This paragraph, from USA Today’s editorial “Trump is unfit for the presidency,” is not an outlier. It reflects yet another oddity of the 2016 election cycle: The unprecedented shunning of a major-party nominee by nearly every widely read daily publication in the country.
Of the top 100 daily newspapers ranked by 2016 circulation, 55 have endorsed Hillary Clinton.1 Only one, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, has endorsed Donald Trump.
For many newspapers, this hardly comes as a surprise; The New York Times, for instance, has endorsed a Democrat in every presidential race since 1960. But for others, a Clinton endorsement is truly off-brand. Six major papers — The Dallas Morning News, Arizona Republic, San Diego Union-Tribune, Columbus Dispatch, Omaha World-Herald, and Cincinnati Enquirer — are each breaking a streak of Republican endorsements going back 32 years or more to choose Clinton. Other reliably conservative editorial boards are instead siding with Libertarian Gary Johnson, or simply refusing to pick a candidate. And USA Today, the highest-circulation daily newspaper in the country, is stepping into the endorsement game for the first time with the “anti-endorsement” of Trump quoted above. [...]
So perhaps Clinton’s unparalleled landslide in newspaper endorsements is reflective not of ideological bias, but of general agreement among journalists — conservative as well as liberal — as to the qualities that make a candidate fit or unfit for the presidency.
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