We Regret the Error: 100 Years of Editorial Blindness

The following story first appeared in Post Alley.

Last weekend, the Seattle Times issued a highly unusual mea culpa, revisiting and apologizing for its 1942 coverage of post-Pearl Harbor internment of thousands of Japanese-Americans.

Reader reactions no doubt ranged from wokeness-run-amuck to too-little-too-late.  But, either way, the coverage was an earnest and intelligent attempt by one generation of newspaper people to address the journalistic sins of their predecessors. Never mind that the Times editorial abuses of our fellow citizens were no worse than those that poisoned newspaper pages from Port Townsend to Key West.

The retrospective took me back 25 years, when I was an editorial writer and political columnist for the Times during its centennial year under Blethen family ownership.   I had been asked to revisit 100 years of editorials, lift some highlights and lowlights, and comment.

To survey some 35,000 editorials would have been cruel and unusual punishment, so I searched the archives by topic, exploring what The Times had written about issues ranging from civil rights to urban renewal and political endorsements. 

I learned a lot, and it wasn’t pretty.

Founder Alden Blethen started off in 1896 by blasting the gold standard and endorsing William Jennings Bryan for President.   Interesting.  But it would be 80 years before the paper endorsed another Democrat for President; no support for Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy.

Editorial writers got some things right, supporting women’s suffrage and “racial harmony,” while wagging fingers at the Ku Klux Klan. 

But the batting average was terrible.  The paper opposed immigration, opposed state initiative and referendum laws and a state income tax.  It attacked the Seattle General Strike of 1919, opposed the campaign to preserve Pike Place Market, and mocked the 1930s plan to build a floating bridge across Lake Washington – “outmoded as a stone hatchet,” the paper opined. Later, the publisher actually crossed the bridge and decided it was a pretty good idea after all.

In the late 40s and early 50s, the Times indulged in McCarthyist red-baiting – at least until a newsroom reporter successfully went to bat for a UW professor accused of being a communist, and won the paper’s first Pulitzer for the effort.

The paper backed the Vietnam war and led the cheers for the doomed WPPSS nuclear projects which ultimately cost ratepayers billions.  And it played ball with Republican prosecutor and powerbroker Charles O. Carroll despite his links to corrupt cops.

Often as not, the Times errors were by omission. Editorial policy was to ignore the existence of Seattle’s vibrant gay communities until the late 70s, when gay rights ballot measures forced the issue.

My week in the archives led me to one significant conclusion: I was in the wrong job.  If, in retrospect, our editorial stances were so frequently dead wrong, then why write them in the first place?  So I asked to go back to the newsroom – an unorthodox request that was granted without hesitation. 

Were Seattle’s editorials any worse than other papers?   I suspect not.  If one were to examine a century of journalism at the New York Times or the Port Townsend Leader, I doubt the experience would be much more uplifting.

Wrong-headed editorials could sometimes be blamed on dogmatic publishers; witness eight decades of uninterrupted Republican endorsements.  More frequently, they simply reflected centrist politics and conventional wisdoms – especially those of the middle-aged white guys who dominated newsrooms and editorial boards.

I loved newspapers and the people who worked for them.  But the people I worked with were no smarter, no more perceptive than anybody else.  The only difference is that reporters and editors are exposed to a broader range of people and perspectives.  And good reporters learn to listen to and weigh competing viewpoints.

There were also powerful economic incentives to take centrist views.  Newspapers depended on ads that were based on how many people bought your newspaper. Editorial views that strayed from the mainstream risked antagonizing readers and advertisers, which was bad for the bottom line.

Given all this, I salute the Times journalists who decided it’s never too late to correct for the mistakes of their forebears.   It won’t sell newspapers.  And it certainly won’t undo decades of horrible injustices imposed on our fellow citizens.  But perhaps the belated critique will help them identify and address today’s blind spots.