Democracy Dies in Dickness
Billionaires are not watchdogs. They are wolves.
My God, what a dick.
By now you are all too well aware that billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, after days of hiding behind the official subterfuge of institutional decision-making below him, has copped to prohibiting a presidential endorsement in his pages. As his publisher had before him, he tried to rationalize the decision as a principled one with the best interests of journalism and American democracy as the beneficiaries. Details to follow, but know this:
The non-endorsement is the worst imaginable combination of dishonesty, cowardice, conflict of interest, hypocrisy, negligence and just mind-boggling idiocy — which, coincidentally enough, is also a description of the Republican candidate and the prostituted party he rules by terror.
It began with the announcement on Friday by publisher and CEO William Lewis that, despite the wishes of the editorial page staff, no presidential endorsement would be forthcoming.
“We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable,” Lewis wrote. “We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values the Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”
He predicted correctly regarding “tacit endorsement,” requiring him to follow up the next day with a panicked assortment of lies and inanities: “Bezos did not see, read, or opine on any draft. As Publisher, I do not believe in presidential endorsements. We are an independent newspaper and should support our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”
Uh-huh. First of all, whether Bezos saw a draft is irrelevant. It was his call, sight unseen, as he finally confirmed in his own letter to readers on Monday:
I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world?
Independent voice? What??? “Independent” is not a synonym for non-partisan, and to pretend so is simply sophistry. In journalism, independence is the determination and courage to observe, analyze and report “without fear or favor” based on evidence, history, public statements, non-public conduct and whatever can shed light on human events, political or otherwise. As I’ve said so often before, warning about an approaching Category 5 hurricane is not bias against weather.
As for the duty to, in Lewis’s words, “support our readers’ ability to make up their own minds,” that is pretty much the definition of a newspaper editorial or endorsement. It is exactly why editorial pages exist, to present issues through the prism of rigorous professional study and argument, thence for readers to decide if they agree. If the Washington Post editorializes against slavery or for low-fat ice cream, there is no fucking enforcement mechanism. To deny readers informed opinion is not trust; it is condescension.
And, by the way, though modern papers delegate that responsibility to their editorial boards, expressing even unrigorous and heavily partisan opinions is the privilege of ownership. Had Jeff Bezos endorsed Trump, there would have been an uproar — because grotesque — but it would be about his choice, not his honesty. This fiasco is a thousand times worse because of the deception at every stage. Including the glossing over of Bezos’s business interests as the largest shareholder of Amazon and beyond. Amazon Cloud Services and his space company Blue Origin together have billions in government contracts, and in his presidency Trump actively abused his power to punish Bezos for Post articles he deemed unfair. Hence the public pile-on from those who witnessed it the first time around:
“It’s a sort of preemptive bending of the knee to who they may think is the probable winner,” said conservative opinion-writer Robert Kagan in quitting the paper. “Anybody who is as much a part of the American economy as Bezos is … they obviously want to have a good relationship with whoever is in power. [It’s] an attempt to try not to be on the wrong side of Donald Trump.”
Former executive editor Martin Baron wrote: “This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty. Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
Two Post editorial board members resigned their seats, including Daniel Hoffman, who only a week ago received a Pulitzer Prize for his pieces documenting Trump’s threat to all that is lawful and decent.
“Under our watch at the Post, no one would be lost in silence,” Hoffman wrote in his resignation letter. “Until Friday, I assumed we would apply the same values and principles to an editorial endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump. I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice at this perilous moment.”
And his colleague Molly Roberts posted this on social media to explain her decision to step down: “Donald Trump is not yet a dictator, but the quieter we are, the closer he comes.”
In his piece defending the indefensible, Bezos explicitly disclaimed charges that he’d buckled in fear of Trump’s vengeance. “You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.”
Is he so oblivious and tone deaf not to see that he himself is using the pages of the Washington Post to present an argument for readers to “make your own determination”? This is a man tangled in his own fatuous lies. He is also ensnared in the backlash. The financially crippled Post has lost more than 10% of its subscribers in five days.
Alas, circumstances dictate that I must mention The Chaos Scenario, first a long magazine cover story I wrote for Advertising Age in 2005, then a 2009 book predicting the collapse of the media economy. Though naive in some respects (pre-Google, pre-developed-Facebook) these publications accurately predicted the toll of the digital revolution on the media and advertising sectors. By “toll” I mean “spiraling vortex of ruin.”
In the subsequent years, through a partnership with the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, I ran the annual Media Future Summit, gathering media executives to document the ongoing crisis and explore potential business models for replacing the collapsing advertising economy. I also taught a senior media-ecology seminar jointly for Wharton and the Annenberg School for Communication to examine 16 of those prospective models.
It was disheartening, because not one of the revenue schemes — from subscriptions to “native” advertising to events to affiliate marketing to philanthropy — alone or in combination with all the others came close to replacing the bounty of the fading mass-advertising age. Among the models was “the patient billionaire.” This was the notion that tycoons with no need for immediate return on investment could step in as a matter of civic goodwill to keep newspapers alive. This, no less than the p.r. scam of native advertising, failed the smell test. Because why would we trust a billionaire to keep his or her own outside business interests or political ideology out of their news properties?
Did we learn nothing from rightwing zealot William Loeb III at the Manchester (NH) Union Leader, Richard Mellon Scaife of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Sun Myong Moon with his Washington Times, parking magnate Sam Zell at the Chicago Tribune and Sheldon Adelson at the Las Vegas Review-Journal? Maybe the Wall Street Journal can be deeply conservative in its opinion pages and journalistically rigorous in its news pages, but in general the Charles Foster Kane model is a threat, not a boon, to journalism.
Be careful of what you wish for. Infidelity to democracy comes in many forms. There is the cartoonish evil of Elon Musk, and then there is complicity by inaction. The slogan of the Washington Post is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” That is true.
So is “Silence=Death.”
Spot-on, Bob, as always. I was particularly pissed at the hopelessly lame justification Bezos offered the other day, where in the first paragraph he used the word "we" in relation to WaPo journalists. Bezos is the farthest thing possible from a journalist: he's a capitalist who has now shown his true colors ... and the predominant hue in his flag is yellow.
The irony of a paper whose motto is "Democracy dies in darkness" going dark at the hand of its timorous owner is almost unbearable.
Just the tip of the iceberg should Trump win and his oligarch buddies get to run the country with Trump as their puppet.