[Page 528]Editorials

The most notable difference in the modern-day newspaper editorial as of 2021 is its decline, mirroring the disappearance of many daily and weekly newspapers and the overall regression of the industry. However, opinionated commentary thrives in nontraditional formats and platforms that include blogs, partisan cable television hosts and pundits, and a host of web news sites. This entry examines editorial influence and readership, as well as dueling editorialists. The entry closes with a discussion of editorial competition.

Since the first widely published newspaper editorial penned in the United States actually appeared—in Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette—before the United States existed, during the colonial era, on May 9, 1754, the newspaper editorial and the editorial page have undergone drastic evolutionary change—in content and in style. Those first editorials—defined as the official policy, agenda setting, and framing voice of a news operation—often were signed by the publisher, invoking the “we” or “I” editorial voice and addressing various issues. The range of these topics included commentary from pro- and anti-royalty to nationalism, support of or opposition to slavery and entry or neutrality during war as the nation’s political history evolved. Editorials have waned in influence and frequency as the newspaper industry has declined in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. But some newspapers, including such historically notable publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times, have carried on the historical watchdog and democratic maintenance function of the newspaper editorial in the present day. Candidates for elective office continue to actively seek editorial endorsement from these and other newspapers; but some publications no longer editorialize at all, while others have decreased their activism from the crusading editorials of the penny press and muckraking era to bland commentary on weather and community boosterism. Blogs and partisan online publications have replaced much of the traditional role of the editorial and have maintained a strong editorial presence, but without the support of the detailed reporting and factual information that bolstered the traditional editorial page. And, as newspaper circulations have diminished, particularly during and following the era of joint operating agreements, cautious commentary for the most part has replaced the vehement, partisan arguments of op-ed columnists in favor of diverse opinion featuring both conservative and more liberal viewpoints to curry favor from a broader, diverse audience.

A Pennsylvania Gazette editorial played a significant role in unifying the colonies and supplying the motto “Join or Die” of the American Revolution two decades later. And in its argument against French efforts to expand the American holdings—in which Franklin argued that the French had violated treaties and attacked colonial traders and murdered farmers while seizing property—it established a prototype of the newspaper editorial’s watchdog function.

What newspaper historians identify as the first modern-day style of editorial, published on October 28, 1783, by George Goodwin and Barzillai Hudson in the Connecticut Courant, became the paradigm of the newspaper commentary’s political discourse. Titled “Hartford,” the editorial scolded Connecticut’s General Assembly for its opposition to the proposal in the U.S. Congress to offer full pay for 5 years of service to officers of the former Continental Army. When a people, the authors argued in language representative of the ornate, expressive writing style of the

...