The Washington Post’s cowardly capitulation to the billionaire class

Here’s a new slogan that seems to fit the sanctimonious but venal braintrust The Washington Post: Democracy dies in the darkness of Jeff Bezos’ wallet. The newspaper, which has long tarnished its reputation as a principled opponent of a paranoid, authoritarian Republican regime, announced Friday that it would not support a presidential candidate this time (or ever again), despite the fact that he has already been impeached twice by the criminally convicted Donald Trump makes Richard Nixon look like a mere agitator in the realm of unchecked abuses of maximum executive power.

The newspaper, which still has the audacity to portray itself as a heroic guardian of the country’s embattled democracy, has championed the MAGA thugocracy under the flimsiest of pretexts: It intends to protect an “independent space” for voters who care nothing want to know who to vote for, editorial page editor David Shipley told outraged newspaper staffers in what NPR media reporter David Folfenflik described as a “tense meeting.” Not to mention that Americans are already being told to vote on an endless loop in every public place imaginable, and they appear to be emerging with their sensibilities intact. Not to mention, the whole idea of ​​a comment section is to bring together voices arguing about what people should say and do. And not to mention that there is no impartial “independent space” in the argument over how and whether America’s formal democracy can continue. What Shipley meant to say was, “My corporate paymasters want to revel in Donald Trump’s tax cuts and avoid jeopardizing their lucrative federal contracts,” but the false rhetoric of noncommittal journalistic objectivity is far more suited to newsroom meetings where one tries to do so Get reporters to toe the line.

Shipley had reportedly already prepared a recommendation for Harris, but via… postYour own reporting was overruled post Owner and retail raider Jeff Bezos, the hundred billionaire owner of Amazon. During Trump’s first term, the then-president threatened to withhold key tax breaks and postal subsidies in retaliation post‘s critical coverage of Trump. As the editorial board weighed their 2020 endorsements, Bezos agreed with his pick for Joe Biden; This time, the newspaper’s owner is insulating himself against white-collar penalties in a second Trump term, not to mention settling several pending antitrust cases against his company that are unlikely to give him a breakthrough in a Harris administration. And like his fellow billionaires, King Amazon is clearly relishing the prospect of more money in his coffers thanks to Trump’s promise to continue doling out gifts to our corporate oligarchy.

It’s worth noting that the same scenario played out Los Angeles Timeswhere its billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked the newspaper’s planned endorsement of Harris. In addition to being a standard-issue plutocrat with a pharmaceutical fortune sure to prosper under a laxer, Trump-appointed FDA, Soon-Shiong is also a longtime pal of Elon Musk, the man-child centibillionaire who ran for Trump’s re-election has . (Indeed, in a lovely irony, that post published a front-page story about how Musk’s Starlink satellite company will rake in billions more in government money in a second Trump term, on the very day the paper’s managers announced their cowardly capitulation to Musk’s would-be patron.)

What is different about the shameful? L.A. Times Legend has it that the paper’s editorial board editor, Marial Garza, recognized the real journalistic and political risks involved in suppressing the paper’s voice through the dictates of a billionaire. “I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I do not agree with us remaining silent,” Garza said Columbia Journalism Review Editor Sewell Chan:

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

As for David Shipley, here is the brutal assessment of one post Employee: “The story about Shipley has long been that he got the job because he knows how to get along with rich men.” Jacob Heilbrunn, a former colleague of Shipley’s The New RepublicHe agrees: Back then he was “serious, conventionally liberal,” but “now he seems to have turned into a completely empty suit.”

In fact, while Shipley said he “owns” this postAfter Bezos made a cowardly decision in that heated staff meeting, the official justification for it was published under the name of Bezos’ hand-picked publisher Will Lewis, the former Murdoch lackey still deeply reeling from the British phone-hacking scandal .

In an arrogant and obtuse editorial, Lewis brushed off the paper’s recent history of presidential endorsements by pointing to the paper’s non-endorsement in the 1960 presidential campaign—a statement of supposed journalistic principle that, by and large, seemed both mean and pompous: “Have that “We have said and will continue to say as sensibly and openly as we can what we believe about the emerging issues of the campaign,” the 1960 editorial read in part. “We have tried to express our opinions as fairly as possible, based on our own principles of independence, but without being tied to a party or candidate.” Translation: For us, openness is nothing more than a convenient rhetorical stance and we must shy away from the clear moral implications of our own journalistic work.

This is also the crux of Lewis’ own slapdash argument. Lewis rejects the idea that his quisling pose simultaneously functions as “a tacit endorsement of one candidate or a condemnation of another,” claiming that it is actually “consistent with the candidate’s values.” post has always stood for what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in the service of American ethics, reverence for the rule of law and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.” If the post While he values ​​these values, it is objectively impossible to reconcile them with sitting out an election given to a multi-convicted lawbreaker, bigot, sexual assaulter, abuser of executive power and self-appointed agent of political retaliation, whose own former cabinet members are restoring maximum power could be restored could be considered fascists. readers of the postOn Lewis’s editorial page, a completely blank space, a horoscope, or a pun would have been better than Lewis’ self-congratulatory nonsense.

And yet long-suffering post Readers might not be too surprised by Lewis’s moronic, self-defeating argument. This was also the newspaper that for three years reported the devastating news that Martha-Ann Alito, the Supreme Court justice’s wife, who championed Trump’s maximum executive power and gleefully crushed women’s right to their own bodily autonomy, caused a riot. In a sign of solidarity with the failed coup attempt on January 6, Lewis lowered the flag outside the couple’s home. And according to NPR’s Folfenflik, Lewis held out the prospect of an exclusive interview with him in exchange for the author’s promise to cover up developments in the phone call case in his reporting.

This is a universe removed from the high-minded standards of character and public probity that Lewis sets by adopting a morally indefensible stance of non-alignment at a time of democratic crisis. But that’s exactly what you get when you staff the top of a masthead exclusively with people who know how to get along with rich men.