Greg Burton and Phil Boas

Arizona Republic

Our highest calling as a news organization is to bring you important facts quickly and accurately so you can make informed decisions. You need information to understand your community, to seize its opportunities and help solve its problems.

In a democracy, newspapers are your eyes and ears on government, courts, police departments, public schools, anywhere the people’s business is conducted. The information we bring you is essential to holding your government accountable.

To do that well we had to change with the digital age. What was once the daily newspaper is now a wide-scale news operation pushing to bring you news where and when you want it – on your cellphone, tablet, laptop and driveway.

Modern readers are changing how they get their news and what they expect from it. They’ve told us in focus groups, surveys and by their online reading habits that they want news and opinion more relevant to the way they live their lives. What they don’t want is another media kingmaker.

So, today we announce a consequential change; The Arizona Republic will no longer endorse candidates for public office.

How you view what we do has changed

We don’t arrive at this decision lightly. We’ve been discussing and debating it for years. But when we change what we do, we owe you an explanation why.

Centuries-old conventions such as editorials and candidate endorsements are less important to readers today than when our words appeared only on newsprint. Newspaper editorials “take too much time to read,” said readers in our focus groups. They take themselves too seriously and are too aggressively “one-sided.”

Hearing such reactions, many American news organizations, including this one, began scaling back editorials years ago. We gradually replaced most of our editorials with more opinion columns, more perspectives from a wider range of people in our diverse community.

Rather than unsigned editorials, our readers wanted more perspective from informed observers identified by names and credentials.

They don’t want their daily newspaper or news website telling them which candidates and which party should get their votes.

To be clear, we never viewed our endorsements that way. We often told readers this was only our opinion, one source among many that should inform their votes. But more and more of today’s readers see candidate endorsements as an intrusion on the electoral process.

They tell us our endorsements alienate them and blur the way they read our news stories. They don’t see the sharp line we draw between our news and opinion content.

How can we bridge the divisiveness?

A lot of the feedback readers gave us was influenced by the changing nature of American politics. In our nation’s roughly 250-year history, we have had moments of deep division as intense as this one, but they are rare.

In our focus groups, readers told us they’re “tired of the discord,” the "divisiveness" in a lot of opinion content.

Today America is seriously split by two predominant visions of the country. This was apparent at the State of the Union address when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi extended her hand to President Donald Trump and he appeared to refuse to shake it. After Trump’s speech, Pelosi tore in two her transcript of the address and later called it a “dirty speech.”

The Opinions page editors and writers at The Republic look at the cultural landscape before us and feel motivated to help preserve the contest of ideas essential to a free society.

Too many Americans and Arizonans have forgotten this about their country: That we cannot be free unless we can disagree.

On all sides of our political discussions, we Americans belittle and berate our opponents. We fail to understand that the person who disagrees with us is not our enemy but the guarantor of our freedom. If we want to live in a place where everyone shares the same opinion all the time, we can live in North Korea, because lock-step ideological unity must be brutally imposed.

In this country we need to be able to disagree in responsible ways. That doesn’t mean we demur from robust debate. As Sen. John McCain told us in his dying days, ours is a “big, boisterous, brawling, intemperate, striving … magnificent country.”

It means we draw the line between spirited debate and the personal destruction and cancellation of our opponents.

We'll still walk you through key races

In the months and years to come, The Republic Opinions pages will fight to preserve the public space for responsible people to express their views. We will defend speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment and challenge those individuals and political movements that would deny them.

Our pages will continue to weigh in on large policy issues, including ballot initiatives, but will step back from recommending candidates in the more partisan arena of electoral politics. Choosing candidates has sometimes inhibited our ability to further the dialogue, because many readers think our endorsements compromise our analysis.

We won’t disappear at election time. Our editors and writers are redefining our role as we frame the issues in state and regional elections. We will inform with perspective and opinion about the major races as they unfold and will raise red flags when we see candidates violating traditional norms.

Because effective editorials and columns anticipate and address counter arguments, we expect some will view our move from candidate endorsements as a retreat from our 2016 presidential endorsement, the first in our then 126-year history to recommend a Democrat for president.

The Republic angered a lot of our readers with that endorsement, but we never backed down. We stand by it today. However, we also know we will never see the likes of that moment again. Our 2016 endorsement was astonishing because it broke with those 126 years of history and made us national and international news.

For six weeks we got visits from media all around the world. We counted a half-dozen news crews from Japan alone. Were we to decide to endorse in the same way this coming November, no one would be shocked. And we wouldn’t become the news.

The opinion side of journalism is important. It’s the enterprise that considers the news and asks what now?

Such a question can provoke rich discussion because there is no single answer. In fact, the answer can vary depending on the unique perspectives of the many people who live among us.

That leads to debate and a contest of ideas.

This newspaper is stepping back from picking sides in candidate elections, but we won’t stand down from our important role of encouraging, inspiring and leading the important discussions essential to a free society and a better community.

Greg Burton is executive editor and Phil Boas is editorial page editor of The Arizona Republic. Contact Burton at 602-444-8797 or greg.burton@azcentral.com. Contact Boas at 602-444-8292 or phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.