Alden’s decision to end endorsements is not an honorable act of bipartisanship -- it’s corporate greed.

Less than a month out from a midterm election that will determine the viability of America’s flailing democracy, the nation’s second-largest newspaper chain weighed in with a curious announcement: It will refrain from endorsing candidates for national and statewide office. That’s right: Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund that now controls more than 200 newspapers, has spurned the notion that it might employ its outsize market role to aid public deliberation during one of the most consequential midterm cycles in our history.

Not surprisingly, the rationale for the decision, published in a chainwide editorial, was steeped in the dogmas of stage-managed bipartisan comity. “Unfortunately, as the public discourse has become increasingly acrimonious, common ground has become a no man’s land between the clashing forces of the culture wars,” the editorial reads. “At the same time, with misinformation and disinformation on the rise, readers are often confused, especially online, about the differences between news stories, opinion pieces and editorials.”

Readerly confusion should, at the most basic level of journalistic endeavor, serve as a mandate to refine a public discourse that explicitly resists the lies and distortions coursing through the broader mediasphere. By no means should it be cause to flee the scene entirely. To act otherwise is to abdicate the most fundamental role of journalism in a democracy – to create and sustain an informed citizenry.

Alden has laid siege to local news markets on its relentless binge of media acquisition. As journalist Julie Reynolds has reported, the chain laid off 70 percent of the workforce in its central news operation, Digital First, after buying it in 2012. The result has been a vast and spreading local news desert along the American interior – the very set of conditions that’s proven the optimal feeding ground for the bad-faith digital platforms that the Alden editorialists bemoan.

It gets even more perverse: Alden declares that it will continue to offer endorsements of candidates in local political campaigns – even as it continues presiding over the planned depopulation of local political news coverage. As always in the Alden sphere of influence, the principal calculation here seems to be market-driven: The chain can pick and choose its optimal points of influence in the denuded news landscapes it now administers. “The only way I read this is that they would rather not lose some percentage of subscribers in local races by endorsing a candidate that that percentage opposes,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of media studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. “It’s an acknowledgment and a surrender, one that’s journalistically irresponsible.”

None of this is to say that candidate endorsements are by themselves a guarantee of journalistic virtue. Endorsements tend not to swing elections in any measurable way. But that’s not really the point. “The obligation is not to change minds,” Vaidhyanathan says. “The duty is to start conversations.”

CHRIS LEHMANN is D.C. Bureau chief of The Nation.