Billionaires' Preemptive Surrender
Billionaires' Preemptive Surrender
Jeff Bezos: Super rich guy, abject coward.
Elite media is failing us
So…the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post have decided not to publish a candidate endorsement for this year’s presidential election.
The choice was made by the papers’ respective billionaire owners, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who made his fortune in biomedical devices, and some guy named Jeff Bezos. As
notes at his newsletter, the Post should change it’s slogan from “Democracy dies in darkness” to “Obey in advance,” an inversion of one of Timothy Snyder’s recommendations for resisting authoritarianism from his book On Tyranny, “Do not obey in advance.”
Frightening times, made more frightening by the fact that a non-negligible proportion of our richest citizens are somewhere between comfortable with and eager for fascism. Peter Thiel, Bill Ackman, Mark Andreessen, Elon Musk and other tech-centric rich mofos are explicitly in the bag for Trump. Mark Zuckerberg is sitting this one out. On the flip side, Bill Gates has apparently donated significantly to the Harris campaign, and Mark Cuban has been actively campaigning for Harris, but in terms of public profile, they’re outliers.
This stuff goes back even further. Subverting democracy through the accumulation of wealth and using that wealth to gain outsized influence over the democratic system by turning it less democratic has been an explicit goal of people on the political right for a long time. Check out Jane Mayer’s Dark Money The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Radical Right, or to go even further back in time, Nancy McLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.
These attacks are not just on the democratic mechanism of voting, but on democratic institutions, the vehicles through which public will exercises power, things like public schools, higher education, journalistic insitutions, and unions. The long campaign to weaken these institutions has now left us vulnerable to a strongman who is explicitly promising to wield authoritarian power and use the presidency to punish his enemies.
The owners of two major newspapers have looked at this state of play, and in answer to the question, “You maybe want to offer up a thought or two on why we should vote for the candidate that believes in democracy?” they answered: Nah…we’re good.
And they are good, as in insulated from the consequences of a collapse in democratic institutions by their enormous wealth. Apparently they’re still afraid enough of a Trump presidency though, to pre-comply with his wishes.
It’s truly disgusting, and yet if Trump wins, this obvious cowardice will be the least of our problems.
But, I want to think positively while I still can and consider a future where this immediate threat has been dodged. In my view, we have a larger problem with how are major national newspapers cover politics than a couple of billionaire owners making pre-election kissy face with Donald Trump.
We need better newspapers.
Better elite media isn’t going to save us
Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think The Washington Post officially endorsing Kamala Harris would have had any effect on the election. I also don’t think that the way the the New York Times and the Post frequently seem to soft-pedal Trump in their headlines and framing is truly dispositive. It’s annoying as hell, and also bad journalism, as
illustrates at when Trump’s eugenicist (Nazi-esque) musings were massaged into “a long-held fascination with genes and genetics” as though Trump’s kept a plot of beans at Mar a Lago to get his Mendel on, but Trump’s open embrace of fascistic and authoritarian thinking, his felony convictions, the wreck of his first presidency, the fact that the vast majority of the people who worked closely with him think he shouldn’t be President again, and his fomenting of a storming of the Capitol meant to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power are all rather well-known. As horrible as it is to contemplate, these are reasons why at least some people are voting for him.The New York Times especially seems to have a truly defective mindset in regards to their role. This was illustrated in an NPR interview when Times executive editor Joe Kahn described what he sees as his paper’s mission.
By “neutral middle ground” Kahn intends to keep his paper “non-partisan,” but I am not the first to observe that neutral and non-partisan are not the same thing. If accurate reporting opens one up to looking partisan, then the problem is with the political party that’s embraced non-democratic norms.
The root of this problem goes deeper than the attitudes of one editor or a couple of elite newspapers. For some deep insights into the structural and historical factors at work here I strongly recommend this episode of the Know Your Enemy podcast in which historian Rick Perlstein talks with hosts Sam Adler-Bell and Matt Sitman about what Perlstein calls “The Infernal Triangle,” the forces that seem to impel elite media to normalize Trump and other authoritarian aspects of the Republican Party.
The media has internalized their job as to, essentially, report on a contest between two roughly equivalent parties. That the contest is between one party working inside a democracy while the other is working to undermine that very democracy doesn’t matter. They’ll just report on who is doing better in the contest.
It’s essentially sports talk grafted onto politics, and it’s as vapid in politics as it is in sports talk, only with much higher stakes. It poorly serves audiences because we are less informed about issues of importance. Consider how much time and editorial real estate is spent on discussing polling, data which is destined to be wrong, obviated by the election itself. Consider also how polling drives coverage. For example, right now, there are lots of stories about how Harris may be earning a smaller share of non-white voters than Joe Biden in 2020, but after the election, if the differences aren’t meaningful, all of those stories were essentially in service of chasing a phantom.
In the case of sports coverage, finding angles to talk about an event that hasn’t happened yet can be seen as a form of entertainment, but none of that speculation has any effect on the outcome of the sporting event itself. We cannot say the same thing for politics.
(On that Know Your Enemy episode they have a brief discussion of what political coverage might be like in the absence of polling and it’s truly mind-bending to consider.)
It’s also bad business
The craven decision to not endorse any candidates has led to an apparent flood of cancellations by subscribers to The Washington Post. The Post had been steadily losing subscribers prior to this incident as the paper has been generally aimless in its pursuit of being The New York Times-lite. They publish lots of excellent journalism, but their political coverage suffers from the same search for middle ground problem as the Times, and even as the Times opinion page is stocked with some of the biggest dullards around (Pamela Paul, Bret Stephens), the Post has them beat by employing both propagandists (Hugh Hewitt, Marc Thiessen) and dinosaurs like George Will, Peggy Noonan, and Kathleen Parker who is so perceptive about politics and democracy she offered up this little bit of brilliance on the day before the 2016 election.
Shouldn’t you either be let go, or perhaps go into hiding from shame if you wrote that in a major newspaper prior to the election of Donald Trump? Apparently not, which is part of the problem of these papers. They’re ossified, incapable of meeting the moment because they live in a dream world of their own construction.
(Shout out to my guy,
Jr. who is an uncommonly perceptive opinion writer at the Post, and Alexandra Petri, who is a national treasure. Kudos also to the Post opinion writers who formally signed on to a statement protesting the decision. Some of these people are hacks, but at least they have integrity.)Since we’re on this point, let me say something about the debate over whether or not it’s appropriate to cancel one’s subscription when a publication does something the reader believes is beyond the pale. Lots of people in the upper perches of elite media have been eager to lecture the proles on this issue. Like this from Tommy Vietor:
And this from Jake Tapper:
Let me stipulate that they are correct. Cancelling your Washington Post subscription does not hurt Jeff Bezos. (Neither does cancelling Amazon Prime, but you should probably do that for other reasons.) Jeff Bezos is beyond hurting. If things get really rough for him here he’s already working on a literal escape to Mars. That we’ve allowed people to become this wealthy and billionaires are the only people who can afford to keep newspapers solvent is a testament to how eff’d we are. (Remember, we can act to make the ultra rich less rich.) It’s very possible that cancelling subscriptions will make it harder for the good journalism routinely produced by The Washington Post to be published.
Unfortunately, aside from a letter to the editor, cancelling a subscription is the only way for an individual subscriber to register their disapproval. While Bezos will not be affected, it’s possible that the paper’s leadership who were appointed by and report to Bezos will be moved to take different action when confronted with hemorrhaging readers.
Or not. Choosing to cancel for these reasons is a small moral act, and we should not discount moral acts no matter how small. When my local paper, The Charleston Post & Courier, wrote an editorial against the removal of a statue of John C. Calhoun (a violent white supremacist) from the city’s Marion Square following the murder of nine people engaging in a Bible study a block away by a violent white supremacist, using warmed-over Lost Cause bullshit as a rationale, I cancelled my subscription and told them why.
They’d failed in their civic duty to better inform the populace and I wasn’t going to continue to support that publication because of it. If we don’t act according to our values, what’s the point?
The fact of these cancellations has elevated the story in a way that makes Bezos and the paper’s leaders look worse and worse. They are at least paying a price in terms of reputation.
If you’re truly worried about the effects Vietor and Tapper highlight, cancel and then resubscribe later.
What would be better?
We don’t have to invent anything new to improve on the status quo. Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU, offers what he calls “The Citizen’s Agenda” for journalism, which very straightforwardly shows how it’s easy to cover issues without getting wrapped up in “politics.”
At his newsletter,
. has frequent posts illustrating the gap between how political journalism is done, and how it could and should be done to better inform the electorate. asks in her “American Crisis” podcast, “Can journalism save democracy?” Rosen, Fallows, Sullivan are not wild-eyed Gen-Z leftists looking to tear down the work of the elders. They’re veteran journalists who recognize how far astray political journalism has gone, and not just in the Trump era.James Fallows published his book, Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy in January of 1996, 10 months before Fox News was even on the air.
I think there’s a huge untapped market for a daily newspaper (recognizing newspapers are now digital) that embraces Rosen’s citizen’s agenda, that treats threats to democracy as threats to democracy, rather than just another political strategy, that eschews the clever “thought leaders” on their opinion pages, and instead employs interesting writers and thinkers. (The closest thing we have in the U.S., The Guardian, actually comes from Britain.)
I would subscribe to that publication.
Would you?
Links
This week at the Chicago Tribune I wrote about Charles Baxter’s wonderful new novel, Blood Test. I’ll have an exclusive Q&A with Baxter coming out as bonus content this coming week.
For Oprah Daily, Bethanne Patrick shares the “25 best” historical fiction books of all time.
Gary Indiana, a truly one-of-a-kind artist and writer passed away this week at the age of 74.
Most books aren’t fact checked. This is a problem that
Maris Kreizman
has been on for some time, and she explains why this should concern us.
Seems a little early for a best books of the year list, but Barnes & Noble is out with their list.
Esquire has chosen Jeff VanderMeer’s Absolution for its book club.
From my friends
, and Amanda Lehr, some seasonal humor, “If Horror Movies Reflected Your Actual Fears.”Recommendations
1. Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
2. Maurice by E.M. Forster
3. The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
4. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
5. The Twyborn Affair by Patrick White
Kristina G. - Salem, MA
Kristina says in her email she likes a good love story, so here’s a love story that we may not think of as a love story, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller.
1. The Answers by Catherine Lacey
2. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
3. Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
4. Queenpin by Megan Abbott
5. Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara
John F. - Los Angeles
For John I’m recommending one of my favorite working writers, The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard.1
I’m trying to resist flogging my book too much, given that it doesn’t publish until February, but don’t you want to preorder a book that
describes like this?
Remember, bonus content this week, a Q&A with Charles Baxter you won’t want to miss.
See you then,
JW
The Biblioracle
All books (with the occasional exception) linked throughout the newsletter go to The Biblioracle Recommends bookstore at Bookshop.org. Affiliate proceeds, plus a personal matching donation of my own, go to Chicago’s Open Books and an additional reading/writing/literacy nonprofit to be determined. Affiliate income for this year is $104.50.
Check out Block Club Chicago as an example of what good political journalism can be.
Thank you for your clear and sweeping analysis of the latest failures of our press! I worked for investigative reporter Jack Anderson in my first job out of college (50 years ago) and the Post was a different newspaper back then. He was very clear-eyed too about the wealthy trying to influence politics. Lacking a paper like the Guardian in the US, I’m grateful for columnists like you and Heather Cox Richardson.