The New York Times, a paper that has been hailed as unbiased but has a history of endorsing left-wing political candidates, has announced it will no longer take sides in local elections.
As announced on Monday August 12, the mainstream media outlet is stopping its long-standing tradition of publicly endorsing candidates in state and local elections, including governor campaigns and races for New York City’s mayor. The updated policy will be enacted right away.
It comes as the state is preparing for elections in the fall in both the legislative and congressional arenas. It also predates the 2025 election in which Mayor Eric Adams is running for a second term in New York City. For more than a century, the Times has engaged in political endorsements for local, state, and national elections.
These endorsements have been conducted by the editorial board at the paper and published in the opinion section, which is a distinct operation from the outlet’s newsroom. Although local candidate endorsements will be no more, the board is planning to continue its practice of endorsing presidential candidates, which it has done since 1860.
As noted in an article published in the Times itself, the outlet’s editorial board has also been rescinding the number of published editorials over the past few years. A February 2020 announcement from the organization revealed that there would no longer be several editorials put out each day but instead these opinion pieces would only be published on “matters of great significance.”
Kathleen Kingsbury, who spearheads the paper’s opinion section, did not specify precisely why they had decided to nix the practice of state and local endorsements. Rather, she assured readers that the section would remain a source of varying “perspective” about elections as well as “candidates and issues at stake.”
The Times is not the first paper to cease its practice of endorsing politicians. Over the past several years, many newspapers have enacted similar decisions for a range of reasons. Some expressed worry that the endorsements would cost them readers and others cited a lack of resources and losing staff members as leaving them unable to continue to practice.
