The New York Times has created a spectacle around one of the stodgiest features of presidential primary season: the newspaper endorsement. In years past, the Times has simply splashed the name of the chosen one across its editorial page a week or so before the Iowa caucuses, with a few bromides about “experience” and “temperament.” In the last two competitive Democratic primaries, the Times endorsed the establishment favorite, Hillary Clinton, revealing both the Times’ own establishment leanings and the depths of its influence on actual voters.

This cycle, the Times has turned the selection into a weeklong affair, a mix between Donald Trump’s The Apprentice and LeBron James’s “The Decision.” The editorial board sat down for lengthy interviews with the candidates: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Andrew Yang, Tom Steyer, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker (who dropped out of the race the day the interview was published), and even Deval Patrick (but not Michael Bloomberg, who skipped the interview rather than be asked about the racist policing policies he oversaw as mayor of New York City).

On Sunday, the editorial page undermined the whole charade—and, really, the whole point of an endorsement—by choosing two diametrically opposed candidates: Warren and Klobuchar. While nearly everyone else in the world of Democratic politics seems to have made up their mind, the board needs more time to choose between a more radical approach to fixing America’s many ills (represented by Warren) and a more conventional one (Klobuchar). The Times editorial page has taken its reputation for careful, sober decision-making to the point of paralysis—calling into question all the ostensible reasons for opening up the endorsement process in the first place.

In announcing the change earlier this month, Kathleen Kingsbury, the deputy editor of the editorial page, said the board aimed to make it “our most transparent endorsement process to date.” Transparency has become something of a theme for the Times, with Executive Editor Dean Baquet telling Meet the Press last year that it was crucial for shoring up the institution’s credibility in an era of fake news. “We went through generations of just assuming everybody believed us,” he said. “What I think we’re going to have to get very aggressive at is to be really transparent, to assume nothing, and to make sure people know where we are, how we do our work, to show our work more aggressively.”



There are, of course, commercial considerations, too. The endorsement, which was announced on The Weekly, was meant to drum up interest in a show that has largely been met with indifference. Taking readers behind the scenes has been a wildly successful formula for the podcast The Daily. In the name of building trust with readers, the Times’ reporters must perform journalism to millions of subscribers peering into the glass offices of the newspaper’s Eighth Avenue high-rise. It’s not enough to break a story about, say, Trump’s decision to take out Qassem Soleimani. Now you also have to talk to Michael Barbaro for 30 minutes about it.

