Times and Post Won’t Endorse
Staffers are in mutiny after owners killed plans to endorse Kamala Harris for President.
Two major newspapers with liberal editorial boards have been ordered not to issue an endorsement in this year’s presidential election.
LAT (“L.A. Times owner’s decision not to endorse in presidential race sparks resignations, questions“):
A decision by the owner of the Los Angeles Times not to endorse in the 2024 presidential race — after the paper’s editorial board proposed backing Kamala Harris — has created a tempest, prompting three members of the board to resign and provoking thousands of readers to cancel their subscriptions.
Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong said that his decision not to offer readers a recommendation would be less divisive in a tumultuous election year.
“I have no regrets whatsoever. In fact, I think it was exactly the right decision,” he said in an interview with The Times on Friday afternoon. “The process was [to decide]: how do we actually best inform our readers? And there could be nobody better than us who try to sift the facts from fiction” while leaving it to readers to make their own final decision.
He said he feared that picking one candidate would only exacerbate the already deep divisions in the country.
Members of the editorial board protested that the non-endorsement was out of step with recent precedent at the newspaper, which has picked a presidential candidate in every election since 2008, and with The Times’ previous editorial position, which has been ardently opposed to former President Trump.
Editorials Editor Mariel Garza resigned Wednesday as a result of the decision. Editorial board members Robert Greene and Karin Klein tendered their resignations from The Times the following day. Greene won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2021 for his writing about criminal justice reform.
“How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger — who we previously endorsed for the U.S. Senate?” Garza wrote Wednesday in her letter of resignation to Times Executive Editor Terry Tang. “The non-endorsement undermines the integrity of the editorial board and every single endorsement we make, down to school board races.”
“I’m disappointed by the editorial [board] members resigning the way they did. But that’s their choice, right?” Soon-Shiong said in the interview.
The medical technology billionaire, who bought The Times in 2018, posted on the social media site X on Wednesday that he believed he had offered his opinion writers a reasonable alternative to a traditional endorsement. He said they should “draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation.”
“In addition, the Board was asked to provide their understanding of the policies and plans enunciated by the candidates during this campaign and its potential effect on the nation in the next four years,” he added. “In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years.”
“The Editorial Board chose to remain silent,” Soon-Shiong contended in his X post, “and I accepted their decision.”
The three journalists who resigned said they were not silent but, rather, disagreed with the owner’s proposal.
“The ‘opportunity’ to instead present a both-sides analysis would properly be done by the newsroom, not by an editorial board, whose purpose is to take a stand and defend it persuasively,” Greene said in a statement.
“I left in response to the refusal to take a stand,” Greene wrote, “and to the incorrect assertion that the editorial board had made a choice.”
For many news consumers, the very existence of editorial writers and editorial boards is a point of confusion.
They are generally veteran journalists who write editorials that express the position of their news outlet. Though written by one individual, the resulting essays are usually not signed because they express the consensus of the board.
WaPo (“The Washington Post says it will not endorse a candidate for president“):
The Washington Post’s publisher said Friday that the paper will not make an endorsement in this year’s presidential contest, for the first time in 36 years, or in future presidential races.
The decision, announced 11 days before an election that most polls show as too close to call, drew immediate and heated condemnation from a wide swath of subscribers, political figures and media commentators. Robert Kagan, a longtime Post columnist and editor-at-large in the opinion department, resigned in protest,and a group of 11 Washington Post columnists co-signed an article condemning the decision. Angry readers and sources flooded the email inboxes of numerous staffers with complaints.
In a column published on The Post’s website Friday, publisher and CEO William Lewis described the decision as a return to the newspaper’s roots of non-endorsement. The Post did not begin regularly endorsing presidential candidates until 1976, when the paper endorsed Jimmy Carter “for understandable reasons at the time,” Lewis wrote.
“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.”Lewis also portrayed the decision as a “statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”
Within hours of the announcement, a group of Washington Post columnists, including Pulitzer Prize winner Eugene Robinson and former deputy editorial page editor Ruth Marcus, called the decision “a terrible mistake,” writing, “This is a moment for the institution to be making clear its commitment to democratic values, the rule of law and international alliances, and the threat that Donald Trump poses to them — the precise points The Post made in endorsing Trump’s opponents in 2016 and 2020.”
Washington Post legends Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein issued a statement saying: “We respect the traditional independence of the editorial page, but this decision 12 days out from the 2024 presidential election ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy. Under Jeff Bezos’s ownership, the Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy and that makes this decision even more surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process.”
The aforementioned column (“On political endorsement“) from Lewis:
The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.
As our Editorial Board wrote in 1960:
“The Washington Post has not ‘endorsed’ either candidate in the presidential campaign. That is in our tradition and accords with our action in five of the last six elections. The unusual circumstances of the 1952 election led us to make an exception when we endorsed General Eisenhower prior to the nominating conventions and reiterated our endorsement during the campaign. In the light of hindsight we retain the view that the arguments for his nomination and election were compelling. But hindsight also has convinced us that it might have been wiser for an independent newspaper in the Nation’s Capital to have avoided formal endorsement.”
[…]
Our job at The Washington Post is to provide through the newsroom nonpartisan news for all Americans, and thought-provoking, reported views from our opinion team to help our readers make up their own minds.
Most of all, our job as the newspaper of the capital city of the most important country in the world is to be independent.
And that is what we are and will be.
Margaret Sullivan, former Public Editor for the NYT and media columnist for WaPo, now at The Guardian, asks the obvious question: “The Washington Post and LA Times refused to endorse a candidate. Why?“
The choice for president has seldom been starker.
On one side is Donald Trump, a felonious and twice-impeached conman, raring to finish off the job of dismantling American democracy. On the other is Kamala Harris, a capable and experienced leader who stands for traditional democratic principles.
Nevertheless – and shockingly – the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post have decided to sit this one out. Both major news organizations, each owned by a billionaire, announced this week that their editorial boards would not make a presidential endorsement, despite their decades-long traditions of doing so.
There’s no other way to see this other than as an appalling display of cowardice and a dereliction of their public duty.
At the Los Angeles Times, the decision rests clearly with Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the ailing paper in 2018, raising great hopes of a resurgence there.
At the Post (where I was the media columnist from 2016 to 2022), the editorial page editor David Shipley said he owned the decision, but it clearly came from above – specifically from the publisher, Will Lewis, the veteran of Rupert Murdoch’s media properties, hand-picked last year by the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos. Was Bezos himself the author of this abhorrent decision? Maybe not, but it could not have come as a surprise.
All of this may look like nonpartisan neutrality, or be intended to, but it’s far from that. For one thing, it’s a shameful smackdown of both papers’ reporting and opinion-writing staffs who have done important work exposing Trump’s dangers for many years.
It’s also a strong statement of preference. The papers’ leaders have made it clear that they either want Trump (who is, after all, a boon to large personal fortunes) or that they don’t wish to risk the ex-president’s wrath and retribution if he wins. If the latter was a factor, it’s based on a shortsighted judgment, since Trump has been a hazard to press rights and would only be emboldened in a second term.
[…]
Some news organizations upheld their duty and remained true to their mission.
The New York Times endorsed Harris last month, calling her “the only patriotic choice for president”, and writing that Trump “has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest”.
The Guardian, too, strongly endorsed Harris, saying she would “unlock democracy’s potential, not give in to its flaws”, and calling Trump a “transactional and corrupting politician”.
Meanwhile, the Murdoch-controlled New York Post has endorsed Trump. Although that decision lacks a moral core, it’s far from surprising.
But the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post decisions are, in their way, far worse.
They constitute “an abdication”, said Jelani Cobb, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. (I run an ethics center and teach there.)
The refusal to endorse, he told me, “tacitly equalizes two wildly distinct candidates, one of whom has tried to overturn a presidential election and one of whom has not”.
As for the message this refusal sends to the public? It’s ugly.
Readers will reasonably conclude that the newspapers were intimidated. And people will fairly question, Cobb said, when else they “have chosen expediency over courage”.
This is no moment to stand at the sidelines – shrugging, speechless and self-interested.
With the most consequential election of the modern era only days away, the silence is deafening.
Longtime WaPo editorial writer Benjamin Wittes, founder of Lawfare, declares, “The Washington Post Bends the Knee to Trump.”
I NEVER EXPECTED TO SEE THE DAY when the Washington Post would kneel before Donald Trump.
These are not Senate Republicans or conservative donors. This is not a group of people who cower in the face of authoritarianism. The Post editorial board, the writers who write anonymous opinion essays in the name of the paper itself, is a group of bold, pro-democracy intellectuals who have traditionally taken—individually and collectively—courageous stands about democracy and human rights around the world.
The Post’s editorial page is also the institution in which I grew up professionally. I worked there for nearly a decade under both of the last two long-time editorial page editors, Fred Hiatt and Meg Greenfield. It is an institution I revere.
And it is one that has not previously wavered with respect to Trumpist authoritarianism.
[…]
[T]he Post kneels without offering a word of praise for Trump. It’s just that, for high-minded reasons that it doesn’t really bother to specify, it’s getting out of this whole presidential endorsement business altogether. That was its traditional position, it archly informs us, back in the good old days before Watergate sent the Post on an aberrant jag. And, you see, while it’s perfectly understandable why the Post betrayed its high-minded above-it-allness in the wake of Nixon—when emotions were running high and all—having thought about it, it’s time to once again remove ourselves to the heights of Olympus where we can peer down on the foibles of mortals
[…]
Yet it is a submission nonetheless: One week before the mortals finish voting and might elect an authoritarian, one whose former chief of staff calls him a fascist, the Washington Post has decided that silence is the best way to guide its readers.
Silence, after all, will not offend the authoritarian should he win. Silence, after all, is more than Trump can reasonably expect from the Post. Democracy may die in darkness, as the Post’s motto goes, but silence is apparently a good hedge.
Wittes has long been a voice of reason, and I generally agree with him here. To the extent newspaper editorial boards ought to issue endorsements in presidential contests, there could hardly be a more important time than now. At the same time, there’s no obvious reason why a mass publication whose ostensible purpose is to report the news ought to issue political endorsements as a corporate entity.
First and foremost, I can hardly fathom a person who not only reads a major newspaper but also reads its editorial pages and does not already have a strong preference in the 2024 presidential election.
To be sure, I can very much imagine the person who thinks Donald Trump an odious person unfit to wield the most powerful office on the planet who’s “meh” on Kamala Harris. Indeed, I’m such a person. For that matter, I can imagine the person who thinks Trump morally unfit to hold the office—or Harris too much of a cipher —but yet finds themselves split ideologically. I just can’t imagine them being convinced to vote for Harris because, well, the LAT or WaPo Editorial Board likes her better than Trump.
In the days when a newspaper was a small operation and the voice of the owner-publisher-editor-in-chief, it might have been a different story. Then, it would be a reflection of a particular, trusted individual. But who, exactly, does the Editorial Board of the LAT or WaPo represent? Apparently, not their respective owners. And, certainly, not all of their editorial columnists.
Speaking of which: both papers employ quite a number of individuals who they pay to express their opinions on American politics on a regular basis. And, it turns out, these individuals have been doing just that.
As to the motives of the owners, I have no strong opinion.
Despite his being “the richest man in Los Angeles,” I don’t believe I’d heard of Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong before this controversy. According to Wikipedia, “Soon-Shiong and his family were major donors to the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign.[ According to Politico, Soon-Shiong twice privately met with Donald Trump during his presidential transition to unsuccessfully try and get a position in the administration.” Which is some Ted Cruz-level shamelessness.
I have, of course, heard of Bezos. But I have no idea whether he tacitly supports Trump, is “bending the knee” in fear that a re-elected Trump would harm his business interests, or what. But, you know, it’s his paper.
Most reporting is leaning toward Bezos ordering the Post’s non-endorsement out of fear of retribution from Trump. If a guy worth 200 billion fears a re-elected Trump, the rest of us are screwed if Trump wins. But other explanations present themselves.
– Bezos, being of the billionaire class, wants Trump to win.
– WAPO is losing money and Bezos wants to shift to being the print equivalent of FOX, as evidenced by his hiring Will Lewis.
I lean toward the last, “Democracy dies in darkness” is the business plan, not the motto.
If they had declared, say a year or more ago that they were getting out of the endorsement business, that would have been fine.
But in the very week that the NYT published Kelly’s fascism comments to then not to take a stand is to be dismissive of all that Trump is.
For the LAT and WaPo to not endorse right now is to further normalize Trump. It is just another reason for normie Reps to self-justify their vote. “See! If he was really a fascist they would have endorsed Harris. I told you it all just crazed loons saying that stuff.”
And I think Wittes is right: there is some fear here (which actually enhances the fascism argument).
“Democrats Dies in the Dark.” Feh.
Also: the notion that billionaires are making all these decisions just adds to the un-democratic nature of the moment.
Well, it does lessen the pressure to be considerate of fabulously wealthy billionaires when it comes to tax policy.
Agree to disagree, Dr. J. While I agree that neutrality in the newspaper is a good idea, the fact that it’s the billionaire owners who command this stand shouldn’t surprise you.
Make no mistake, this was not principled stand, except possibly the stand of the owner class against democracy in favor of autocracy.
Canceling my WaPo subscription this morning
I suspect that Bezos believes that Harris won’t make it no matter what the WP says and is hoping to get a re-elected Trump to put a lot of money into space development. So he needs to at least not make Trump into an enemy.
What Bezos doesn’t seem to understand is that for Trump, anything less than enthusiastic ass-kissing is considered as “being an enemy”.
@Steven L. Taylor: @Flat Earth Luddite: There’s an old saying that “Freedom of the press is reserved to those who own one.” If they were squashing negative reporting about Trump, I’d be outraged. If they were firing editorial writers who criticized Trump, I’d be mildly concerned. I honestly just don’t care about their endorsements.
@MarkedMan: I subscribe to WaPo and NYT because they provide first-quality reporting on national and international news. If their opinion and editorial sections disappeared entirely, it wouldn’t bother me.
Who in their right mind would endorse Kamala?
She was pathetic to the Democratic party then when she was installed she was great.
If the Post and LA Times want to abdicate their Fourth Estate roles as US society’s advocates for truth and influencers of public opinion let the cowards abdicate.
The Philadelphia Inquirer has stepped up:
This post is a great example of how fascism gets normalized by people who puport to oppose it.
The business side of a media company violating the editorial independence of the news side is a huge ethical violation and should be a disturbing story. The immediate question is what other stories is the ownership interfering with?
Instead we get Chip Diller telling us to remain calm, all is well.
@Jake:
Ha ha
https://x.com/DefiyantlyFree/status/1850192559177658611
@Grumpy realist:
Agreed. And at this point, I don’t know how Bezos could not understand that.
If the owners are killing endorsements, why would we assume they are not also killing news stories? At the very least, the news room is now acutely aware that the owners are paying very close attention to what is being printed and how it aligns with the owner’s other interests.
In the first Trump term, he was talking about having the Post Office raise the rates for Amazon to punish Bezos for reporting coming from the Washington Post. I have no doubt that this is Bezos trying to signal to a possible incoming Trump administration that he is willing to play ball. And don’t forget, Amazon has a lot of government contracts with EC2.
Musk is a major government contractor as well, with SpaceX and Starlink. Did he actually turn to dear leader out of “principal,” or has he been trying to protect his fortune? Probably a bit of both, as he doesn’t seem to have a lot of self-control and he is very upset that one of his many kids decided to be trans at him.
And this is how early stage fascism controls the free press — the press “freely” makes decisions that benefit dear leader, and ingratiates themselves to dear leader.
Oligarchs: can’t live with them, but it’s probably illegal to set them on fire.
@James Joyner:
What if they were making decisions that would very clearly have a chilling effect on the newsroom?
Katherine and I each had a subscription, both canceled.
From Columbia Journalism Review: The Washington Post opinion editor approved a Harris endorsement. A week later, Jeff Bezos killed it.
And the reason given is, “We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates,” which the editorial board and the public are told less then two weeks before the election–yeah, really high minded of WaPo management.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I blame JFK, who ended confiscatory income tax rates.
Cancelled my LA Times and WAPO subscriptions, along with a note telling them both why. Bye.
@James Joyner:I’ve subscribed to the Times for decades, but I subscribed to the Post the first time when living in B’more in the 90’s. I eventually dropped it because I felt they covered political issues as if they were “homers” for both parties, meaning that they feared losing either one”s readership. So they would report that Republican Smith says X, and Democrats Jones says not-X, but would rarely report which was true even when it was straightforward to find out.
I resubscribed in the Trump era because they seemed to have changed to a more fact based approach. But earlier this year they brought in the British tabloid guy, and now this. I can see the writing on the wall.
Canceled my subscription this morning.
Gobshites.
Bezos needs to worry about tariffs as China is where most of the products sold in his platform come from. He’s also probably worried about facing anti-monopoly enforcement. He can hope to buy off the first problem and have the second ‘go away’.
@Steven L. Taylor:
@James Joyner:
I commented Wednesday that WAPO had a good, thorough, story about the NYT interview with General Kelly, but they buried it under an anodyne, small type, headline on their homepage. That’s what they’ll do. They’ll cover major stories to inoculate themselves against a charge that they aren’t, but like FOX, they’ll minimize some stories and push others, like, say, inflation and Biden is old.
@James Joyner:
But that really isn’t the point. The issue is what is motivating this behavior at this moment. Isn’t about the endorsements themselves.
@Jake:
Anyone who supports the best candidate for president.
Duh.
So if WAPO, NYT and LAT are not to be trusted which news site is to be trusted?
Bezos is a coward. Straight-up. Just utterly spineless.
Just read this. I think JVL sums up the whole thing correctively. Preemptive surrender anyone?https://www.thebulwark.com/p/bezos-kills-washington-post-endorsement-guardrails-falling
@Mr. Prosser:
JVL is correct.
Canceled my WaPo subscription, dropped them a note, and “subscribed” to the Guardian (gave them money on a monthly basis so they would stop asking me for money — they have an annoy wall rather than a paywall)
Might feel motivated enough to move my cat food and cat litter orders from Amazon.
Translation: you’re not allowed to use the things Trump says he will do in your analysis. That’s not factual.
@Jake:
Yes, she is the opposite of Trump in this, too. Or at least the converse.
@Steven L. Taylor: “Also: the notion that billionaires are making all these decisions just adds to the un-democratic nature of the moment.”
But JJ says it quite clearly: “But you know, it’s his newspaper.” JJ is apparently of the class that believes that billionaires should be allowed to acquire vast swaths of our country and once owning them should be allowed to do whatever they want with them. The only thing that matters is money, especially the money spent to buy legislators to slash taxes on billionaires so they can buy even more of the country.
@Grumpy realist:
“I suspect that Bezos believes that Harris won’t make it no matter what the WP says and is hoping to get a re-elected Trump to put a lot of money into space development.”
I suspect Bezos thinks that if he gets on Harris’s bad side, the consequences will be minimal, while the consequences of being on Trump’s bad side are huge. And he’s probably correct about that. So he’s making a Pascal’s wager.
As @ptfe: said, “Bezos is a coward. Straight-up. Just utterly spineless.”
Looks like I paid my WaPo subscription annually, so I set it not to auto renew.
This was always a when, not if, event in my mind when Bezos got his hands on wapo. Did we expect any better? Did we not see this coming?
Boo-hoo, or should it be LOL.
Papers exercise their right to withhold opinions. OTB commenters: How dare they not agree with me! I’m exercising my right to withdraw my subscription!
@wr: Yes, he seems to put blind faith in the system, which can be good and bad.
This does seem to me to be further evidence of how extreme wealth, and therefore power, in the hands of a relative few is bad for society. Musk being a dipshit (heh) and enshittening twitter is another example. The system allows it, of course, and I don’t know what to do about it, but it hardly seems healthy.
@Jack:
Well, as we discussed the other day, nothing matters to you but money. The very definition of a whore, n’est ce pas?
@wr: The Washington Post is a private company. If its owner wants to decline to endorse Harris, what is it that should be done? Force him to sell?
@Grumpy realist:
It seems very clear to me also that Bezos believes Trump is going to win and he doesn’t want to be on the losing side of Trump’s ongoing Revenge and Retribution Tour.
He’s very much afraid of Trump.
@wr:
Even more important is the money spent to buy Supreme Court Justices who have removed pretty much all barriers to money in politics. Amongst other things, making it easier to buy legislators.
And now we learn that the LA Times’ owner squashed a series of articles making the case against Trump.
https://www.thewrap.com/la-times-case-against-trump-kamala-endorsement-canceled/
@Jack: If Harris or Biden repeatedly threatened the owners of Fox, and they changed their coverage in response, you would probably be a wee bit concerned. And rightly so.
@Gustopher: When I lived in Seattle, grocery stores sold litter and pet food. Sometimes for less money, too. And I hear they deliver now, too.
@Kingdaddy: Ah, so the owners of these papers ARE putting a thumb on the scale. Huh.
@Jack: I mean, yeah? That’s how markets work, right? I no longer am happy with the leadership, I get to cancel. That shouldn’t be a hard concept.
My big issue is the timing. WaPo had no problems at all running opinion pieces calling on Biden to drop out of the race. That they decided to change a standard that has been in place since 1976, eleven days before an election, is sketchy AF.
@Kingdaddy: True, but it’s his newspaper, if he declined to write about Trump, what are we to do?
@Jack:
Ha. You and Dr. Joyner are pretending it’s just about the endorsement. You both know the bigger issue is oligarchs a) attacking the 1st Amendment by chilling editorial freedom shortly before election day, then b) lying to readers and employees about why.
As others have noted, had these billionaires pushed their new non-endorsement policy back in 2021 or 2022, that would’ve been ho-hum, even welcome. It’s chilling and gutless do so just days till Election Day and immediately after Trump White House officials’ renewed warnings of his fascism.
But, again, you and Joyner both know all that already, you’re just faking.
The contradictory damage control from the papers’ slimy corporate leaders is just as alarming. At the LA Times, owner Soon-Siong falsely claimed the editors willingly stayed silent. Then his daughter Lika reverse engineered a phony, ex post facto excuse about Gaza. She has already been contradicted by her Trump-lackey father. Embarrassing, and now all of Los Angeles knows their flagship paper is owned by family of messy liars.
At WaPo, CEO and publisher William Lewis claimed the non-endorsement was about a return to tradition — bullshit, since the tradition for the past half-century has been to endorse presidential candidates. Today, Luis is publicly denying the Post’s own reporting about Bezos spiking the editors’ planned Harris endorsement. Either Lewis or his reporters are peddling falsehoods.
Either way, WaPo’s credibility is shot.
James, doing absolutely everything he can to avoid typing and posting the inescapable conclusion that the owners want Trump to win.
The process both papers had set up [board votes, paper displays result of that vote, sun comes up the next morning] was stopped by exactly one person: The owner.
If it really didn’t matter….. the owners would have done nothing and it would have been published.
Big yawn…..Your partisans don’t care who a newspaper does or does not endorse. Those still undecided are more likely influenced by their wallets or purses.
Endorsements are like trophies. You put on a shelf but nobody but your friends/family/supporters pay them any attention.
While Bezos is the owner, I am not comfortable with saying that he can do anything he wants with it. My doctor has an obligation to act in my interest not his. This is the essence of professional ethics. I think a big time newspaper has a professional responsibility to us; otherwise the first amendment is merely a carte blanche to the owner. There is a social contract.
@Gavin:
You can escape th conclusion that Bezos wants Trump to win if you consider the possibility that Bezos is afraid Trump will win, and is trying to curry favor.
And that is a far worse conclusion.
I would still trust WaPo in general if there was a Bezos-signed editorial endorsing Trump. I would have been disappointed, but the guy’s politics have always been TechBro Libertarian, and that can slide rightward at any moment.
This is so much worse than an endorsement.
@Bill Jempty:
Duh. And which candidate they expect to be better for their personal $$ depends on what they hear and read. In this case, it isn’t what they (don’t) read in the newspaper that matters — it’s the story, which will be reported and commented on everywhere, that two allegedly liberal newspapers are refusing to endorse Harris and lying transparently about why.
Random related thoughts:
If the owner of McDonald-Douglas or Northrop (have they merged?) owned a major newspaper it would be concerning. Amazon is no less important, as so much of the government is running on EC2.
Or if McDonald-Douglas owned Twitter and was posting like a lunatic.
Also, if Iran had the rocket capabilities of Bezos or Musk, we would be bombing them.
@DrDaveT:
Politicians lie through their teeth. People know that and rarely care. They wouldn’t care an iota about the editorial board of a newspaper.
From a UK perspective, it’s taken as a given that most press, except for the Guardian and the Mirror, are pro-Conservative.
Well, and the FT is a “neutral”.
The interesting thing is how hard the Times etc found it to endorse the Tories in the last election, if you read between the lines.
Except the Telegraph, which has gone utterly mental.
The difference is: the UK Conservatives may be largely a bunch of dimwits (actually some are not, see Grieve, Gauke, etc) but none have engaged in disputing obviously valid elections, or calling for the use of military force against domestic opponents.
Therefore, the British Conservatives, and the pro-Tory press may be fools, by my lights.
But they are honourable and lawful fools.
The American Republican Party seems to be morphing into something much darker.
I’d think a sensible conservative should be inclined to ensure the defeat of, rather than enable or accommodate, such a pernicious doctrine.
I may be incorrigibly inclined to historic analogy: but the path of US right discourse seems horribly reminiscent in some respects of the Right in Germany in the 1930’s or France 1870-1945.
“We can’t get everything that we want: therefore destroy it all!”
Looking back from 1945 was a salutary lesson.
At a horrible price.
@Slugger: I’m sorry, but Bezos comes from retail. The only ethos there is make the sale.
@JohnSF:
…Therefore, destroy it all.
That’s Steve Bannon’s refrain: “Burn it all down.”
@CSK:
Indeed.
And such a fool he is.
The base assumption is always: “I’ll come out of this OK. And screw everyone else.”
The evidence of history is that things often don’t work out as you might hope, if it comes to rolling the dice of war.
Therefore, a sensible conservative does not do so.
Except under extreme circumstances.
And now you get silly MAGA asserting: “All is justified to resist the communism of Kamala Harris!”
Imo they have got themselves into a rhetorical trap,and just can’t bear the sheer embarrassment of admitting their candidate is a wannabe gangster authoritarian numbskull.
@JohnSF:
Also reminiscent of things that have happened here. Digby found some film of the 1939 German American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden. Easy to picture that crowd in red ball caps. Pearl Harbor, and Hitler’s subsequent declaration of war ended this. No knowing how far it would have gone otherwise.
@JohnSF:
But, but, but what if there was a dollar in it for @Jack: ? He has to chase the dollar! What else is there in life? Jack/Drew was an M&A guy, not a real businessman. More like a tapeworm in the capitalist digestive tract.
A real conservative has principles, Drew just has me me me, mine mine mine.
We had an alien species in Animorphs: Taxxons. They were very large centipedes with impossible-to-sate hunger. Hunger so overwhelming that they would devour one of their own if opportunity presented itself. Greed is a weakness which fools think is a strength. Drew’s the guy in his retirement home who steals an old lady’s tapioca and thinks he’s a master of the universe.
@Jack:
You know the essential difference between us? I mean, other than the fact that I’m smarter, more interesting, more creative, more charming, wittier and have had a positive influence on millions of lives? I can’t be bought, and you can. There’s a dollar amount that would have you on your knees licking my Hokas. You know it’s true.
See new posts
Conversation
Amjad Masad
@amasad
If you canceled your newspaper subscription because they’re striving to be more objective you are basically saying “I only read news that reinforce my biases.”
@Michael Reynolds:
I’m usually fine for easy money.
But a few times in my life, I’ve considered easy money comes at too high a price.
I do have certain standards, perhaps aesthetic, if not necessarily moral. 🙂
Also, a carefully curated sense of self-preservation, which has often served me well.
The US ultra-right might care to reflect from that perspective: European ultras sometimes strove hard to deny history, and generally ended up screwing themselves in the process.
If you are bent on being a nasty bastard, its best to calculate the odds carefully.
They’re…..not sending their best trolls.
@JohnSF: @JohnSF:
The US ultra-right doesn’t have enough brain cells among them to reflect on anything. The people with the actual brains who are driving this clown car are not motivated by principles*, are getting everything they want in the short term, don’t care about the collateral damage, and can’t imagine that the leopards would ever eat their faces.
*There are a few exceptions, like Leonard Leo’s anti-abortion fervor, but they are secondary.
@JohnSF:
I have the protection of Oppositional Defiant Disorder. I am pathologically incapable of being bought off. Most recently walked away from 200K from a company that wanted to essentially buy our compliance on an Animorphs movie. But I’ve told various publishers to fuck off when they wanted me to do things I didn’t want to do. (Chinese: Make the bad guys Russians; Germans: lose the lesbians and the religious references.) At a pretty desperate time in my life I quit a job I needed rather than try to push a lousy wine.
Fortunately I’m married to someone equally nuts. Short version: “I don’t talk to no woman!” The wife, “You’ll talk to this woman, mother fucker.” We were on the street broke and homeless and laughing our sociopathic asses off five minutes later. Good times, good times.
It’s a power move saying, ‘no.’ Especially sweet when they come back with, ‘but you can’t!’ Because of course I can.
@JohnSF:
My wife is from Nuremberg (yes, that one) so we go there every couple years to visit her family. It’s a lovely city now, it had to rebuild after WW2 of course but the medieval walls are intact and the lovely old churches (St. Lawrence and St. Sebald) were restored to their centuries-old beauty.
Anyway. They have been pretty unsparing in their treatment of the city’s history during the Nazi era, and one of the things they did was create a museum at the old Nazi Party rally grounds, the Dokumentationszentrum (Documentation Center). This museum does not deal with the Holocaust. It deals with everything that led to the Holocaust. The rise of Hitler and the NSDAP, basically, from the late 1920s to the start of WW2.
I had the chance to visit the museum in mid-2017, and the parallels between the rhetoric and propaganda of the Nazis and of the Trumpist movement were so significant and so direct, it was distressing. It was then that I understood Trump is a fascist.
So, yeah, if as you said “the path of US right discourse seems horribly reminiscent in some respects of the Right in Germany in the 1930’s” that’s because it very much is.
@DK: @Gavin: I am quite comfortable that, despite the LAT withholding its endorsement, Harris will win all of California’s Electors by a margin of several million votes. Similarly, I’m confident that, despite WaPo withholding its endorsement, Harris will win the District of Columbia, Virginia, and Maryland by comfortable margins. It. Just. Doesn’t. Matter.
For that matter, if the opinions of the two papers’ editorial boards would have swayed any votes at all, it’s actually MORE likely now. Endorsements by two Democrat-leaning Editorial Boards would have been greeted with yawns. Their outrage over their endorsements being withheld has been widely-circulated news for several days.
@Jake: That’s rather rich, coming from the book removal crowd. Also, no, it doesn’t mean that at all. My objection is that they are playing Calvinball. When your paper endorses for 35+ years and you decide to change that process ELEVEN DAYS before an election, you’re looking for a desired outcome.
@James Joyner:
As a PR practitioner, I think you’re wrong on this point. These are national newspapers, and within just a few days, more than one has opted to alter long-standing policy. The very well informed who know the difference between the ownership, the editorial page, and the news reporting sides are able to parse out what has happened here–namely, that the wealthy owners got scared of Trump’s threats and caved–for them, it likely doesn’t matter. But that’s a vanishingly small percentage.
The message that is being sent to the rest of the country, in particular the queasy and questionable Republicans who are uncomfortable with Trump but have been so conditioned to the “Democrats blah blah socialism taxes etc.” message, this will give them pause. It gives them an excuse to not vote for Harris. These papers–and I’m suspicious of not only the timing but the number, I would not be at all surprised to learn that this was orchestrated–are doing exactly what Cambridge Analytica did in 2016. They are undermining the weak-kneed, squishy, without a real moral core vote.
@James Joyner:
I think you are missing the point of why this is concerning–although you note that point above in the OP by quoting and agreeing with Wittes.
I do think it matters that Bezos may well be doing this as a hedge against Trump’s retaliation should he win. Or that he wants access to government contracts.
It is also concerning that a significant number of intelligent people think Trump is a fascist and WaPo and the LAT are going to sit this one out.
It is not about the endorsements, per se.