Hometown newspapers are coming for Trump’s enablers

There was once a time when lawmakers and politicians had reason to fear a scathing editorial in a national newspaper. That’s clearly no longer the case.

A long and fruitful campaign of demonisation of the establishment press, as well as the dissipation of media power and attention, has all-but rendered them toothless. In the Trump era, it’s not uncommon for his acolytes to boast of such attacks, the better to prove to their base that they are effective warriors against the liberal elite. 

The same trick simply doesn’t work on hometown newspapers. It’s one thing to rail against the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, quite another to go to war with the newspaper your mother picks up every day to check the local listings. 

The past week has seen a fascinating test of local newspaper influence. In the wake of the storming of the Capitol building, there has been an unprecedented backlash from local dailies across the country against Senators who indulged the president’s false claims of a rigged election. Senator Ted Cruz faced the wrath of two of Texas’s most-read newspapers. Marco Rubio was hammered in the Miami Herald. And Missouri’s two biggest newspapers — the Kansas City Star and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch — both called on Josh Hawley to resign.

Their response is a sign of the gravity of the moment, but it also tells us something about the media landscape today.

It’s no secret that local newspapers have been in decline for some time. The shift to digital and the corresponding siphoning off of ad-revenue by Google and Facebook has contributed to the closure of more than 1,800 newspapers since 2004, according to a PEN America report released in 2019.

But local newspapers, representing urban areas and states, can still make a splash with a timely intervention. They have a relationship with their readers that the nationals can’t hope to match. They are relied on for crime reporting, events, and local community listings. And although they may not always be a deciding factor in a race, they are a vital part of the patchwork of local alliances that lawmakers need to win primaries and elections. Candidates rely on their local papers to publish interviews and op-eds that will reach the people who matter the most come election time. 

What’s more, local newspapers are compatible with our atomised media environment. A reader might go to Fox News for national goings-on and the local paper for city news.

Margaret Sullivan, who spent 13 years on the editorial board of The Buffalo News before moving on to become Public Editor at The New York Times, then serving in her current role as a media columnist at The Washington Post, maintains that our local dailies still pack a punch.  

“Local newspaper editorials might not be as influential as they were decades ago, but I still think they have an impact on public opinion — especially if they are strongly worded and prominently displayed,” she told The Independent.  “That the two major papers in Missouri have written very direct and critical editorials about Josh Hawley is certainly notable. These pieces will help some people think through their positions and may stiffen a few spines — or even change some minds.”

“Local newspaper editorials have the advantage of speaking to citizens who can have a direct impact on these elected officials in the voting booth. In that sense, they can punch above their weight,” she added.  

That ability to speak to and for the electorate is a powerful tool. Take The St. Louis Post Dispatch’s destruction of Hawley, who was the first senator to announce that he would object to Joe Biden’s electoral college certification last week, published under the headline: “Trump must go — and take Hawley with him.”

The editorial makes an appeal to common principles, but also for local values and local grievances.  

“Missourians can no longer afford to keep in power a senator who demonstrates not the faintest understanding of what democracy actually means. For him, it is merely a tool for him to collect donations and climb the political ladder, perhaps to be installed in the same Oval Office where his mentor in megalomania now sits.”

There’s something of an art to the hometown editorial. It’s not just about the fact that a local paper’s readership is more likely to be composed of the people who will either cast a ballot for you or deny you a term in office. Hometown newspapers also simply know politicians better. They have the cuttings; the receipts from your rise to elected office. 

The Houston Chronicle wrote of Cruz this week: “Public office isn’t a college debate performance. It requires representing the interests of Texans. In your first term, you once told reporters that you weren’t concerned about delivering legislation for your constituents. The more you throw gears in the workings of Washington, you said, the more people back home love you. Tell that to the constituents who complain that your office rarely even picks up the phone.”

It ends on a brutal note: “Resign, Mr. Cruz, and deliver Texas from the shame of calling you our senator.”

So what does this backlash of the locals tell us about where we stand today? For one, they are a sign of the scale of this scandal. Cynical and ambitious politicians like Rubio and Cruz are usually able to contain their scandals in Washington. This one reached their doorstep.  

And if there’s a cardinal sin that is unique to local newspapers, it’s a politician putting their own political ambitions above the needs of their constituents. You won’t find that kind of keen eye for this disconnect at national news organisations.  

We likely won’t find out for a while how the current atmosphere will impact those ambitions, but it’s clear that Hawley and his fellow enablers have taken a hit. Local newspapers also buy ink by the barrel, after all.