Guarding the Firewall: How Political Journalists Distance Themselves From the Editorial Endorsement Process

Abstract

Through a lens of boundary work and role conception, this study seeks to understand how political journalists discursively construct the role of the newspaper editorial endorsement. Researchers conducted long-form interviews with political journalists in the United States ( n = 64) to understand how journalists conducted boundary work relative to endorsements. Journalists argued that the 2016 election was a decisive event in which political news endorsements lost their original objective. Political journalists described laboring to discursively distance themselves from the endorsement process and viewed political endorsements not only as ineffective, but also as jeopardizing their news organizations’ independence.