WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 (UPI) -- With the election less than two weeks away scores of newspapers are going through the ritual of endorsing their candidates of choices for the nation's top job and lesser offices. And, as in time past, campaigns wave their endorsement lists in the air as proof positive of their righteousness and impending victory.
Just ask the Bush campaign, which put out a special news release Sunday trumpeting some of the nods they received from eight of the then 36 newspapers backing the president's re-election bid.
"A critical juncture in an epochal war is not time to change a president, particularly if the option is one whose position regarding that war is elusive," The Arizona Republic said.
"The nation can count on Mr. Bush to hang tough" in the war on terror, the Dallas Morning News added.
Sen. John Kerry hasn't shied from self-promotion through endorsements either.
"Over the last year we have come to know Mr. Kerry as more than just an alternative to the status quo," the Kerry campaign quotes The New York Times on its Web site. "We like what we've seen. He has qualities that could be the basis for a great chief executive, not just a modest improvement on the incumbent."
"Kerry's approach demonstrates maturity, nuance and thoughtfulness," the Minneapolis Star-Tribune said. "Those qualities don't always play well in campaign sound bites. But they will serve America exceedingly well in the Oval Office. The United States deserves a Kerry victory on Nov. 2."
Americans Coming Together, an anti-Bush 527-advocacy organization, turned the subject of endorsements into a multiple-page smirk. "Battleground Papers Come Out Strong for Kerry; Even Conservative Papers Can't Hold Their Nose and Support Bush," they headlined in a news release.
Great stuff. But does it matter at a time when newspapers are no longer the prime source of news, when the public gets news and information from 24-hour cable television channels, the Internet and late-night television shows?
"Editorial endorsements are dinosaurs. The vast majority of the public don't read editorials," Larry Sabato, political science professor and head of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics said. "The handful of people who read editorials already know for whom they are going to vote. They are either reading it for reinforcement or they are reading it because it's part of a newspaper."
Sabato said newspaper endorsements were far more important in the 18th century when there weren't many news sources, and money sometimes changed hands to gain favorable print. But today "there are thousands of options for interested news consumers, voters, and this really is horse and buggy.
People make up their own minds. People who are going to vote in this election know what the stakes are."
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, shares the general thought.
"They are not very important. Most people don't know who was endorsed by their newspapers," she said. "The effect of the editorials doesn't come out of people reading them, they come out of the ads by the candidates saying 'I've been endorsed.'"
Jamieson added, however, even the effects of the ads are open to question. "It is too small a factor to detect" in polling, she said. "You couldn't ask people this question, what difference did the editorial make, and trust the answer. Most people aren't going to say, 'Oh, yes, I'm a sheep and do what the editorial tells me.'"
For the record, Kerry had 52 newspaper endorsements as of Tuesday, according to Editor & Publisher magazine. Those papers accounted for a total circulation of more than 9 million. Bush had 36 newspaper endorsements, with the papers accounting for a circulation of more than 4.9 million.
Among the papers for Kerry: the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Miami Herald, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Boston Globe, The Detroit Free Press, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Philadelphia Inquirer.
A feather for Kerry, an embarrassment for Bush and a gleeful anecdote for the media was the Lone Star Iconoclast, from Bush's home town of Crawford, Texas, embracing the Massachusetts Democrat.
Bush-supporting papers included The San Diego Union-Tribune, the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, the Chicago Tribune, Indianapolis Star, Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
The Boston Herald joined the Bush bandwagon Wednesday.
"While we are in the unusual position of doing so in the face of the candidacy of a native son, our choice was not a close call," it said. "John Kerry, who has served his state well in the U.S. Senate is in his bid for the presidency simply the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time."
The preponderance of polling shows Bush and Kerry neck-and-neck. Paramount for both campaigns is heavy television advertising in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin. With the constant bombardment on television and on the drive to work by yard and street signs, editorial endorsements have been relegated to mere asterisks, editorial boards notwithstanding.
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