The Pillar and The Post

An extra Pillar Post

Hi everyone, 

You’ve probably noticed there’s an election coming in a few days. Americans will head to the polls to select a president. And it’s a tight race.

Credit: Unsplash

The media plays a big role in that. News outlets big and small, secular and Catholic, seem to be digging in for their candidates of choice, and quite a few readers have asked us where we are on all this. Most have done so thoughtfully and out of genuine desire to hear what we — JD and Ed — think, for whatever it might be worth.

Others have been a little more blunt about what they believe we have to say about the election and how Catholics should vote. We’ll get to that in a second.

There’s a lot of talk this week about the Washington Post’s recent decision — made not by the editorial board but by its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos — not to endorse a candidate. That decision has led to the largest mass-cancellation of subscribers the newspaper has seen.

A few things jump out at us — JD and Ed — about all this. We wanted to mention them to you, because those things are central to the principles of our own journalism project.

First, we’re not big fans of presidential endorsements by newspapers, because they seem to us like pretty obvious vanity exercises and marketing gimmicks. And it’s not our aim to hold the Washington Post up as a paragon of impartial and fact-based reporting. Really. 

But we’re struck this week by the fact that Bezos jumped into his newsroom, to tell his paper’s journalists what they can and can’t do. We’re not fans of endorsements, but we are also not fans of seeing higher-ups from outside the newsroom — the people with the big pockets — deciding what gets published and what doesn’t.

We think editorial freedom matters a lot. Even for the people at the Washington Post, who’ve been known to turn their fire on us for doing our jobs. 

We’re not the Washington Post, obviously. And we don’t really work in the sandbox of American national politics. But the principle of this thing matters to us, because something similar happens in Catholic media, too — all the time. 

Our experience tells us that Catholic media outlets, left and right, see their coverage steered by their biggest-dollar donors and revenue sources. 

Sometimes this happens at the macro level, with partisan election season endorsements from left and right, cloaked in language of moral and conscientious obligation, which usually far exceed the actual teaching of the Church on the subject.

But more often it comes in the way coverage is shaped, sculpting the news to fit a narrative about bad guys and good guys, regardless of the facts. It comes with news outlets telling their readers what someone — sometimes even the readers themselves — wants them to hear, or with pushing an agenda.

Facts are weaponized, the world is divided into them and us, and the mission becomes to win for “our side” at all costs — the truth be damned. 

We don’t say that lightly. But we’ve seen too much of it. And we’ve encountered it ourselves first-hand.

In fact, that is the reason we decided to set up The Pillar in the first place — because if reporting the news is a service to truth, anyone telling reporters to shade it one way or another is working against that service. And we simply refuse to play that game, for anyone, at any price.

Real independence matters. It’s the reason we are able to go to Rome, and keep one eye on the synod on synodality, while spending the bulk of our time digging into stories like this one — which matter to the Church’s moral witness and institutional credibility, and which simply aren’t being covered anywhere else.

That’s why we’re set up the way we are — subscriber-funded — so that we don’t put anyone in a position to tell us what to write or how to write it, or, for that matter, to tell us to tell our readers what to think.

That’s what this project of ours is all about. 

Unlike the Washington Post, no one gets to tell us we can’t endorse anyone, or that we have to endorse someone. And, on that front, we aren’t going to insult your intelligence or moral agency by claiming to tell you what you have to do in the election booth, or anywhere else. 

Pillar readers will look at the choice we’ve been served up this election cycle, consider the Church’s guidance, and decide for themselves the right thing to do. 

But we will go exactly this far: If you read from left or right that there’s only one right thing for Catholics to do in the voting booth — only one possibly moral option for Catholics of conscience — someone is selling something. Because that’s just not what the Church teaches about making moral judgments on voting. 

Anyway, with all the endorsement talk going on right now, it just seemed like a good time to remind you why we’ve set ourselves the way we have. We want to be accountable to our subscribers — to you — and not beholden to deep-pocketed ideologues setting the agenda. It’s not the easiest path, but we sincerely think it’s the best.

You might not like our editorial judgment, you might not be happy about what stories we choose, or you might think we spend too much time on the wrong thing. That’s all fine. But we want you to be confident about one thing: Those decisions are ours, they’re not steered by anyone else, and we aim to make the best decisions we possibly can about what news matters, and how we can cover it meaningfully.

With all that said, this note is just because we want to thank you for making our model possible, and to make our approach clear for those who’ve asked about whether we’ll endorse a political candidate. 

We’re grateful for you, we pray for you, and — if you support The Pillar with a subscription or with your prayers — we rely on you.

Here at The Pillar, we only want to sell one thing: the chance to support honest, real, unflinching and unbiased coverage of the life of the Church. That’s all we’re ever going to do, and there is no one to make us do it any other way. That’s because of Providence, and it’s because of you. And this is a thank you note. 

If that’s not the endorsement you’re looking for, we’re sorry about that — it’s all we’ve got. 

Let’s all pray for our country this week. It’s gonna need it.

Yours in Christ,

JD and Ed.
The Pillar