Show Us Your Votes, Cowards!
News organizations lack the courage and "moral clarity" to be transparent about their political leanings.
Oh, the joys that our more cowardly news brethren miss out on by declining to disclose how their staffers intend to vote!
You can get needled by Jonah Goldberg ("If Reason magazine got 270 electoral votes, Chase Oliver would be the next president of the United States. Alas, they do not"). Accused—by a friend of 30-plus years, no less!—of being more "concerned about Megyn Kelly's [judgment]" than making the right call in "one of the most consequential elections" of our lifetime. Pilloried for insufficient Donald Trump support by the official New Hampshire affiliate of (*checks notes*) the political party whose nominee is getting half our staff's votes: "How does anyone work at Reason and not feel guilty about what they do? It's shameful." Many digit-containing Twitter handles doubtlessly agree.
But the pleasures of disclosure go far beyond group mirth in the workplace Slack. Besides the dependable web traffic, these editorial exercises offer we few practitioners (basically us, Slate, and The American Conservative) a palpable sense of relief, not dissimilar to waltzing down Fifth Avenue in your most beloved ugly coat. Sure, you get some weird glances, but there's a confidence boost in surviving a more complete presentation of your authentic, bizarre self.
Especially given the ostensible values of this withering industry we have chosen. As Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward put it in an interview four years ago with the National Press Club Journalism Institute,
From the very beginning, Reason's idea was to puncture some of the self-mythologizing that journalists love to indulge in. The idea that concealing our votes somehow shores up our objectivity is absurd. Hiding the biases and preferences of a publication's staff doesn't make them go away. We believe if more publications asked their writers and producers to disclose their votes, readers would be better able to contextualize the news and analysis they receive and seek out real viewpoint diversity (if that's what they value).
As I have argued from the beginning, asking a newsroom's journalists who they're voting for (always with the acceptable response option of "none of your damned business"), is a way of telling both external audience and internal management some useful information about organizational tilt. When Free State Project Executive Director Eric Brakey says that "I do think it reveals they are lacking representation from a major swath of the liberty movement," he's not wrong! (We may quibble on "major.") Reason critics have rightly noted that we, like many news organizations, are clustered around deep blue media capitals, though it's also true that the declared voting intentions people tend to get maddest about are the ones from those few staffers in actual swing states.
A libertarian magazine's ballot-booth habits were always going to be eccentric, if thankfully non-monolithic. But what about more normie publications? That's where this quadrennial fun would get really interesting, if only our media colleagues had any backbone at all.
Slate, a publication within the mainstream of the opinion-journalism left, last reported a staffer voting for a Republican all the way back in 2012, when Mitt Romney got two compared to Barack Obama's 29. "Will that be the last time ever?" Editor in Chief Jared Hohlt demurred in 2020 (we're still waiting on 2024). "That's kind of up to the Republican Party more than it's up to Slate." Is it though?
Now, imagine those lopsided numbers—in 2020, Slate went Joe Biden 59, Green Party nominee Howie Hawkins one, plus one staffer who couldn't decide between the two—only this time played out at the most august and pretentious journalistic institutions. Maybe The Atlantic, to pluck one title out of a top hat, has a felt need this week to demonstrate with some hard voting evidence that it indeed "is a heterodox place, staffed by freethinkers" who sometimes think Vice President Kamala Harris is "too liberal," as the magazine stated in its, um, endorsement of Kamala Harris. C'mon, Jeffrey Goldberg, show us your votes!
Or how about the first Goldberg mentioned above, young Jonah? We know The Dispatch was forged amid the conservative media crack-up in the age of Trump, so there won't be a lot of DJT support there, but…wouldn't it be interesting to know how a bunch of alienated Republican voters are approaching November 5? Show us your vote, Dispatchers!
More revealing, by a long shot, would be any vote totals revealed by Jonah Goldberg's longtime home, National Review. Was it really only eight years ago when conservatism's flagship magazine dared produce an entire issue "Against Trump," creating huge headaches for the business side of the operation? Yes, some of the critics therein have since pledged their allegiance, but, like, what's the breakdown? Trump has a 94 percent favorability rating among Republicans, so some of us math geeks would like to know what's the maximum allowable anti-Trumpness at a sufficiently large conservative news outlet. Do it for the science, o Buckley inheritors!
Let us not let our legacy media properties off the hook. CBS News has had quite the campaign season, what with a highly criticized vice presidential debate moderation performance, a deceptively edited 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, and a series of bizarre internal struggle sessions over some moderately challenging Israel questions in a morning news interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates.
At the same time, like its counterparts at NBC and ABC, CBS is one of the last major news sources that attract a solidly bipartisan audience. So let's clear the air, network news divisions! Show us your votes!
This very week, my former employers at the L.A. Times have been roiling over owner Patrick Soon-Shiong's decision to put the kibosh on editorial page presidential endorsements. Editorials Editor Mariel Garza resigned, saying "In these dangerous times, staying silent isn't just indifference, it is complicity." Soon-Shiong clapped back, the L.A. Times Guild said it was "deeply concerned," and so forth.
Now, I don't know much about newspaper union etiquette, but it seems to me there's nothing preventing the guild from publishing its own tally of who members plan to vote for president. Don't stay silent, L.A. Times Guild, show us your votes! Soon-Shiong too, while we're at it.
When writing this column four years ago, I brought up this quote from a then-recent piece by the then-New York Times media correspondent Ben Smith: "Journalists can also be clear about where we're coming from, and where we're not….But journalism also has its own weird ideology that doesn't match up with a party or movement. That you, the public, should know, rather than not know. That sunlight is the best disinfectant. That secrets are bad. That power deserves challenge, including the power of figures most of our respective audiences admire."
Big Media Ben has since launched his own new property, Semafor, one of those canny insidery-news-plus-conferences outlets that gives off an Axios-meets-Atlantic vibe, and takes transparency seriously enough to have their star writers include their clearly marked "View" in most pieces. So where shall Semafor slot into my shaming exercise? I DM'd Smith. "Ahhhh ….. shame away," he said.
As Reason's own Nick Gillespie pointed out this week, we are living in an era where trust in media is at an all-time low; even lower than that of Congress, if you can believe it. At the same time, the industry is experiencing an internal push toward the "moral clarity" of abandoning faux-objectivity for "pro-democracy" honesty, while journalists rage against anyone seen as pulling punches in condemning Donald Trump. I'm sensing a win-win here!
Sure, you can tell people who you think they should vote for, if that's your bag (it is not mine, though my opinions are always available upon request). But if you're genuinely interested in transparency, in clawing back audience trust, and maybe just in showing the world that your entire newsroom is unanimous in despising Donald Trump, then there really is an easy and obvious thing to do. Show us your votes! Then we'll see you in all your glory on Fifth Avenue.
