DRAFT EDITORIAL PAGE MISSION STATEMENT

The Los Angeles Times Opinion and Editorial Pages
Mission Statement
March 2005



The mission of the Los Angeles Times opinion pages is to publish intelligent and simulating analysis and opinion about a wide variety of topics, from a wide variety of points of view. The mission of the editorial page in particular is to filter the news through a coherent and consistent set of values. These values include a special interest in and concern for the people and institutions of Southern California.

T
he essential quality of opinion journalism is intellectual honesty. Honesty is to opinion writing what accuracy is to news reporting. Intellectual honesty includes such qualities as sincerity (saying what you really think), coherence (thinking it through before you say it), consistency (applying the same principles in different situations), and skepticism (testing what you say and think against available counterarguments).

Editorials should provide more than just an opinion. They should provide understanding of the issue the editorial addresses. A good editorial will provide enough understanding to enable a reader to disagree intelligently with its own conclusions. And over the course of months and years, editorials should produce a general worldview that readers can recognize and appreciate, even if they do disagree.

We imagine our typical reader as a citizen of Southern California, the United States and the world—perhaps even in that order. Local affairs and concerns are a vital element of our editorial page. This is partly for the obvious reason that we ourselves live, raise children, and do business here, and we want to be good neighbors. But it is partly out of the practical consideration that local controversies are the ones about which a newspaper editorial can have genuine impact.

Although a special concern for southern California will affect the topics we choose to editorialize about, it should not affect the principles we apply to them.

What are those principles? For most of its history, the Los Angeles Times editorial page was extremely conservative, reflexively pro-business, and geographically chauvinist. In recent decades, it has been more eclectic, less reliable from any point of view, but averaging out mainstream liberal on the American political spectrum. We expect that more recent tradition to continue. But our principles also include open-mindedness and skepticism, which may change our views on any given issue, or even in general.

Although we will not resist all opportunities to blow the trumpets for our values when they are all on one side of the debate, the interesting topics for an editorial page are ones where our own values are in conflict. These are the ones that test intellectual honesty, and that make for the best reading.

It is the nature of editorials to declare a problem and propose a solution. In the imaginary world of editorials, announcing the solution is the happy ending. In the real world, the editorial’s solution must be made to happen. Under these circumstances, there is a natural temptation to want the government to impose the wise solution the editorial has ordained. In many cases, we will succumb to this temptation, and rightly so.

But we also keep in mind that government action limits freedom. Government functions by coercing people to do things they may not wish to do. This is true even when the proposed action is, on balance, a good idea—as it often is. It is true even if the action, overall, increases human freedom, as laws and government often do. It is true even in a democracy, and even when the action has the support of the majority. Preventing tyranny of the majority is what the Bill of Rights is all about.

O
ne goal of the Los Angeles Times editorial page is to remind readers that the government is often a positive force in society. For that very reason, logic and credibility both dictate that proposals for government action should be examined with skepticism and endorsed with care.

Domestically, as a very general proposition, we believe that free markets are the best engines of prosperity, but the government is needed to increase fairness. For that reason, we are deeply skeptical of government activity intended to improve the economy, but more sympathetic to government activity aimed at tempering the effects of raw capitalism on individuals. We also are skeptical of government activity aimed at affecting the culture or tone of society, preferring to let individuals choose how they wish to live.

Internationally, we believe that the United States should be an active citizen-state of the world. That means unabashedly promoting our values of freedom and democracy, using our wealth to help ease the burdens of less fortunate nations, and participating with some degree of humility in the councils of nations and shared efforts to address global problems. We believe that the United States should have, and sometimes must use, the strongest military capability in the world. And we believe that American power should be used on occasion to serve American values, including the alleviation of suffering, as well as our national interest and security, narrowly defined. But we will examine any particular use of military force with special skepticism.

In all these areas, balancing intelligently the various interests and values that we share will be the main work of the editorials we publish. In one area, though—civil liberties—we believe that a newspaper editorial page has a special obligation. Because newspapers and other news media, uniquely among businesses, enjoy and rely on a provision of the Bill of Rights that protects our core activity, we assume an obligation to defend the civil liberties of all citizens. And while we recognize that even civil liberties must compete with other social interests (such as public safety), this may be one area where readers should bring skepticism of their own to our analysis of the trade-offs.


MEK 3/05