Profiles in Cowardice: Owner Jeff Bezos and Publisher William Lewis of The Washington Post

Saturday, 26 October 2024

Sewell Chan, writing for Columbia Journalism Review on Wednesday, “Los Angeles Times Editorials Editor Resigns After Owner Blocks Presidential Endorsement”:

Mariel Garza, the editorials editor of the Los Angeles Times, resigned on Wednesday after the newspaper’s owner blocked the editorial board’s plans to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Garza told me in a phone conversation. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”

On October 11, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the newspaper for $500 million in 2018, informed the paper’s editorial board that the Times would not be making an endorsement for president.

Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, was like, “Hold my beer...” Here’s William Lewis, CEO and publisher of the Post, which Bezos wholly owns:

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.

The only rational explanation for this decision is cowardice on Bezos’s part in the face of Donald Trump’s vindictiveness. Lewis tries, haplessly, to couch this as a return to the Post’s “roots”, hand-wavingly justifying the decision by pointing out that, prior to 1976, the newspaper declined to issue endorsements:

That was strong reasoning, but in 1976 for understandable reasons at the time, we changed this long-standing policy and endorsed Jimmy Carter as president. But we had it right before that, and this is what we are going back to.

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.

It’s that last one.

The “understandable reasons” for The Washington Fucking Post to endorse Carter in 1976, not delineated by Lewis, were — you know — the crimes of Republican Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal, as reported by the Post’s own legendary reporting duo, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Woodward and Bernstein are having none of Lewis’s and Bezos’s bullshit, issuing a clear condemnation of the decision (which, conspicuously, the Post’s own news desk published):

“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.”

Marty Baron, recently-retired executive editor of the Post, on X, minced even fewer words:

This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty. @realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.

A joint column signed by 17 current Washington Post columnists:

The Washington Post’s decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake. It represents an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love. 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. [...] An independent newspaper might someday choose to back away from making presidential endorsements. But this isn’t the right moment, when one candidate is advocating positions that directly threaten freedom of the press and the values of the Constitution.

Alexandra Petri — one of those 17 columnists — in a solo column, mocking the absurdity of Lewis’s justification for the decision:

We as a newspaper suddenly remembered, less than two weeks before the election, that we had a robust tradition 50 years ago of not telling anyone what to do with their vote for president. It is time we got back to those “roots,” I’m told!

Roots are important, of course. As recently as the 1970s, The Post did not endorse a candidate for president. As recently as centuries ago, there was no Post and the country had a king! Go even further back, and the entire continent of North America was totally uninhabitable, and we were all spineless creatures who lived in the ocean, and certainly there were no Post subscribers.

Garza, the editor who resigned in protest from the LA Times, made clear in her interview with CJR that the point of newspaper endorsements is not based on the premise that they sway elections:

“I didn’t think we were going to change our readers’ minds — our readers, for the most part, are Harris supporters,” Garza told me. “We’re a very liberal paper. I didn’t think we were going to change the outcome of the election in California. But two things concern me: This is a point in time where you speak your conscience no matter what. And an endorsement was the logical next step after a series of editorials we’ve been writing about how dangerous Trump is to democracy, about his unfitness to be president, about his threats to jail his enemies. We have made the case in editorial after editorial that he shouldn’t be reelected. [...]”

“And it’s perplexing to readers, and possibly suspicious, that we didn’t endorse her this time.”

Chan, the CJR writer Garza spoke to, continues:

Indeed, hours after Semafor reported on Tuesday that Soon-Shiong had blocked the endorsement, former president Donald Trump’s rapid-response team sent out an email calling the newspaper’s decision “the latest blow” for Harris.

“In Kamala’s own home state, the Los Angeles Times — the state’s largest newspaper — has declined to endorse the Harris-Walz ticket, despite endorsing the Democrat nominees in every election for decades,” the campaign said. “Even her fellow Californians know she’s not up for the job. The Times previously endorsed Kamala in her 2010 and 2014 races for California attorney general, as well as her 2016 race for US Senate — but not this time.”

What’s so maddeningly disingenuous about this is that it’s not “the newspapers” that refused to endorse Harris. It was their cowardly owners. Both newspapers had already written their Harris endorsements. Liberal newspapers breaking tradition to not endorse anyone is worse than if their owners had forced them to endorse Trump instead. A Trump endorsement from the LA Times or Washington Post would be absurd. No one, not even the derpiest of MAGA trolls, would believe that. It would be like a steakhouse endorsing veganism. But refusing to endorse Harris? That, on the surface, is plausibly suspicious.

Before this week, I’d never heard of Patrick Soon-Shiong, the LA Times’s owner. I just assume now he’s a self-interested idiot. But Jeff Bezos turning coward surprises me. I didn’t have Bezos pegged as a chickenshit. When he bought the Post, I sincerely thought he was saving it, not destroying it. What’s the point of having so much “fuck you” money if you’re afraid to tell a petty tyrant like Donald Trump to pound sand? And Bezos is smart, really smart, which makes it baffling that he thinks Trump, if elected, might remember this craven gesture of abject subservience, and decline to lash out against Amazon, Blue Origin, or Bezos personally, after a single negative news story in The Washington Post. Transactions work only one way with Donald Trump. Toward him. Only going on stage with Trump and dancing like a dipshit might actually gain derp Führer’s favor.

Jonathan Last, writing at The Bulwark, “The Guardrails Are Already Crumpling”:

These guys can hear the music. They’ve seen the sides being chosen: Elon Musk and Peter Theil assembling with Trump’s gangster government in waiting. They see Mark Zuckerberg praising Trump as a “badass.” And now they see Bezos getting in line, too.

What’s remarkable is that Trump didn’t have to arrest Bezos to secure his compliance. Trump didn’t even have to win the election. Just the fact that he has an even-money chance to become president was threat enough.

Or maybe that’s not remarkable. One of Timothy Snyder’s rules for resisting authoritarians is that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” People surrender preemptively much more often than you might expect.

Two weeks ago, Ian Bassin and Maximillian Potter wrote what might be the most prophetic essay of the year. They warned about “anticipatory obedience” in the media.

Seventeen days later, Bezos made his demonstration.

In case you needed reminding: The “guardrails” aren’t guardrails. They’re people.

And they’re already collapsing. Before a single state has been called.

This is no time to get squishy. I have never once unsubscribed from a newspaper in protest, and I certainly haven’t encouraged you to. But there’s a line for everything, and this abject cowardice, in the face of the greatest threat to our democracy itself since the Civil War, crossed that line. I’ve been a paying subscriber to The Washington Post for many years. Not anymore. I recommend you do the same.