Issued the following announcement on Sept. 4.
The Jeanne for Congress campaign has made the decision not to participate in the Editorial Board endorsement processes with the Daily Herald, SunTimes or Northwest Herald. This was not a decision that was made lightly.
Since being elected to the Illinois State House in 2012, Jeanne Ives has been very open with the media. She has made herself available to reporters to answer almost any questions on policies or politics, wrote op-eds, and emailed constituents regularly.
Even though endorsements don’t generally move votes, Jeanne has taken time to thoughtfully fill out candidate surveys and sit for interviews with these editorial boards in good faith.
However, recent history has made it clear that we can no longer expect an objective hearing from these editorial boards.
In both the 2018 primary and the 2020 primary, all three publications dropped any pretense of objectivity. They disregarded the policy solutions Jeanne laid out in their questionnaires and interviews. They instead made their endorsement of Jeanne’s opponent a hit piece on her based on issues that were not addressed in their questionnaires and were barely touched upon in their interviews.
Yet, in 2018 Jeanne moved over 40 points in less than 5 months to nearly unseat a billionaire incumbent. And in 2020, Jeanne defeated her primary opponent 71-29.
Whether those results were due to Jeanne’s leadership abilities, clarity of principle and grassroots appeal or due to their fading credibility, it is clear that the endorsement processes of these three outlets is a waste of time. People know they can hear right from Jeanne through her social media platforms without a reporter misquoting her, filtering ideas out, or an editor telling them what they should think. The campaign now reaches more of the people we need to reach through our proprietary channels than through any of these publications.
We value a free and fair press. And we are happy to continue to work with those in the media who report with fairness and accuracy. But we won’t continue the charade. We are not going to pretend that our message and ideas have been fairly or accurately represented by these three outlets, or that they have held our opponents to the same level of scrutiny. We can simply no longer trust in the objectivity of the Daily Herald, SunTimes and Northwest Herald.
Original source can be found here.
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