Newspaper Endorsements

Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher is keeping meticulous count of newspaper editorial-board presidential endorsements. He reports, as of yesterday, that "Kerry now leads in endorsements 142 to 123 and in the circulation of those papers (roughly 17.5 million to 11.5 million)."

A total of 37 newspapers that endorsed Bush in 2000 have switched to Kerry, compared to six papers that endorsed Gore and switched to Bush.

And Howard Kurtz writes in The Washington Post today: "Nine more papers, including the Cleveland Plain Dealer yesterday, abandoned Bush after four years but did not support the Massachusetts senator. Instead, these papers -- the Detroit News, the Tampa Tribune and the New Orleans Times-Picayune among them -- threw up their collective hands and made no endorsement."

Kurtz writes that "the Bush defections may reflect a degree of disillusionment with the president, at least among opinion leaders, principally on Iraq but on domestic issues, as well."

The switching -- and, as Kurtz writes, disillusionment -- in those papers is something you don't hear much of in the modern media world, saturated with bickering partisans who display no ambivalence or hesitation about their positions.