Journalism Requires Owners Committed to the Cause

Friday, 20 December 2024

Mike Allen, in the bizarre notes-hurriedly-jotted-on-a-napkin house prose style of Axios:

Kara Swisher, the popular podcaster and pioneering tech journalist, is trying to round up a group of rich people to fund a bid for the Washington Post, she told us.

One big problem: Jeff Bezos, the owner, has shown no interest in selling.

Why it matters: Swisher — who started in the Post mailroom, and became an early tech reporter at the paper (and later one of the first at The Wall Street Journal) — believes the Amazon founder will eventually want to sell, since the paper has become a managerial nightmare.

Like many, Swisher thinks Bezos should sell since he has other financial and personal interests — like space tech — that are more important to him, and can conflict with his Post ownership.

“The Post can do better,” she told us. “It’s so maddening to see what’s happening. ... Why not me? Why not any of us?”

This would be an excellent outcome. Bezos should sell. These last few months should make clear to him that he should not own the Post. Swisher would be an excellent publisher. Her entire career has been focused on sharp, smart, good journalism.

One simple fact that’s been clear to me ever since I worked (as a designer in the promotions department) at The Philadelphia Inquirer in the late 1990s is that news publications need to be owned by people who are devoted to the core pursuit of journalism. The Inquirer was a world-class newspaper at the time. I played supposedly casual lunchtime softball with colleagues from across the company on Fridays, and only after a few weeks found out that around half the regulars in our group had won Pulitzer prizes. When I learned this I was astonished. It gave me a moment’s pause about hitting the ball as hard as I could. I didn’t want to injure journalistic royalty. (But just a moment’s pause. It was a friendly game but we were all competitive bastards.) There was a stretch in the late 1980s when the Inquirer, under the leadership of editor Gene Roberts, won more Pulitzers than The New York Times and Washington Post. That culture, and the journalists, remained in place through the 1990s. But The Inquirer was owned at the time by Knight Ridder, a national conglomerate, and Knight Ridder wasn’t in the newspaper business for the journalism. They were in it for the profits. Which, at the time, were quite lucrative. There was one quarter where word spread that Knight Ridder brass was pissed because The Inquirer’s profit margin for the quarter had dropped to 19 percent. 20 was the magic number. Newspapers were still minting money from the classified ads. Much of the great editorial and reporting talent at The Inquirer soon left for other publications, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time magazine. It fell apart. Ownership matters.

There are many types of businesses a wealthy person can own as a mere hobby, in which the business can thrive under such ownership, simply by the owner allowing talented dedicated professionals to run the operation. A wealthy dilettante owner can help many such businesses, by providing the capital to hire great talent. Journalism is not one of those businesses. Profits are important because profits maintain independence and pay for talent. Investigative reporting is expensive. But independence is more important than anything, and there can be no true independence for a publication when the owner is not committed to the cause.

We see it with The Washington Post under Bezos, when he kiboshed the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris so as not to antagonize Donald Trump. We see it with this shithead owner of the LA Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, whose latest dictum is for the paper’s editorial board to, I swear, “take a break” from writing about Donald Trump. Instructing a daily newspaper’s editorial board to take a break from writing about the incoming president of the United States is like telling a bar to take a break from selling beer. It’s the entire point of the establishment.¹

We see it most clearly, perhaps, with Disney’s ownership of ABC News. Disney last week settled a bullshit defamation lawsuit with Trump, for $16 million, that they clearly should have taken to trial, choosing instead to embarrass and humiliate, rather than proudly stand behind, their own talent, George Stephanopoulos. As Josh Marshall eloquently argues, settling that defamation suit on those obsequious, cowardly terms made perfect sense for Disney. It wasn’t worth the risk to Disney’s brand and overall interests. But it was devastating to ABC News’s brand and reputation. The simple truth is that Disney’s core business isn’t journalism. Not even close. It’s not that ABC News’s journalistic integrity doesn’t matter to Disney. It’s that it’s just one small factor to Disney. Disney would fight tooth and nail to defend Mickey Mouse, but George Stephanopoulos’s face isn’t printed on t-shirts at Disneyland.

Say what you want (and there is much to be said) about the Ochs-Sulzberger family’s dynastic ownership and control of The New York Times Company, but whatever their faults, there can be little argument that nothing is more important to them than the Times’s core mission of independent journalism. If The New York Times had been faced with this same defamation lawsuit from Trump for the same reason (whether the word “rape” fairly describes the sexual assault he was found to have committed in E. Jean Carroll’s victorious civil lawsuit against him, in which she was awarded $88 million), they would not have capitulated as Disney did. The New York Times did not hesitate to strongly endorse Kamala Harris. Et cetera.

Even Rupert Murdoch exemplifies this. When News Corp cashed in and sold assets five years ago, Murdoch sold 21st Century Fox — the film and TV assets — and held onto the news assets. And the buyer was Disney, whose core business is aligned with those assets: entertainment. Murdoch’s News Corp, aptly named to describe its primary purpose, still owns The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Times and The Sun in the U.K., and more. And the Murdoch family, of course, owns a controlling share of Fox Corporation, the parent of Fox News. Say what you want about Murdoch too (and I would say, with no hyperbole, that he’s singlehandedly responsible for more of what’s gone wrong in the United States over the last quarter century than any person alive, including Donald Trump, who I believe would never have even run for president, let alone become president twice, without the deeply pernicious and pervasive influence of Fox News), but he built and owns his news media empire because he believes in its core mission, as dastardly as his vision is for what journalism ought to be.

Good intentions aren’t enough. Disney, all things considered, has never wanted ABC News to be anything other than a bastion of quality TV-style journalism. Bezos, heretofore, has been a fine steward at the Post. But it’s easy to be a good owner of a good news outlet when times are normal. It’s when times are hard, whether financially, or more crucially, when truth speaks to malicious power, that it becomes essential for the owner to be in the game first and foremost for the mission of journalism itself. Those are moments of contention and conflict and risk, and like a don’s consigliere, a news publication in conflict with malicious power needs an owner with the stomach for war.

The Washington Post’s own illustrious history speaks to this. In 1971, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s internal secret history of the Vietnam War (which Ellsberg had helped write). Per The New York Historical:

The first article on the Pentagon Papers ran on the front page of the Times on June 13, 1971. Two days later, the Nixon administration sued, asking for an injunction to halt any further publication of the papers. U.S. District Court Judge Murray Gurfein issued a temporary restraining order — the first in U.S. history that restrained the press prior to publication. [...]

The court order was still in place on June 16, when the Washington Post’s national editor, Ben Bagdikian, returned from Ellsberg’s home in Boston carrying a partial copy of the Pentagon Papers. The Post’s president and publisher Katharine Graham was faced with the decision: to publish or not? Defying the court order carried significant risk: the Washington Post Company had just gone public, and reporting on the Pentagon Papers meant risking a criminal charge that would imperil its $35 million stock offering and put the paper’s financial future in jeopardy. A criminal conviction would also give the FCC an excuse to strip the Washington Post Company of the licenses to its lucrative television stations, WTOP in Washington, D.C., and Florida’s WJXT. Doing so would stand up for freedom of the press.

On June 17, reporters, editors, and lawyers gathered at executive editor Ben Bradlee’s house to wrangle over the question of whether or not to publish. Meanwhile, Katharine Graham was hosting a farewell party for the paper’s departing business manager in her stately Georgetown home. Interrupted in the middle of her laudatory speech, she was summoned to the phone and asked to make a decision that could, one way or the other, destroy her paper. Though her lawyers opposed publication, her reporters and editors argued that failing to publish would be “gutless” and erode the Post’s credibility. Frightened and tense, as she later wrote in her Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Graham “took a big gulp and said, ‘Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Let’s go. Let’s publish.”

In the face of possible prison time — not only for her staff but for herself — and the risk of financial ruin for the paper and her family, Graham said, “Let’s go. Let’s publish.” Jeff Bezos didn’t even have the intestinal fortitude to allow the Post editorial board to publish an utterly unsurprising election endorsement. Katharine Graham, portrayed by Meryl Streep, was the hero of a great Steven Spielberg film, The Post. In a hypothetical sequel portraying the events that led to Trump’s second term, Jeff Bezos would be portrayed by the actor who played the cowardly lawyer snatched on the can by the T-Rex in Jurassic Park.

For those readers and viewers who enjoy and support Rupert Murdoch’s publications and channels for what they are, he is the best owner imaginable. He stands behind their work and their mission. His media outlets are his life’s work. ABC News doesn’t hold an iota of that value to Disney. The same is true for what The Washington Post means to Jeff Bezos. It’s obvious Bezos does care about the Post. But it’s also now obvious that he does not care nearly enough.

The Washington Post would hold such value to an ownership consortium led by Kara Swisher. Bezos can still be a hero in this story. But his only move is to sell.