media maven / By Marcy Burstiner

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(Sept. 4, 2008)  There is a great American song that goes like this: “Once there was a silly old ram, thought he’d punch a hole in a dam. No one could make that ram, scram. He kept buttin’ that dam. Cause he had high hopes, he had high apple pie in the sky hopes. So any time you’re feeling bad, instead of feeling sad, just remember that ram. Oops! There goes a billion kilowatt dam.”

I thought of that Frank Sinatra song when I considered the value of a great American newspaper tradition that now seems to be endangered: the editorial.

Newspapers in this country began as editorials that pushed the views of whoever printed the paper. Colonial newspapers helped galvanize people generally loyal to their mother country to rise up against the British.

In 2004, the Sacramento Bee published 14 editorials calling for the restoration of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite, which would require the destruction of the now 85-year-old, 430-foot tall O’Shaughnessy Dam. Tom Philps’ editorials won the Pulitzer Prize. More important, they got the attention of Gov. Schwarzenegger. He ordered a feasibility study. And they spurred several state legislators to publicly support the taking down of the dam. Since then studies have shown it to be not only feasible but practical.

While the dam that encloses the Hetch Hetchy Valley still stands, the Bee managed to get a Republican governor and the U.S. Congress to consider something once thought ridiculous. It shifted the argument from why to how.

That’s the potential and responsibility of the newspaper editorial, and these days it is a responsibility the Times-Standard shirks. In August it ran just two editorials, aside from its “Roasts and Toasts”: One that cautioned the county’s Code Enforcement Task Force not to broaden the scope of its responsibilities and another urging support for the Eureka Skate Park. On other days it runs editorials from newspapers in other parts of the state.

When a newspaper chooses not to run an editorial it says one of two things to the community: We have found nothing important enough to comment on; or our voice isn’t important. The first can’t possibly be true and the second sends a bad message. Regardless whether people will agree or disagree with the editorial, people expect a newspaper to print an editorial.

In making the case for editorial endorsements in political races in particular, Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, argued that the newspaper’s role is to sift through information its readers don’t have time to adequately consider and help them reach conclusions. “Most of us, most citizens, don’t sit down and say, ‘You know what, I’m trying to figure out who to vote for for judge, let me sit down and write about my thoughts in an argument to decide,’” he told the American Journalism Review in 2004. “We don’t do that. Dentists are busy being dentists and gardeners are busy being gardeners. It’s not your job to sit down at 11 in the morning and hash it out around a table and write that argument out. Well, that’s what editorial writers have the luxury of doing for the rest of us. And [readers] can then look at those arguments and say, ‘Those guys are idiots’ or ‘That’s a pretty good argument.’”

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