The Washington Post’s Craven Capitulation to the Billionaire Class

Right here’s a brand new slogan that appears proper for the sanctimonious-yet-venal mind belief at The Washington Submit: Democracy dies within the darkness of Jeff Bezos’s pockets. The paper that’s lengthy dined out on its repute as a principled foe of a paranoid, authoritarian Republican regime introduced on Friday that it wasn’t going to endorse a presidential candidate this day trip (or certainly ever once more), although the twice-impeached, criminally convicted Donald Trump makes Richard Nixon appear to be a mere piker within the realm of unhinged abuses of most government energy.

The newspaper that also has the temerity to ascertain itself as a heroic guardian of the nation’s embattled democracy rolled over for the MAGA thugocracy beneath the flimsiest conceivable pretext: It intends to safeguard an “independent space” for voters who don’t need to be instructed whom to vote for, editorial-page editor David Shipley reportedly instructed outraged staffers of the paper in what NPR media reporter David Folfenflik known as a “tense assembly.” By no means thoughts that Individuals are already instructed whom to vote for on a endless loop in each conceivable public venue, and appear to emerge with their delicate sensibilities intact. By no means thoughts that the entire thought of an op-ed part is to assemble voices arguing over what individuals ought to say and do. And by no means thoughts that there’s no such factor as an neutral “unbiased house” in a battle over how and whether or not America’s formal democracy can proceed. What Shipley was really doing was saying, “My company paymasters need to wallow in Donald Trump’s tax cuts and keep away from jeopardizing their profitable federal contracts,” however the phony rhetoric of noncommittal journalistic objectivity is much better suited to newsroom conferences the place you’re making an attempt to get reporters to toe the administration line.

Shipley had reportedly already drafted an endorsement of Harris, however per the Post’s own reporting, it was overruled by Submit proprietor and retail predator Jeff Bezos, the centibillionaire proprietor of Amazon. Throughout Trump’s first administration, the then-president threatened to withhold key tax breaks and postal subventions in retaliation for the Submit’s crucial protection of Trump. When the editorial board weighed its 2020 endorsement, Bezos permitted its alternative of Joe Biden; this day trip, the paper’s proprietor is hedging his bets in opposition to financial penalties in a second Trump time period, to say nothing of the decision of a number of pending antitrust actions in opposition to his firm unlikely to interrupt his manner in a Harris administration. And like his fellow billionaires, King Amazon is clearly warming to the prospects of extra pelf in his coffers due to Trump’s pledge to proceed lavishing giveaways on our financial oligarchy.

It’s value noting that the identical state of affairs performed out on the Los Angeles Instances, the place its billionaire proprietor, Patrick Quickly-Shiong, blocked the paper’s deliberate endorsement of Harris. Along with being a standard-issue plutocrat with a pharmaceutical fortune certain to prosper beneath a extra lax Trump-appointed FDA, Quickly-Shiong is a longtime pal of Elon Musk, the man-child centibillionaire who’s gone all in on Trump’s reelection. (Certainly, in a nice irony, the Submit printed a front-page account of how Musk’s Starlink satellite tv for pc firm stands to rake in billions more in government dosh in a second Trump time period, on the very day the paper’s managers introduced their craven capitulation to Musk’s would-be benefactor.)

What’s completely different in regards to the shameful LA Instances saga is that the paper’s editorial-pages editor, Marial Garza, acknowledged the precise  journalistic and political stakes of getting the paper’s voice squelched by a billionaire’s diktat. “I’m resigning as a result of I need to make it clear that I’m not okay with us being silent,” Garza told Columbia Journalism Review editor Sewell Chan:

In harmful occasions, trustworthy individuals want to face up. That is how I’m standing up.… It is a time limit the place you communicate your conscience it doesn’t matter what. And an endorsement was the logical subsequent step after a sequence of editorials we’ve been writing about how harmful Trump is to democracy, about his unfitness to be president, about his threats to jail his enemies. We now have made the case in editorial after editorial that he shouldn’t be reelected.

As for David Shipley, right here’s the brutal evaluation of 1 Submit worker: “The story about Shipley has lengthy been that he received the job as a result of he is aware of the best way to get together with wealthy males.” Jacob Heilbrunn, a former colleague of Shipley’s at The New Republic, concurs: Again then, he was “earnest, conventionally liberal,” however “now appears to have morphed into a complete empty go well with.”

Certainly, whereas Shipley stated he “owned” the Submit’s cowardly resolution in that heated workers assembly, the official rationale for it was printed beneath the byline of Bezos’s handpicked writer, Will Lewis, the previous Murdoch lackey still neck-deep within the fallout from Britain’s phone-hacking scandal.

In an smug and obtuse editorial, Lewis waved away the paper’s latest historical past of presidential endorsements by citing its non-endorsement within the 1960 presidential race—an announcement of putative journalistic precept that mainly succeeded in being weaselly and pompous in equal measure: “We now have stated and can proceed to say, as fairly and candidly as we all know how, what we consider in regards to the rising problems with the marketing campaign,” the 1960 editorial learn partly. “We now have sought to reach at our opinions as pretty as potential, with the steerage of our personal ideas of independence however freed from dedication to any get together or candidate.” Translation: We don’t relish candor as something greater than an expedient rhetorical posture, and should shrink back from the clear ethical implications of our personal journalistic work.

That’s the gist of Lewis’s personal slapdash argument, as nicely. Dismissing the notion that his quisling pose doubles as “as a tacit endorsement of 1 candidate, or as a condemnation of one other” Lewis asserts that it’s, in reality, “in line with the values the Submit has at all times stood for and what we hope for in a frontrunner: character and braveness in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of legislation, and respect for human freedom in all its points.” If the Submit certainly cherishes these values, it’s objectively not possible to sq. them with sitting out an election that would restore most energy to a multiply convicted lawbreaker, bigot, sexual assaulter, abuser of government energy, and self-styled agent of political retribution whose personal former cupboard members regard as a fascist. Readers of the Submit’s editorial web page would have been higher served by a wholly clean house or a horoscope or phrase recreation, rather than Lewis’s self-congratulatory bilge.

But long-suffering Submit readers couldn’t be all that stunned by Lewis’s moronic, self-canceling reasoning. This was additionally the paper that sat for three years on the damning news that Martha-Ann Alito, the spouse of the Supreme Courtroom justice who stans for Trump’s maximal executive power and gleefully struck down girls’s rights to their very own bodily autonomy, flew an upside-down flag exterior of the couple’s residence in a gesture of solidarity with the failed coup of January 6. And in accordance with NPR’s Folfenflik, Lewis dangled the prospect of an unique interview with him in change for the author’s pledge to bury developments in the phone-hacking case in his reporting.

It is a universe or so faraway from the high-minded requirements of character and public probity that Lewis professes to uphold in embracing a morally indefensible posture of nonalignment in a second of democratic disaster. However it’s what you get whenever you workers the highest of a masthead solely with individuals who know the best way to get together with wealthy males.