The New York Times has announced it will stop endorsing candidates for any elected office except President – a service it’s been performing for a century and a half. They didn’t say why; they didn’t need to. “It’s just business” – that capacious excuse for cowardice. Endorsing candidates, if done right, takes time, effort, and gains you more foes than friends. It’s a luxury the hard-pressed journalism business can ill afford. Do Google, Facebook or modernity’s other prosperous communicators issue endorsements? They do not. They allow any old opinion, however rabid or fallacious, to pollute their information stream – in the interest of “free speech.” Google and Facebook mint money while the Times, the most profitable legacy newspaper company still standing, earns a comparative pittance. That’s not fair – to the Times’ shareholders or to the suits who want to keep their jobs. Profits before Principles: that’s how capitalism works.

My heart hurts. Much as I deplore their decision, I don’t blame the Times: I’ve wrestled this dilemma myself. For twenty years, the community newspaper I captained issued endorsements for all the races on the ballots of nine towns in Westchester County, New York. That’s a lot of races when you count town board, school board, legislators at the local, county, state, and national levels, town judge, highway superintendent, not to mention ballot initiatives, and so forth. This took us two months of reading, interviewing, reporting, deliberating, by the equivalent of two full-time journalists – and we were hardly rolling in dough. We did it because, if we didn’t, few would have a clue whom or what they were voting for and be swayed by propaganda, party labels, and self-serving lies. We made a difference, sometimes a decisive difference. We also made enemies. At the close of endorsement season, out of curiosity, I tallied the parties of our endorsees. Republicans and Democrats invariably came out balanced. For conservatives our newspaper was too liberal, for liberals too conservative. That made me smile.

Paradoxically, the Internet, while proliferating information, has compounded ignorance. More and more we squirrel in echo chambers, to be comforted by opinions like our own. Fewer and fewer citizens “make up their own minds,” which takes effort, opting instead to salute tribal chieftains. Trump can lie like a rug to his adherents because they’ve deputized him their big banana. Loyalty first, to hell with truth; to demur is to desert; off with the traitor’s head!

Thinking that we think more, we parrot more and think less. I’m convinced that capitalism, technology, fatuity and laziness will doom democracy eventually but maybe, just maybe, not this year.

As newspapers fail or flail, who will stand for the common good, the sensible center of communal opinion, the sanest choice all things considered? Who, of influence, will aim to be just, not just win?

I do not know. Perhaps tiny enclaves of intelligence are the best we can hope for until tyrants proscribe thinking altogether. Sometimes I feel a relic huddling here with you, weighing ideas, using language with respect – as old-fashioned as antimacassars or spats (those you wear). Is cool deliberation a dinosaur or dodo?

My crystal ball is permanently out for repairs. But of this I’m certain: those of us who care must do our best to arrest the tide of greed and folly. The timid Times may quit using their heads, but we cannot.