With the announcement by the New York Times that it will no longer endorse local candidates for office — yet will still weigh in on presidential races — the newspaper has taken another step distancing itself from its namesake city. Beyond the impact in New York, the move is one more sign that the spiraling demise of local news coverage can affect even the biggest regions and largest publications.
Newspapers backing away from endorsing candidates is not in and of itself a strange decision. The endorsement game can turn off readers and lead to further accusations of favoring one side of the aisle. The results are not that great anyway — 2016 saw a historic number of papers backing Hillary Clinton, to no avail.
But that’s not what is happening here. By retaining its presidential endorsements, where the paper managed to embarrass itself in 2020 by choosing not one but two Democratic primary candidates (Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar) who failed to win, the Times still wants to retain its power on the national scene. The editorial board just doesn’t seem to care about the local races, where, because many of the candidates are not well known before the election, endorsements can have the greatest impact.
The Times did not provide a reason for its retreat, but perhaps an earlier step back explains it. In 2016, the Times announced that it would be reducing its metro beat in order to focus on global stories with “larger, more consequential themes.”
The NYT’s public editor, noting that the paper had just spent significant effort on a story about a fire in the Bronx that killed two people, at the time nodded approvingly, claiming: “You can’t have your reporters parked in courthouses and police stations all day — or chasing fires — and still deliver memorable, ambitious stories that take time to produce.”
Such thinking is completely backwards. Big stories break through on-the-ground reporting and building direct contacts with sources. You’re not going to get that by ignoring local leaders and institutions.
The Times could look back at one of the most famous books about American politics to discover this insight. In “The Powerbroker,” Robert Caro points out that the fall of Robert Moses and the scandals that brought him down started with a reporter noticing a dearth of garbage cans in his neighborhood.
This dismissive attitude has a powerful effect on coverage. Perhaps the willingness to look down on local matters explains why the Empire State has, over the last decade, seen a governor resign under fire, and a lieutenant governor, Assembly Speaker and Senate majority leader convicted of crimes and forced out of office.
Ignoring local developments may also explain why journalists often appear to be a step or two behind the recent rise of movements that radically challenge the status quo on all sides of the partisan divide — the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, anti-immigration activists or Black Lives Matter.
I’ve spent decades studying local politics in the form of recall elections. I can’t claim any specialized knowledge or ability to predict trends. But it is clear that looking at the decidedly local issues that motivate voters presents a better understanding of broader trends that may unsettle society. The late House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s claim that “all politics is local” still rings true.
The move away from local coverage is almost certainly driven by economic factors. Local newspapers have been dying off at incredible rates, with a Medill School of Journalism report estimating that one-third of America’s papers closed or merged since 2005. The country has been losing on average more than two papers per week.
The bigger money is clearly on the national and international stage, leading to these deep cuts in local news. WCBS, one of the nation’s oldest all-news radio stations, just changed formats to sports coverage.
Unfortunately, this trend is not going away. But the cost of ignoring local coverage is not just borne by the people. Local connections help uncover the deeper stories that newspapers are so proud of. For a paper that wants to be seen as on the cutting edge of news stories, there’s a real cost to skimping on local beats.
Joshua Spivak is a senior fellow at Hugh L. Carey Institute of Government Reform at Wagner College. He is the author of “Recall Elections: From Alexander Hamilton to Gavin Newsom.”