Recommendations are coming
There are no comments for this page [ Add Comment ]Sunday, October 21, 2007
There was no blood on the floor after the Standard-Examiner editorial board determined which candidates would be recommended to voters in the Nov. 6 municipal elections, but a couple of mild disagreements still hang in the air.
Beginning sometime this week, in this very space, we'll do something we haven't done in 35 years: Tell you the names of candidates we think deserve your votes. The overwhelming majority of daily newspapers in this country recommend -- some use the word "endorse" -- candidates for public office. Nobody who works for this newspaper in 2007 was around to hear the discussions in 1972, so we don't know precisely why our predecessors stopped recommending candidates. But we're clear as to why we've revived the practice.
We've observed in recent years that elected officials in Utah -- at all levels -- have been increasingly hostile to the public's right to know the inner workings of government. This runs contrary to the Founding Fathers' vision for governance in the United States of America. So, as we've interviewed candidates as part of our process of determining who'll be recommended, we've asked them about open records. It's not the only thing we'll base our decisions on, but it's one important aspect.
Another reason we're headed back down this road is the experience and advice of Publisher Lee Carter, who's been at the Standard-Examiner almost three years now, after serving as publisher at newspapers in Michigan and Ohio. He's familiar with the process of making recommendations, and his experience has given him the conviction that they help foster a community's interest in politics, serving to inspire greater participation by voters.
In addition to that, he says, it's a bedrock responsibility a newspaper has to the communities it covers.
But since this old practice has become new again, we thought we'd make a couple of things clear at the outset -- just to make sure no one misunderstands. We won't be telling you how to vote. We'll be telling you who our consensus choice is. It's only one opinion among many. But our hope is that it will carry weight with people who may not have been following the issues closely in a given race; if they read our argument, maybe it will help them decide whether or not to support a given candidate.
We frankly don't expect to change the vote of an individual who's already made up his or her mind. But maybe we'll validate their opinion -- even if it conflicts with our own.
And we don't really expect to see all -- or even most -- of our choices elected by the people. We're not making our recommendations based on which candidate we think will win; we're going with the person in each race we think presents the best choice of the available candidates. That's why we avoid use of the word "endorsement," because there aren't any candidates we think are flawless. Every one of the 18 candidates we interviewed gave us reasons to favor their opponents. In some cases, the people we won't be recommending simply gave us more reasons not to choose them. (We videotaped our interviews with each of the candidates and will post them on www.standard.net between now and Election Day.)
Furthermore, our recommendations will be based on more than our interviews. The editorialists at this newspaper have been observing many of these communities, and lots of these candidates, for years and years. We've written about them, and their cities, time and time again. The interviews helped to sift our choices, but were by no means our only criteria.
Lastly, we hope readers don't fail to recognize the separation between the opinion pages and the news pages of the Standard-Examiner. The line reporters and editors who objectively assign, report and edit the news content of the Standard-Examiner had no involvement in the interviews or deliberations concerning candidate recommendations.
And the editorial board's recommendations will have no effect on the way news is covered in the pages of this newspaper. The opinion pages are the home of subjectivity, but the news pages are objective in an approach to news and information.
That said, we're interested to know what you think. Don't be shy about writing a letter to the editor and letting us know.
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