Bryan Preston reminded us yesterday that the New York Daily News, a left-of-center paper, has endorsed Mitt Romney for president. Another solidly liberal paper, Newsday, which is Long Island’s only daily paper, has also endorsed Romney.
According to the editors:
“On the campaign trail in 2008, Obama promised to halve the annual budget deficit of the United States. Instead, the shortfall has remained over $1 trillion per year, and the national debt has increased about 45 percent. . .”
Robert Wargas is a regular contributor to PJ Media. A native of Long Island, he was educated at the City University of New York and Yale University, and has contributed reports and opinion pieces to Newsday and FrontPage Magazine on a range of topics. He also maintains an independent blog at http://robertwargas.typepad.com.
Outside of his political writing, Wargas has worked as a professional historian for a large cancer-research institution, documenting the history of biotechnology since the 1970s.
He can be reached at rwargas22@yahoo.com. Follow him on Twitter @RobertWargas
The News’ endorsement of Romney is actually less surprising — owner Mort Zuckerman’s been brutal on Obama for the past two years in his columns in U.S. News and elsewhere. After all that it would have been a shock to see the paper endorse Obama (and Mort’s actually endorsed Republicans in three of the five presidential elections since he took control of the Daily News in the mid-1990s, and — so far — has gone with the winner every time).
Newsday’s the bigger surprise, since this is the first election cycle since the Dolan family of Cablevision, American Movie Classics and Madison Square Garden ownership fame (the less said about the latter, the better) have owned the paper. The folks at Newsday have always considered themselves the Long Island version of The New York Times, as far as their editorial policies go, so there was probably some garment-rendering and invective-tossing in the editorial offices and on the newsroom floor when the staff found out which way the Dolans were going.
Unfortunately for the staffs at Newsday and the Daily News, right now is not a buyers’ market in the media for either reporters or editorial writers — other than causing some grief via the Newspaper Guild the next time the union contracts come up, they really have no option but to just sit there and take it (and even with the Guild, both papers already have gone through near-death experiences — they’re going to have to live with their owners’ decisions, even if just having a squishy moderate for an owner is enough to send them up the ideological wall).
Even before ownership changed hands, however, Newsday was always willing to endorse Republicans, if only at the state and local levels. It did so actually quite frequently.
I have no doubt about the rent garments and the invective grenades. However, that the Dolans should have steered the editorial board directly and unequivocally to Romney comes as a mild surprise. They don’t have a political reputation of any magnitude, and in our current age many a business owner fears to anger the Left for reasons all PJ Media readers already know.
All the same, it’s justification for this Long Islander to take back some of the nasty things he’s said about Newsday: About 20%, as it’s still journalistically near the bottom of the barrel.