It’s really not a difficult decision who to vote for for President this year. On one side, you have an experienced, qualified, knowledgeable, reasonable person; and on the other, you have someone who is a buffoon and an asshole, totally unqualified — and dangerous — in every way imaginable.
So, recently I was thinking, is there any newspaper that would endorse this guy? I mean, journalists, editors, and publishers have their leanings and biases, but they are still professionals, and have to have some rational justification for their views (usually). It would really be sacrilege to actually come out and say that they thought this guy was qualified to be President.
I found this page, which lists the major newspaper endorsements for the general election. At the time, *not* one had endorsed Donald Trump.
As of now, 2 papers (the page lists the top 100 newspapers, by circulation) have endorsed Trump. One is the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a newspaper recently purchased by the right-wing extremist, Sheldon Adelson.
57 of these papers have endorsed Hillary Clinton.
This site has pages for the 2012 election, as well as the 2008 election. In both of those years, things were more evenly divided (41-35 for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012; 65-25 for Obama and John McCain in 2008).
All this is somewhat unprecedented, in a number of ways, but warranted by the situation. The newspaper with the largest circulation in the country, the USA Today, does not endorse candidates; this year, they came out with a NOT Trump endorsement. Three papers had NOT Trump endorsements this year, while in 2012 and 2008 there were no such “NOT” endorsements.
Several papers that had never endorsed a Democrat, or had not endorsed one for a long time, endorsed Clinton. Some such papers chose not to endorse either of them, also a strong statement. (See the footnotes on the page listing the endorsements.)
These are *really* strong statements, and reinforce the idea that there is a clear choice in the election this year.
Ahh, my faith in journalism is restored (slightly).