The Washington Post’s Craven Capitulation to the Billionaire Class

Here’s a new slogan that seems right for a sanctimonious but marketable think tank The Washington Post: Democracy dies in the darkness of Jeff Bezos’ wallet. The newspaper, which has long lost its reputation as a staunch enemy of the paranoid, authoritarian Republican regime, announced Friday that it is not going to endorse a presidential candidate this time (or even ever again), despite being impeached twice. the criminal trials of Donald Trump make Richard Nixon look like a mere stooge in the realm of reckless abuse of maximum executive power.

A newspaper that still has the audacity to present itself as the heroic guardian of democracy in a struggling country has acquiesced to MAGA’s thuggish statism on the flimsiest pretext imaginable: it intends protect “independent space” for voters who don’t want to be told who to vote for, editorial page editor David Shipley reportedly told outraged newspaper employees in what NPR reporter David Folfenflick called a “tense meeting.” Never mind that Americans are already being told who to vote for in an endless loop in every public place imaginable, and seem to be walking away with their fragile sensibilities intact. It doesn’t matter that the main idea of ​​the article is to gather voices arguing about what people should say and do. And never mind that there is no such thing as an impartial “independent space” in the struggle over how and whether formal democracy can exist in America. What Shipley was really doing was saying, “My corporate taxpayers want to soak in Donald Trump’s tax cuts and not jeopardize their lucrative federal contracts,” but the bogus rhetoric of optional journalistic objectivity is much better suited to newsroom meetings where you trying to get reporters to go to the control line.

It is reported that Shipley had already prepared Harris’ endorsement, but for Messageown reportit was cancelled Message owner and retail predator Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of Amazon. During Trump’s first administration, the then-president threatened to scrap key tax breaks and postal subsidies in retaliation for Messagecritical coverage of Trump. When the editors weighed in on their 2020 endorsements, Bezos endorsed the choice of Joe Biden; this time, the newspaper owner is hedging his bets against economic sanctions in Trump’s second term, not to mention the resolution of several pending antitrust suits against his company, which are unlikely to make it into the Harris administration. I like his fellow billionairesThe king of the Amazon is clearly bullish on the prospect of more prosperity in his coffers thanks to Trump’s promise to continue his lavish handouts to our economic oligarchy.

It should be noted that the same scenario played out in Los Angeles Timeswhere its billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked the paper’s planned endorsement of Harris. In addition to being a standard plutocrat with a pharmaceutical fortune sure to thrive under a more lenient Trump-appointed FDA, Sun-Xiong is a longtime friend of Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire man who is all in for re-election Trump. (Indeed, ironically, Message published a front-page report on how Musk’s Starlink satellite company looks rake in billions more of government dosha in Trump’s second term, the very day the paper’s managers announced their timid capitulation to Musk’s would-be benefactor.)

What is the difference between shameful LA Times The saga is that the paper’s editorial page editor, Marial Garza, recognized the actual journalistic and political stakes in having the paper’s voice stifled by the diktat of a billionaire. “I’m resigning because I want to make it clear that I don’t agree with us being silent,” Garza told Columbia Journalism Review editor Sewell Chan:

In dangerous times, honest people must rise up. This is how I stand… This is the moment in time when you speak your conscience no matter what. And the endorsement was a logical next step after a series of editorials we wrote about how dangerous Trump is to democracy, about his unfitness to be president, about his threats to jail his enemies. We argued in editorial after editorial that he should not be re-elected.

As for David Shipley, here’s a rough estimate of one Message Employee: “It’s been said about Shipley for a long time that he got the job because he knows how to get along with rich people.” Jacob Heilbrunn, Shipley’s former colleague in The new republicagree: he was a “serious, traditional liberal” back then, but “now seems to have turned into a completely empty suit.”

Indeed, while Shipley said he “possessed.” MessageA cowardly decision at that heated staff meeting, the official rationale for it was published under the foreword of Bezos’ handpicked publisher Will Lewis, a former Murdoch lackey. still up to the neck as a result of the phone hacking scandal in Britain.

In a pompous and obtuse editorial, Lewis dismissed the paper’s recent history of presidential support by citing the paper’s lack of support during the 1960 presidential race—a statement of supposed journalistic principle that mostly came off with equal parts grace and pomp: “In we have said and will continue to say, as reasonably and honestly as we know how, what we believe about the issues that arise in the company,” the 1960 editorial read in part. “We have sought to arrive at our opinions as fairly as possible, guided by our own principles of independence, but without allegiance to any party or candidate.” Translation: We dislike candor as anything more than expedient rhetorical posturing, and we must shy away from the obvious moral implications of our own journalistic work.

This is also the crux of Lewis’s trenchant arguments. Dismissing the notion that his quisling stance doubles as “tacit support for one candidate or condemnation of another,” Lewis argues that it is, in fact, “consistent with values Message has always stood for what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in the service of the American ethic, respect for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.” If Message truly cherishes those values, it is objectively impossible to reconcile them with the absence of an election that would restore maximum power to a repeatedly convicted lawbreaker, bigot, sex offender, executive abuser, and self-styled agent of political retribution, whose own former cabinet members he considers fascists. Readers of St MessageAn editorial page would be better served by a complete blank, a horoscope or a play on words, rather than Lewis’s self-congratulatory hold.

Still long-suffering Message readers could not help but wonder at Lewis’s moronic, self-defeating reasoning. It was also that paper sat for three years in the damn news that Martha-Anne Alito, the wife of a Supreme Court justice who advocates Trump’s maximum executive power and gleefully destroyed women’s rights to their own bodily autonomy, hung an upside-down flag outside the couple’s home in solidarity with the failed January 6 coup. And, according to NPR’s Folfenflik, Lewis dangled the prospect of an exclusive interview with him in exchange for a writer’s promise bury the events of the phone hacking case in its reporting.

This is a universe, or not, away from the high-minded standards of character and public integrity that Lewis claims to uphold by adopting a morally unjustifiable stand of non-alignment at a time of democratic crisis. But that’s what you get when the top of a top phone is staffed exclusively by people who know how to get along with rich men.