In the back and forth the last couple of days over the billionaire owners of the LAT and WaPo preventing their editorial boards from endorsing Kamala Harris, it struck me that the objections were mostly driven by a sense 1) that the papers had a duty to stand up against Donald Trump in the latest Most Crucial Election In The History Of The Republic; 2) that editorial independence should prevail over the wishes of the owners; 3) that the owners are simply feckless cowards kowtowing to Trump; and 4) that this is just the latest example of how billionaires are ruining the country.
While I’m sympathetic to all of these to varying extents, none of the individual arguments dissuade me from my overall reaction of Meh. But the combination of them is indeed problematic.
Let’s focus on WaPo and its majority owner, Jeff Bezos, as more is known. A story fronting the B section of today’s NYT, “Inside The Washington Post’s Decision to Stop Presidential Endorsements,” details the events leading up to the decision to quash the editorial.
The decision by Mr. Bezos had been in the making for weeks. It is not clear what motivated his final determination or its timing.
Mr. Bezos has clashed repeatedly with Ms. Harris’s electoral opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, who for years has been openly hostile to him on social media. In 2019, Amazon sued the Trump administration, blaming Mr. Trump’s animosity toward Mr. Bezos for its loss of a $10 billion cloud computing contract.
The businesses Mr. Bezos founded, including Amazon and Blue Origin, his aerospace company, still compete regularly for lucrative government contracts. Blue Origin executives met with Mr. Trump on Friday, and the company has a $3.4 billion contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to build a lunar lander.
The rest of the report contains some speculation from staffers, most damning of which is former editor-at-large Robert Kagan (who resigned over the matter) claiming it was “clearly a sign of pre-emptive favor currying” with Trump. Ditto former editor Marty Barron’s calling it “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.”
Longtime Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch goes even further in “Billionaire cowards at Washington Post, L.A. Times show what life under a dictator is really like.”
If this looks like the latest saga of open corruption in a nation that’s become a billionaire kleptocracy, it is — but this moment is also so much more than that. America is witnessing the raw power of dictatorship some nine days before voters even decide if that will truly be our future path. The cowardly Bezos can spend billions to erect a manmade projectile that sends him into space, but he’ll never have the cojones of a Katharine Graham. He is obeying fascism in advance, and he is not alone.
[…]
The message here is clear. The cowardice of the news organizations controlled by Bezos and Soon-Shiong has already taught Trump — in the words of Yale’s [Timothy] Snyder, a leading U.S. expert on fascism — what power can do, and if he prevails in next week’s election, he plans to bring that hammer down in full force. What happened at the Post and the L.A. Times was a stunning betrayal of journalism’s moral values, but in a strange way the papers did perform a public service: showing American voters what life under a dictator would feel like.
But these reversals, coming now and coming from the poisoned heart of American oligarchy, have instead confirmed the worst fears among an anxiety-wracked electorate that the core institutions that once saved U.S. democracy under the life-or-death pressures of Watergate — the Supreme Court, Congress, and an aggressive media — have morally imploded into empty shells.
While the hysteria here is understandable, it’s predicated on facts not in evidence: that the owners were in fact currying favor with Trump and/or afraid of reprisals in the event of a second Trump presidency. While plausible there is, at least in Bezos’ case, the matter of his having stood up against Trump multiple times during his presidency, both in terms of backing a rather aggressive editorial and reportorial stance against him (the whole “Democracy Dies in Darkness” motif) as well as on the business front. Indeed, the photo atop this post was borrowed from a June 2017 essay titled “Meet Jeff Bezos: the Amazon billionaire daring to take on Trump and the White House.” See also Chris Cillizza’s February 2019 piece, “Donald Trump’s long and dramatic history with Jeff Bezos.”
A couple of readers pointed me to an essay by Bulwark editor Jonathan V. Last, “Bezos, Trump, and the Failure of Democracy,” that brings the multiple threads together in a way that resonates with me.
ON FRIDAY, after the Washington Post’s publisher announced that the paper was suddenly abandoning the practice of the editorial page endorsing presidential candidates, news leaked that—on the very same day—Donald Trump met with executives from Blue Origin.
Blue Origin, of course, is the rocket company owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.
This was neither a coincidence nor a case of Bezos and Trump being caught doing something they wished to keep hidden. The entire point of the exercise, at least for Trump, was that it be public.
While Last offers no direct evidence that the two events were linked, it strains credulity that they weren’t. Indeed, it’s otherwise quite odd—even by Trump standards—for a presidential candidate to be taking meetings unrelated to getting out swing voters in the final days of what appears to be another nailbiter of an election.
What we witnessed on Friday was not a case of censorship or a failure of the media. It had nothing to do with journalism or the Washington Post. It was something much, much more consequential. It was about oligarchy, the rule of law, and the failure of the democratic order.
When Bezos decreed that the newspaper he owned could not endorse Trump’s opponent, it was a transparent act of submission borne of an intuitive understanding of the differences between the candidates.
Bezos understood that if he antagonized Kamala Harris and Harris became president, he would face no consequences. A Harris administration would not target his businesses because the Harris administration would—like all presidential administrations not headed by Trump—adhere to the rule of law.
Bezos likewise understood that the inverse was not true. If he continued to antagonize Trump and Trump became president, his businesses very much would be targeted.
So bending the knee to Trump was the smart play. All upside, no downside.
Again: we have no direct evidence of Bezos’ motives here. But we do know that he bought the Post in August 2013 and that it has endorsed candidates in every election until suddenly announcing that it wouldn’t be doing so this cycle. The explanation proferred by its editor, that it was returning to its pre-1976 stance that newspapers should be neutral, while reasonable (indeed, Bunch acknowledges that he’s made that argument himself in the past), strains credulity given the timing.
What Trump understood was that Bezos’s submission would be of limited use if it was kept quiet. Because the point of dominating Bezos wasn’t just to dominate Bezos. It was to send a message to every other businessman, entrepreneur, and corporation in America: that these are the rules of the game. If you are nice to Trump, the government will be nice to you. If you criticize Trump, the government will be used against you.
Which is why Trump met with Blue Origin on the same day that Bezos yielded. It was a demonstration—a very public demonstration.
Again: this is conjecture without evidence. But it’s certainly in keeping with Trump’s mindset.
After quoting a Russia expert on the parallels of this situation with 1990s Russia, Last asserts:
The Bezos surrender isn’t just a demonstration. It’s a consequence. It’s a signal that the rule of law has already eroded to such a point that even a person as powerful as Jeff Bezos no longer believes it can protect him.
So he has sought shelter in the embrace of the strongman.
Bezos made his decision because he calculated that Trump has already won—not the election, but his struggle to break the rule of law.
[…]
What should change is our understanding of where our democracy currently sits on the continuum. We are not teetering at the precipice of a slide into autocracy. We are already partway down the slope. And that’s even if Harris wins.
If Trump wins? Well, I suppose we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.
But Bezos and Trump have just taught America’s remaining small-d democratic leaders: The time for normal politics, where you try to win bipartisan majorities by focusing on “kitchen-table” issues is past. The task in front of us will require aggressive, systemic changes if we are to escape terminal decline.
The hour is later than we think.
While this sounds histrionic—How can a guy who lost the last election and subsequently been found guilty of multiple felonies in court be an autocrat?—there’s something to it. At the very least, it’s a reminder that the guardrails that protected us from the worst of Trump’s excesses last go around likely won’t be there if there’s another.
Circling back to the issue at hand, though, this all amplifies a point that my friend and co-blogger, Steven Taylor, made early in the conversation: “the notion that billionaires are making all these decisions just adds to the un-democratic nature of the moment.”
As I reflect on it, I don’t think the fact that Bezos and LAT owner Patrick Soon-Shiong are billionaires per se is the problem. The Ochs-Sulzberger families have owned the NYT for a very long time and the Grahams owned WaPo until they sold to Bezos and, by and large, they exercised strong support for press freedoms. While not billionaires, they were certainly rich.
More problematic is that, for Bezos at least, the Post is not even a rounding error in his net worth. During standoffs like Watergate and the Pentagon Papers cases, the Ochs-Sulzbergers and Grahams stood firm because they believed they were protected by the First Amendment and their papers’ reputations were at the core of the family business. For Bezos, the Post is a money-losing sideshow. He’s not about to lose government contracts worth billions for Amazon Web Services or Blue Origin over a little thing like a presidential endorsement.
This is rather ironic in that the best argument for someone like Bezos owning a great newspaper is that he can afford to lose $77 million a year—as WaPo reportedly did last year—indefinitely. He likely couldn’t tell you within $77 million how much he’s got liquid right now.
Still, to the extent he can be intimidated by threats of retaliation in the event of a second Trump presidency, it’s to his core business interests, not his vanity project. It’s likely not good for the country that one of its top two newspapers is owned by someone who sees it that way.
