IN THAT CONTEXT, HAS THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS EVER ENDORSED A DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE IN THE GENERAL ELECTION?
We’ve literally got a task force working on this. But it’s beginning to look a lot like “never.” Native Texan Lyndon Johnson, who ran as an incumbent Democratic president in 1964, would seem to be the most likely to have broken the string. But no, the DMN endorsed his conservative Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, in that year. Editor & Publisher, which has tracked newspaper endorsements since 1940 (the successful third-term campaign of Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt), has no record of The Dallas Morning News ever endorsing a Democrat. So the search goes on in the year that The Chicago Tribune is endorsing a Democratic presidential candidate — Obama — for the first time in its 161-year history. No one at The Dallas Morning News, which does not list a history of its previous presidential candidate endorsements (on its Web site or anywhere else) seems to be able to say with any certainty whether the newspaper has ever gotten behind a Democratic presidential candidat
