By Ken Paulson, Director of the Free Speech Center, Middle Tennessee State University
Hazel Brannon Smith was almost certainly the most unpopular woman in Mississippi when she wrote an editorial in 1963 lambasting the racist White Citizens Councils in the Lexington Advertiser, a newspaper she owned.
“The hierarchy of rulers in this totalitarian-like organization permit no deviation from its official line – and those who believe in and stand for the traditional American concepts of human liberty, dignity, and decency, do so at their own peril,” she wrote in an editorial that was both poetic and dangerous.
The councils constituted a network of white supremacy groups throughout the South, often with deep ties to prominent local citizens. They had already been targeting Smith with economic pressure, not for being a full-throated integrationist – she wasn’t – but for editorials in which she insisted on adherence to the rule of law, demanded fairness for all and encouraged peaceful race relations.
Smith paid a steep price for her courage.
Death threats, arson in her pressroom, boycotts and even the firing of her husband as a hospital administrator did not temper her fight for liberty and justice. She became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, in 1964.
Smith’s story is inspiring, yet by no means an isolated instance. But the long history of newspaper editorials may now be about to end, a casualty of both changing news values and economic pressure.
From calls for reform to partisan attacks
Since the birth of this nation, newspapers large and small have published their own opinion pieces challenging the powerful, calling for reform and demanding accountability. The editorials weren’t always constructive. There were plenty of editorials criticizing Smith, and others were partisan attacks. But many reflected care for the community and calls for a better future.
Editorials – in their ideal form – are essentially letters from the newspaper itself to its readers explaining a problem, outlining the facts and then concluding what would be in the best interests of the community. You can agree or disagree, but the end result is that you gave it some thought, which is what the editorial writer intended anyway. Typically, the opinion is written by one journalist in consultation with the publisher, editor and knowledgeable colleagues, and relies in good part on the newspaper’s own reporting.
In 1841, publisher Horace Greeley pioneered the stand-alone editorial page in the New York Tribune. The innovation, which separated the newspaper’s views from news articles, was widely adopted by other publishers.
Over the past 185 years, newspaper editorials have played a role in virtually every important social and justice movement in American history. William Lloyd Garrison’s call for the abolition of slavery in the Boston-based Liberator and the battle for women’s suffrage spearheaded by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in The Revolution in New York City presaged and helped inspire similar calls for justice in the pages of local papers across America.
And when President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent in 1942, just one newspaper – The Bainbridge Review, on Bainbridge Island, Washington – called it out as the unconstitutional act it was. The paper saw the rounding up of citizens in its own community and would not stand silent.
Losing the newspaper’s soul
During my career as editor-in-chief of USA Today and daily newspapers in Wisconsin, Florida and New York, I’ve reviewed thousands of editorials. I can tell you that on the local level, newspaper editorials tend to be about more mundane and yet essential topics like supporting local schools, monitoring the use of taxpayer dollars and calling out ineffective government processes.
The book “Outrage, Passion & Common Sense,” compiled by former Gannett executive Michael Gartner, collects some of the finest American editorials of the 20th century, including a piece by William Allen White, the renowned editor of the Emporia Gazette in Kansas, defending the right of workers to organize even as many of his fellow editors sided with management. That willingness to challenge power and convention – whatever the political cost – was long considered central to a newspaper’s identity and integrity.
That tradition is fading. The Pulitzer Prizes, journalism’s highest honor, once had a dedicated category for editorial writing. This year, the Pulitzer board declined to just 25 this year, after years of combining editorials with other opinion pieces into a single category – a sign of how few newsrooms are still producing the kind of institutional editorial voice that once defined American journalism.
Major news companies have backed away
Some of the largest newspaper companies in America have pulled back from editorial writing altogether. Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, and Lee Enterprises have both moved toward the scaling back of local editorials beginning in 2022, with USA Today’s own opinion page now consisting of commentary from national columnists and its editorial board rather than locally reported editorials tied to individual communities.
A rationale frequently cited by news executives is that editorials confuse readers about the line between news and opinion, and that in a hyper-polarized country, telling people what to think alienates half the audience. As one Gannett executive put it, “Readers don’t want us to tell them what to think.”
In my experience, that’s a straw man. Editorials don’t have to be preachy or partisan to be valuable, and there are ways to signal a diversity of views even while taking an institutional stand. USA Today pioneered dual editorials, pairing its own institutional editorial with an opposing view so readers could weigh both sides for themselves – a model that treated readers as capable of forming their own judgments rather than something to be shielded from debate entirely.
The public wants accountability
Yet the appetite for watchdog journalism hasn’t disappeared. a Pew Research study found that most Americans continue to believe that media scrutiny of political leaders keeps them from doing things they shouldn’t do – a clear signal that the public still values a press willing to hold power accountable, even as fewer newsrooms are doing it through the traditional editorial form.
For newsrooms looking to reclaim that role without alienating readers, a few practices can help:
- Focus editorials on local, verifiable issues – school budgets, infrastructure, government transparency – rather than national partisan flashpoints.
- Clearly label opinion content and separate it from news coverage so readers never confuse the two.
- Invite opposing viewpoints alongside institutional editorials, so readers see the paper is engaging in debate rather than dictating conclusions.
The framers of the Constitution considered the watchdog role of the press so essential to self-government that they made sure freedom of the press be part of the Constitution in 1791. More than two centuries later, that role – boldly, plainly telling a community what it needs to hear – is at risk of fading not because it’s been outlawed, but because newsrooms are quietly deciding it isn’t worth the trouble anymore.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
