Good point here:
https://twitter.com/PeterHamby/status/1215316619666190336
Kathleen Kingsbury: On Jan. 19, the @nytimes editorial board will publish our choice for the Democratic nomination for president. It won’t be the first time we’ve endorsed a candidate — we’ve been doing that since 1860 — but we aim to make it our most transparent endorsement process to date.
Peter Hamby: My usual rant: Newspaper ed boards should stop endorsing candidates, and considering abandoning editorials altogether. Too many consumers are low-information headline readers who have a hard time distinguishing between news/opinion/analysis ...
Ed board endorsements - mostly left-leaning - only fuel bad faith attacks on the "biased" media and confuse modern readers on what the press does and is supposed to do. It's not 1957 - communities no longer look to ed boards to tell them how to think/how to vote.
This is obviously more true of big national papers -- they're political targets in a way, say, the Des Moines Register and El Paso Times are not. I can see editorials still being valuable in local communities.