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    To protect US democracy from tyrants, we must protect the truly free press | Robert Reich

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    Reliable and independent sources of news are now threatened by growing alliances of oligarchs and authoritarians.The mainstream media doesn’t use the term “oligarchy” to describe the billionaires who are using their wealth to enlarge their political power around the world, but that is what is happening.This is why I write for and read the Guardian, and why I’m urgently appealing to you to support it.During the US presidential campaign, legacy mainstream media – who mostly answer to corporate or billionaire ownership – refrained from reporting how incoherent and bizarre Donald Trump was becoming, normalizing and “sanewashing” his increasingly wild utterances even as it reported every minor slip by Joe Biden.The New York Times headlined its report on the September 2024 presidential debate between the president-elect and Kamala Harris – in which Trump issued conspiracy theories about stolen elections, crowd sizes, and Haitian immigrants eating pet cats and dogs – as: Harris and Trump bet on their own sharply contrasting views of America.Trump also used virulent rhetoric towards journalists. He has called the free press “scum” and the “enemy within”. During his campaign, he called for revoking the licenses of television networks and jailing journalists who won’t reveal their anonymous sources.Come 20 January, Trump and his toadies – including billionaires such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy – will have total control over the executive branch of the United States government. Trump’s Maga Republicans will be in charge of both chambers of Congress as well.Most members of the US supreme court, some of whom have been beneficiaries of billionaire gifts, have already signaled their willingness to consolidate even more power in Trump’s hands, immunize him from criminal liability for anything he does, and further open the floodgates of big money into US politics.All of this is sending a message from the United States that liberalism’s core tenets, including the rule of law and freedom of the press, are up for grabs.Elsewhere around the world, alliances of economic elites and authoritarians similarly threaten public access to the truth, without which democracy cannot thrive.It’s a vicious cycle: citizens have grown cynical about democracy because decision-making has become dominated by economic elites, and that cynicism has ushered in authoritarians who are even more solicitous of such elites.Trump and his lapdogs have lionized Victor Orbán and Hungary’s Fidesz party, which transformed a once-vibrant democracy into a one-party state, muzzling the media and rewarding the wealthy.Trump’s success will likely encourage other authoritarians, such as Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party in France; Alternative in Germany, or AfD; Italy’s far-right Giorgia Meloni; and radical rightwing parties in the Netherlands and Austria.Trump’s triumph will embolden Russia’s Vladimir Putin – the world’s most dangerous authoritarian oligarch – not only in Ukraine and potentially eastern Europe but also in his worldwide campaign of disinformation seeking to undermine democracies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEvidence is mounting that Russia and other foreign agents used Musk’s X platform to disrupt the US presidential campaign in favor of Trump. Musk did little to stop them.During the campaign, Musk himself reposted to his 200 million followers a faked version of Harris’s first campaign video with an altered voice track sounding like the vice-president and saying she “does not know the first thing about running the country” and is the “ultimate diversity hire”. Musk tagged the video “amazing”. It received hundreds of millions of views.According to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk posted at least 50 false election claims on X, which garnered a total of at least 1.2bn views. None had a “community note” from X’s supposed fact-checking system.Rupert Murdoch, another oligarch who champions authoritarianism, has turned his Fox News, Wall Street Journal, and New York Post into outlets of rightwing propaganda, which have amplified Trump’s lies.Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, prohibited the newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris. Evidently, he didn’t want to raise Trump’s ire because Bezos’s other businesses depend on government contracts and his largest – Amazon – is already the target of a federal antitrust suit.Bezos’s decision demonstrated that even the possibility of a Trump presidency could force what had been one of the most courageous newspapers in the US to censor itself. Marty Baron, former editor of the Post, called the move “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty”.Citizens concerned about democracy must monitor those in power, act as watchdogs against abuses of power, challenge those abuses, organize and litigate, and sound the alarm about wrongdoing and wrongful policies.But not even the most responsible of citizens can do these things without reliable sources of information. The public doesn’t know what stories have been censored, muted, judged out of bounds, or preemptively not covered by journalists who’d rather not take the risk.In the final weeks before the election, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked his newspaper’s planned endorsement of Harris, prompting the head of the paper’s editorial board to resign. Mariel Garza said she was “not OK with us being silent”, adding: “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up.”Honest people standing up is precisely what resisting authoritarianism and protecting democracy require. Americans and the citizens of other countries must have access to the truth if we have any hope of standing up to tyranny.The Guardian remains a reliable and trustworthy source of news because it is truly independent. That’s why I’m writing this, and why you’re reading it.Unlike other US media organizations, the Guardian cannot be co-opted by the growing alliances of oligarchs and authoritarians. It does not depend for its existence on billionaires or the good graces of a demagogue; it depends on us.Please support the Guardian today. More

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      A new era dawns. America’s tech bros now strut their stuff in the corridors of power | Carole Cadwalladr

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      In hindsight, 2016 was the beginning of the beginning. And 2024 is the end of that beginning and the start of something much, much worse.It began as a tear in the information space, a dawning realisation that the world as we knew it – stable, fixed by facts, balustraded by evidence – was now a rip in the fabric of reality. And the turbulence that Trump is about to unleash – alongside pain and cruelty and hardship – is possible because that’s where we already live: in information chaos.It’s exactly eight years since we realised there were invisible undercurrents flowing beneath the surface of our world. Or perhaps I should talk for myself here. It was when I realised. A week before the 2016 US presidential election, I spotted a weird constellation of events and googled “tech disruption” + “democracy”, found not a single hit and pitched a piece to my editor.It was published on 6 November 2016. In it, I quoted the “technology mudslide hypothesis” a concept invented by Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, who coined the term “disruption” – a process endlessly fetishised in tech circles, in which a scrappy upstart such as Microsoft could overthrow a colossus like IBM.Whoever wins, I wrote, this election represented “the Great Disruption. With Trump the Great Disruptor.” And, for good measure, I chucked in some questions: “Will democracy survive? Will Nato? Is a free and fair election possible in a post-truth world?”View image in fullscreenThat article was the beginning of my own Alice in Wonderland tumble down the rabbit hole. and I reread it with the sinking knowledge that this next presidential term may yet provide those answers. If it seems like I’m crowing, I wish. This isn’t a valedictory “I told you so”: it’s an eight-year anniversary reminder for us to wake up. And a serving of notice: the first stage of this process is now complete. And we have to understand what that means.We’ve spent those eight years learning a new lexicon: “misinformation”, “disinformation”, “microtargeting”. We’ve learned about information warfare. As journalists, we, like FBI investigators, used evidence to show how social media was a vulnerable “threat surface” that bad actors such as Cambridge Analytica and the Kremlin could exploit. PhDs have been written on the weaponisation of social media. But none of this helps us now.There’s already a judiciary subcommittee on the “weaponisation of the federal government” in Congress to investigate the “censorship industrial complex” – the idea that big tech is “censoring” Republican voices. For the past 18 months, it’s been subpoena-ing academics. Last week, Elon Musk tweeted that the next stage would be “prosecutions”. A friend of mine, an Ivy League professor on the list, texts to say the day will shortly come “where I will have to decide whether to stay or go”.View image in fullscreenTrump’s list of enemies is not theoretical. It already exists. My friend is on it. In 2022, Trump announced a “day one” executive order instructing “the Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in the new online censorship regime … and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified”. And my friends in other countries know exactly where this leads.View image in fullscreenAnother message arrives from Maria Ressa, the Nobel prize-winning Filipino journalist. In the Philippines, the government is modelled on the US one and she writes about what happened when President Duterte controlled all three branches of it. “It took six months after he took office for our institutions to crumble.” And then she was arrested.What we did during the first wave of disruption, 2016-24, won’t work now. Can you “weaponise” social media when social media is the weapon? Remember the philosopher Marshall McLuhan – “the medium is the message”? Well the medium now is Musk. The world’s richest man bought a global communication platform and is now the shadow head of state of what was the world’s greatest superpower. That’s the message. Have you got it yet?Does the technology mudslide hypothesis now make sense? Of how a small innovation can eventually disrupt a legacy brand? That brand is truth. It’s evidence. It’s journalism. It’s science. It’s the Enlightenment. A niche concept you’ll find behind a paywall at the New York Times.You have a subscription? Enjoy your clean, hygienic, fact-checked news. Then come with me into the information sewers, where we will wade through the shit everyone else consumes. Trump is cholera. His hate, his lies – it’s an infection that’s in the drinking water now. Our information system is London’s stinking streets before the Victorian miracle of sanitation. We fixed that through engineering. But we haven’t fixed this. We had eight years to hold Silicon Valley to account. And we failed. Utterly.Because this, now, isn’t politics in any sense we understand it. The young men who came out for Trump were voting for protein powder and deadlifting as much as they were for a 78-year-old convicted felon. They were voting for bitcoin and weighted squats. For YouTube shorts and Twitch streams. For podcast bros and crypto bros and tech bros and the bro of bros: Elon Musk.Social media is mainstream media now. It’s where the majority of the world gets its news. Though who even cares about news? It’s where the world gets its memes and jokes and consumes its endlessly mutating trends. Forget “internet culture”. The internet is culture. And this is where this election was fought and won … long before a single person cast a ballot.Steve Bannon was right. Politics is downstream from culture. Chris Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, quoted his old boss to me in my first phone call with him. Elections are downstream from white men talking on platforms that white men built, juiced by invisible algorithms our broligarch overlords control. This is culture now.The Observer’s reporting on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica belongs to the old world order. An order that ended on 6 November 2024. That was the first wave of algorithmic disruption which gave us Brexit and Trump’s first term, when our rule-based norms creaked but still applied.View image in fullscreenThe challenge now is to understand that this world has gone. Mark Zuckerberg has ditched his suit, grown out his Caesar haircut and bought a rapper-style gold chain. He’s said one of his biggest regrets is apologising too much. Because he – like others in Silicon Valley – has read the runes. PayPal’s co-founder Peter Thiel, creeping around in the shadows, ensured his man, JD Vance, got on the presidential ticket. Musk wagered a Silicon Valley-style bet by going all in on Trump. Jeff Bezos, late to the party, jumped on the bandwagon with just days to go, ensuringhis Washington Post didn’t endorse any candidate.These bros know. They don’t fear journalists any more. Journalists will now learn to fear them. Because this is oligarchy now. This is the fusion of state and commercial power in a ruling elite. It’s not a coincidence that Musk spouts the Kremlin’s talking points and chats to Putin on the phone. The chaos of Russia in the 90s is the template; billions will be made, people will die, crimes will be committed.Our challenge is to realise that the first cycle of disruption is complete. We’re through the looking glass. We’re all wading through the information sewers. Trump is a bacillus but the problem is the pipes. We can and must fix this.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk More

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      Washington Post cancellations hit 250,000 – 10% of subscribers

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      Deterioration of the Washington Post’s subscriber base continued on Tuesday, hours after its proprietor, Jeff Bezos, defended the decision to forgo formally endorsing a presidential candidate as part of an effort to restore trust in the media.The publication has now shed 250,000 subscribers, or 10% of the 2.5 million customers it had before the decision was made public on Friday, according to the NPR reporter David Folkenflik.A day earlier, 200,000 had left according to the same outlet.The numbers are based on the number of cancellation emails that have been sent out, according to a source at the paper, though the subscriber dashboard is no longer viewable to employees.The Washington Post has not commented on the reported numbers.The famed Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward said on Tuesday he disagreed with the paper’s decision, adding that the outlet was “an institution reporting about Donald Trump and what he’s done and supported by the editorial page”.Bezos framed the decision as an effort to support journalists and journalism, noting that in “surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress”.But in this election year, he noted, the press had fallen below Congress, according to a Gallup poll.“We have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working,” he wrote.A survey published by the New York Times over the weekend found that the mainstream media were trusted less than social media and 55% of poll respondents thought the media bad for democracy.The Washington Post’s decision to forgo a presidential endorsement follows a growing trend in the newspaper business, which has mostly been hemorrhaging revenue and readership.Gannett-owned USA Today, with the fifth-largest print and fourth-largest digital subscriber circulation, said on Tuesday that neither it nor more than 200 local papers under its umbrella would endorse a candidate.“Why are we doing this? Because we believe America’s future is decided locally – one race at a time,” a USA Today spokesperson, Lark-Marie Antón, said in a statement to Politico. “Our public service is to provide readers with the facts that matter and the trusted information they need to make informed decisions.”The non-endorsing papers have said they still plan to make political recommendations at local and state levels.Bezos wrote in defense of the Post’s decision that “presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election … what presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.” More

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      The Washington Post is a reminder of the dangers of billionaire ownership | Siva Vaidhyanathan

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      Last week the Washington Post refrained from endorsing a candidate in the presidential race for the first time in 36 years. The decision was reportedly ordered by Jeff Bezos, the Post’s owner and one of the richest men in the world. The Seattle billionaire, who owns Amazon, purchased the flailing newspaper in 2013 in a rare fit of civic duty.The blowback was immediate and substantial. Within 48 hours of the announcement as many as 200,000 paying readers cancelled their subscriptions to the already money-losing news organization, according to reporting by NPR.Such withholding of revenue is usually more a symbolic message than a real threat to the viability of a company. But for the Post, which has been teetering for decades, any loss in subscribers is threatening. Hundreds of good journalists who had no influence on Bezos’s decision remain unsure of the viability of their employer. Residents of the District of Columbia and much of Virginia and Maryland also rely on the Post for coverage of state and local issues, culture and sports. All of this is threatened by Bezos’s decision and the public uprising against it.Some angry citizens also cancelled their subscriptions to Amazon Prime, the service that provides free shipping for many Amazon products and access to video and music streaming.While a widespread Prime resignation would not damage the public sphere or the prospects for democracy and good government the way that hurting the Washington Post does, it’s still a futile gesture that probably will not alarm or injure Bezos in the slightest.That’s because Prime is a classic loss-leader feature: Amazon uses the service to crush competitors by offering cheaper goods and services while the company makes its money elsewhere. Prime has about 180 million members in the United States, so if a few thousand quit, Amazon would hardly notice and Bezos hardly care.Amazon and Bezos are far more powerful than most people realize. The company’s power is deep, broad and largely invisible. The books and dog toys we buy through Amazon remind us of its public face and original mission. But it’s not 2004 any more.Amazon is not a normal retail company or a normal company in any way; it’s a sprawling leviathan wrapped around the essential processes of major governments, commerce and culture of most of the world.Amazon’s major source of revenue and profit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is the leading provider of computing and data services in the world, ahead of Microsoft and Alphabet. AWS hosts the sites and data of more than 7,500 governmental agencies and offices in the US alone, including those of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Reserve.Just about everything a 21st-century state or firm might want to do probably goes through Amazon and makes Bezos wealthier and more powerful in the process. All of this happened over the past 20 years as we enthusiastically chose convenience and mobility over all other human values. We clicked Bezos into power – and not by buying things through Amazon retail; we did it by choosing the internet again and again.In blocking the Washington Post endorsement, Bezos is not acting cowardly as much as slyly. Secure in his fortune and status regardless of the potential rise of fascism in the US, he has some more selfish concerns about the nature of the next administration.One potential Bezos-centric consequence of the election on 5 November is that Donald Trump will prevail over a bacchanal of greed and corruption, potentially opening federal contracts to all sorts of favored players and – more importantly – stifling investigations and prosecutions into firms and people Trump might favor.The other possible consequence is that a Kamala Harris administration would continue the aggressive and much-needed investigations into the ways internet companies like Amazon have restrained trade, concentrated wealth and solidified power by leveraging networks and scale.Bezos also founded and owns Blue Origin, a rocket and space technology firm that has many government contracts. Limiting the government’s regulatory oversight over space technology or contracting is in Bezos’s interest, which might explain why Blue Origin staff met with Trump around the same time as the Post announced its decision not to endorse. It’s also likely Bezos would like to muscle out Trump’s pal Elon Musk and his company, SpaceX, for what is to come.Given all this, it makes sense that Bezos, who is generally liberal and supports Democratic candidates, would try to limit how much Trump hates him (and Trump has long hated Bezos – a lot), if there is a small chance to curry favor with the once and future president. Perhaps Bezos figures his newspaper should not help Harris more than it already has by reporting the basic news.So there are many reasons to fear a Bezos-Trump rapprochement. Still, it does not make much sense to cancel a Post subscription or Prime membership. Neither would hurt Bezos at all.Most boycotts, especially when they are tiny, disorganized, ad-hoc, emotional and aimed at enormous, global companies, are mere expressions of self-righteousness. They have no significant influence on the world but they can make the boycotter feel a bit better for a few days. What’s worse, they often distract energy from real political action that might curb the excesses of the companies in question.Here is the problem: billionaires are mostly immune to consumer pressure. That’s how they became and remain billionaires.So how do we solve a problem like a billionaire? First, we must be blunt about the nature and scope of their power. It’s not a matter of describing their wealth, which flashes before us in numbers we can’t properly grasp or feel. We must describe their influence and how they control things in the world.Second, we must find ways to limit their wealth by taxing the various ways they accumulate and hide it.Third, we must be enthusiastic about breaking up big companies that do too many things in too many markets and thus crush or purchase potential competitors and insurgents. It’s not about prices. It’s about power.Most of all, we should do our best to elect leaders who are not beholden to billionaires, but actively seek to turn them back into millionaires.

      Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy More

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      Washington Post writers say don’t dump subscriptions over non-endorsement

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      The furore over the Washington Post’s decision to forgo a presidential endorsement continued on Monday, with writers for the newspaper pleading with subscribers not to cancel as it would only hurt journalists who did not make the call.The newspaper owned by the multibillionaire Jeff Bezos was thrown into a pre-election inferno on Friday when it announced that it would abandon a five-decade convention of making a formal presidential endorsement.Reaction was swift, with the famed Watergate investigative duo Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein slamming the decision as “surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process” ahead of the 5 November election.But there are developing signs of a pushback to calls to cancel Washington Post subscriptions, with writers for the newspaper pointing out that doing so was ultimately counterproductive.Dana Milbank, an opinion columnist, said he could not endorse the calls to cancel. He said that would not hurt Bezos, who already lost $77m on the Post in 2023, because the paper is just “pocket change” to the businessman who also owns the online retailer Amazon and aerospace company Blue Origin.“But boycotting The Post will hurt my colleagues and me,” Milbank wrote. “The more cancellations there are, the more jobs will be lost, and the less good journalism there will be.”But he added that if the non-endorsement was “the beginning of a crackdown on our journalistic integrity … my colleagues and I will be leading the calls for Post readers to cancel their subscriptions, and we’ll be resigning en masse”.Milbank pointed out that Bezos had typically not interfered with the Post before the newspaper’s brass refused to run an endorsement of Kamala Harris in the upcoming election. The non-endorsement policy was announced shortly before executives of Blue Origin met with Donald Trump as the Republican White House nominee campaigns for a second presidency.From outside the Post, the CNN anchor Jake Tapper wrote on X: “Canceling a newspaper subscription helps politicians who don’t want oversight, does nothing to hurt the billionaires who own the newspapers and make decisions with which you may disagree, and will result in fewer journalists trying to hold the powerful to account.”By mid-Monday, reports indicated that more than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions to the Washington Post, according to NPR. The publication noted that the number was “about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well”.But some argue it would be better to cancel subscriptions to Bezos’s Amazon Prime service.The mood in the Washington Post was still “pretty furious”, an employee there told the Guardian on Monday. And there were moves toward greater union involvement.The employee confirmed that workers were worried that subscription cancellations could ultimately boomerang on them with further job losses.The Post’s non-endorsement decision was made public by Will Lewis, the paper’s publisher and chief executive officer since January. He said that Bezos “was not sent, did not read and did not opine on any draft” of the spiked Harris endorsement.“I do not believe in presidential endorsements,” Lewis – who previously rose through the ranks of British newspapers and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire – wrote in a statement on Sunday. “We are an independent newspaper and should support our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”Nonetheless, under Lewis’s leadership, the Post has issued endorsements this election cycle, including in a US Senate seat race in Maryland.Within hours of the announcement on Friday, 11 Post opinion columnists co-signed a column condemning the decision as “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe progressive senator Bernie Sanders alluded to multibillion contracts Amazon holds with the federal government, including the Department of Defense, to explain the decision. Sanders said Bezos “is afraid of antagonizing Trump and losing Amazon’s federal contracts” if the former president returns to power. “Pathetic,” Sanders said.On Monday, Michelle Norris, an opinion contributor at the Post, said she would resign, calling the decision “a terrible mistake” and “an insult to the paper’s own longstanding standard of regularly endorsing candidates since 1976”.Norris follows Robert Kagan, an editor-at-large, who left the paper after the non-endorsement announcement.David Hoffman, an editorial board member who recently accepted a Pulitzer for a series on “the tactics authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in the digital age”, is also said to be resigning.Among those to cancel Post subscriptions since Friday is the former Republican congresswoman turned Trump critic Liz Cheney. She accused Bezos – who owns the paper through a for-profit subsidiary of an investment fund Nash Holdings LLC – of being “apparently afraid” to endorse “the only candidate in the race who’s a stable responsible adult because he fears Donald Trump”.The Oscar-nominated actor Jeffrey Wright and the West Wing actor Bradley Whitford also posted that they had canceled.The Post’s controversy erupted days after the Los Angeles Times made a similar call to block an endorsement of Harris. The LA newspaper also faced a wave of subscription cancellations.But the LA outlet has sought to cast its non-endorsement decision as more straightforward, with its billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, framing the matter as an attempt at neutrality.On Saturday, his daughter Nika Soon-Shiong, a progressive political activist, said the decision was motivated by Harris’s continued support for Israel as it wars in Gaza.“As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children,” she said in a statement. More

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      Bezos faces criticism after executives met with Trump on day of Post’s non-endorsement

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      The multi-billionaire owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, continued facing criticism throughout the weekend because executives from his aerospace company met with Donald Trump on the same day the newspaper prevented its editorial team from publishing an endorsement of his opponent in the US presidential election.Senior news and opinion leaders at the Washington Post flew to Miami in late September 2024 to meet with Bezos, who had reservations about the paper issuing an endorsement in the 5 November election, the New York Times reported.Amazon and the space exploration company Blue Origin are among Bezos-owned businesses that still compete for lucrative federal government contracts.And the Post on Friday announced it would not endorse a candidate in the 5 November election after its editorial board had already drafted its endorsement of Kamala Harris.Friday’s announcement did not mention Amazon or Blue Origin. But within hours, high-ranking officials of the latter company briefly met with Trump after a campaign speech in Austin, Texas, as the Republican nominee seeks a second presidency.Trump met with Blue Origin chief executive officer David Limp and vice-president of government relations Megan Mitchell, the Associated Press reported.Meanwhile, CNN reported that the Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy, had also recently reached out to speak with the former president by phone.Those reported overtures were eviscerated by Washington Post editor-at-large and longtime columnist Robert Kagan, who resigned on Friday. On Saturday, he argued that the meeting Blue Origin executives had with Trump would not have taken place if the Post had endorsed the Democratic vice-president as it planned.“Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do – and then met with the Blue Origin people,” Kagan told the Daily Beast on Saturday. “Which tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo.”The Post’s publisher Will Lewis, hired by Bezos in January, defended the paper’s owner by claiming the decision to spike the Harris endorsement was his. But that has done little to defuse criticism from within the newspaper’s ranks as well as the wave of subscription cancelations that has met the institution.Eighteen opinion columnists at the Washington Post signed a dissenting column against the decision, calling it “a terrible mistake”. The paper has already made endorsements this election cycle, including in a US senate seat race in Maryland. The Washington Post endorsed Hillary Clinton when Trump won the presidency in 2016. It endorsed Joe Biden when Trump lost in 2020, despite Trump’s pledges to retaliate against anyone who opposed him.In their criticism of the Post’s decision on Friday, former and current employees cite the dangers to democracy posed by Trump, who has openly expressed his admiration for authoritarian rule amid his appeals for voters to return him to office.The former Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who broke the Watergate story, called the decision “disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process”.The former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron said in a post on X, “This is cowardice with democracy as its casualty”.The cartoon team at the paper published a dark formless image protesting against the non-endorsement decision, playing on the “democracy dies in darkness” slogan that the Post adopted in 2017, five years after its purchase by Bezos.High-profile readers, including the bestselling author Stephen King as well as the former congresswoman and vocal Trump critic Liz Cheney, announced the cancellation of their Washington Post subscriptions with many others in protest.The Post’s non-endorsement came shortly after the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, refused to allow the editorial board publish an endorsement of Harris.Many pointed out how the stances from the Post and the LA Times seems to fit the definition of “anticipatory obedience” as spelled out in On Tyranny, Tim Snyder’s bestselling guide to authoritarianism. Snyder defines the term as “giving over your power to the aspiring authoritarian” before the authoritarian is in position to compel that handover.Bezos is the second wealthiest person in the world behind Elon Musk, who has become a prominent supporter of Trump’s campaign for a second presidency. He bought the Washington Post in 2013 for $250m.In 2021, Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon, claiming during a podcast interview that he intended to devote more time to Blue Origin.The New York Times reported Bezos had begun to get more involved in the paper in 2023 as it faced significant financial losses, a stream of employee departures and low morale.His pick of Lewis as publisher in January seemingly did little to help morale at the paper. Employees and devotees of the paper were worried that Lewis was brought on to the Post despite allegations that he “fraudulently obtained phone and company records in newspaper articles” as a journalist in London, as the New York Times reported.Nonetheless, in a memo to newsroom leaders in June 2024, Bezos wrote, “The journalistic standards and ethics at the Post will not change.” More

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      The Washington Post and LA Times refused to endorse a candidate. Why? | Margaret Sullivan

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      The choice for president has seldom been starker.On one side is Donald Trump, a felonious and twice-impeached conman, raring to finish off the job of dismantling American democracy. On the other is Kamala Harris, a capable and experienced leader who stands for traditional democratic principles.Nevertheless – and shockingly – the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post have decided to sit this one out. Both major news organizations, each owned by a billionaire, announced this week that their editorial boards would not make a presidential endorsement, despite their decades-long traditions of doing so.There’s no other way to see this other than as an appalling display of cowardice and a dereliction of their public duty.At the Los Angeles Times, the decision rests clearly with Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the ailing paper in 2018, raising great hopes of a resurgence there.At the Post (where I was the media columnist from 2016 to 2022), the editorial page editor David Shipley said he owned the decision, but it clearly came from above – specifically from the publisher, Will Lewis, the veteran of Rupert Murdoch’s media properties, hand-picked last year by the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos. Was Bezos himself the author of this abhorrent decision? Maybe not, but it could not have come as a surprise.All of this may look like nonpartisan neutrality, or be intended to, but it’s far from that. For one thing, it’s a shameful smackdown of both papers’ reporting and opinion-writing staffs who have done important work exposing Trump’s dangers for many years.It’s also a strong statement of preference. The papers’ leaders have made it clear that they either want Trump (who is, after all, a boon to large personal fortunes) or that they don’t wish to risk the ex-president’s wrath and retribution if he wins. If the latter was a factor, it’s based on a shortsighted judgment, since Trump has been a hazard to press rights and would only be emboldened in a second term.“Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage,” the wrote former Washington Post editor Marty Baron on Friday on X, blasting the Post’s decision. He predicted that Trump would see this as an invitation to try further to intimidate Bezos, a dynamic detailed in Baron’s 2023 book Collision of Power.The editorials editor at the Los Angeles Times, Mariel Garza, resigned this week over the owner’s decision to kill off the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Harris.“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent,” Garza told Columbia Journalism Review’s editor, Sewell Chan. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”Others, including a Pulitzer prize-winning editorial writer at the California paper, followed her principled lead. The Washington Post editor at large Robert Kagan resigned in protest, too. They do so at considerable personal cost, since there are so few similar positions in today’s financially troubled media industry.Some news organizations upheld their duty and remained true to their mission.The New York Times endorsed Harris last month, calling her “the only patriotic choice for president”, and writing that Trump “has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest”.The Guardian, too, strongly endorsed Harris, saying she would “unlock democracy’s potential, not give in to its flaws”, and calling Trump a “transactional and corrupting politician”.Meanwhile, the Murdoch-controlled New York Post has endorsed Trump. Although that decision lacks a moral core, it’s far from surprising.But the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post decisions are, in their way, far worse.They constitute “an abdication”, said Jelani Cobb, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. (I run an ethics center and teach there.)The refusal to endorse, he told me, “tacitly equalizes two wildly distinct candidates, one of whom has tried to overturn a presidential election and one of whom has not”.As for the message this refusal sends to the public? It’s ugly.Readers will reasonably conclude that the newspapers were intimidated. And people will fairly question, Cobb said, when else they “have chosen expediency over courage”.This is no moment to stand at the sidelines – shrugging, speechless and self-interested.With the most consequential election of the modern era only days away, the silence is deafening.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Collision of Power review: Marty Baron on Bezos, the Post and Trump

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      Marty Baron led the Washington Post as executive editor for eight years, retiring in 2021. All told, newsrooms he led won 17 Pulitzer prizes, 10 of them at the Post. Liev Schreiber portrayed him in Spotlight, the 2015 Oscar-winning movie that depicted a Boston Globe investigation of sexual predation by priests.Baron has stories to tell. His first book has a tantalizing subtitle – Trump, Bezos and the Washington Post – and he dives right in.In August 2013, “five days after the announcement that Bezos would buy the Post, Trump heaped praise on both Bezos and the paper”, Baron recalls.“I think it’s a great move for him, I think it’s great for the Washington Post,” Trump remarked. Beyond that, Trump, then a mere reality TV star, called Bezos “amazing” and proclaimed that he was a “fan” of the paper.Trump soon fell out of love. In December 2015, as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, he accused Bezos and Amazon of scamming the American taxpayer. In March 2018, as president, he began hammering away at the supposed Amazon “post office scam”. But the deference Trump demanded never arrived.Baron’s book is timely. Last month, Trump barked that Comcast, owner of NBC and MSNBC, should be investigated for “treason”, and will be if he is re-elected next year.His Republican opponents offered no pushback. This was not a surprise. During his first presidential run, and then as president, Trump repeatedly called the media the “enemy of the people”, treating reporters as foils. To Baron, that echoed Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Goebbels. Threats of violence against the press wafted through campaign rallies. In late October 2016, in Miami, Trump whipped a crowd into a frenzy against Katy Tur of MSNBC. On Twitter, death threats circulated like “loose trash”, she recalled.Baron writes: “The middle finger he had given the press was about to become a fist. My own mood was one of stoic acceptance.” Throughout his book, his tone is measured and concerned, not simply alarmed. He calls for objectivity but he knows the press is under attack. Nationally, investigative journalism thrives. Locally, it dies.This being a Trump book, Baron also deals some dish. According to Baron, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, tried to oust him from the Post.“Trump and his team would go after the Post and everyone else in the media who didn’t bend to his wishes,” Baron writes. “In December 2019, Kushner would lean on [the Post publisher Fred] Ryan to withdraw support for me and our Russia investigation. ‘He aims to get me fired,’ I told Ryan.”Kushner “suggested the Post issue an apology and there be a ‘reckoning of some sort’”, Baron writes. No apology followed. Baron kept his job.The Post came with a storied history: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Ben Bradlee, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers and more. It was no one’s toy or bauble. It was not the New York Observer, once owned by Kushner, whose own memoir reportedly received an assist from Ken Kurson, a former Observer editor pardoned by Trump on cyberstalking charges only to plead guilty to state charges of spying on his wife.In Collision of Power, Baron also describes a White House dinner in June 2017, months after the inauguration, at which Trump unleashed a torrent of grievance and self-adulation.“He had better relations with foreign leaders than Obama, who was lazy and never called them.” His predecessor had “left disasters around the world for him to solve”.In the same breath, Baron says, Trump took to task the chief executive of Macy’s for pulling Trump-branded products in reaction to his calling Mexican immigrants “rapists”. The store, Trump said, “would have been picketed by only 20 Mexicans. Who cares?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBaron also captures Trump throwing jabs at Benjamin Netanyahu, complaining of how little the US received in exchange for aid to Israel. Fresh off a trip there, and advised he couldn’t leverage aid to broker peace with the Palestinians, Trump was annoyed.“I was told ‘there’s no connection,’” Trump told Bezos, Baron, Ryan and Fred Hiatt, another Post editor. “He was incredulous. ‘No connection?’”Trump’s take, Baron says, foreshadowed reporting by Barak Ravid of Axios, that Trump “said he was surprised to find that the Palestinians want a peace deal more than the Israelis”. In his own book, Trump’s Peace, Ravid captures Trump saying of Netanyahu, “fuck him”, and reducing American Jews to antisemitic caricatures.A postscript: Trump’s dinner with Baron and Bezos was held on 15 June 2017, the night of the congressional baseball game. Trump chose to hang out with a bunch of reporters despite the shooting, at practice for that game, of Steve Scalise of Louisiana, a House Republican leader and Trump supporter, who was left fighting for his life.Of course, this is not surprising. In summer 2020, when protests for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd came close to the White House, Trump hid in the basement. More recently, John Kelly, Trump’s second chief of staff, has confirmed that Trump refused to be seen with wounded veterans. In the Trump White House, bravura was common, compassion and bravery near-non-existent.A year after Trump was ejected from power, Baron retired and went to work on his book. As it comes out, Scalise is both battling cancer and plotting to become House speaker. Trump, 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats notwithstanding, is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination again.From the beginning, as Baron saw close up, Trump “had the makings of an autocrat”. In the next election, the tenor of coverage will be vital. Should Trump win, the plight of the press may be uncertain. Either way, Baron says, journalists will need “idealism, determination and courage”.
      Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and the Washington Post is published in the US by Macmillan More

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      The US ultra-rich justify their low tax rates with three myths – all rubbish | Robert Reich

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      The US ultra-rich justify their low tax rates with three myths – all of them rubbishRobert ReichA record share of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of billionaires, who pay a lower tax rate than the average American. This is indefensible On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office released a study of trends in the distribution of family wealth between 1989 and 2019.Over those 30 years, the richest 1% of families increased their share of total national wealth from 27% to 34%. Families in the bottom half of the economy now hold a mere 2%.Meanwhile, a record share of the nation’s wealth remains in the hands of the nation’s billionaires, who are also paying a lower tax rate than the average American.How do the ultra-wealthy justify their wealth and their low tax rates? By using three myths – all of which are utter rubbish.The first is trickle-down economics.Billionaires (and their apologists) claim that their wealth trickles down to everyone else as they invest it and create jobs.Really? For more than 40 years, as wealth at the top has soared, almost nothing has trickled down. Adjusted for inflation, the median wage today is barely higher than it was four decades ago.Trump provided a giant tax cut to the wealthiest Americans, promising it would generate $4,000 increased income for everyone else. Did you receive it?In reality, the super-wealthy don’t create jobs or raise wages. Jobs are created when average working people earn enough money to buy all the goods and services they produce, pushing companies to hire more people and pay them higher wages.The second myth is the “free market”.The ultra-rich claim they’re being rewarded by the impersonal market for creating and doing what people are willing to pay them for.The wages of other Americans have stagnated, they say, because most Americans are worth less in the market now that new technologies and globalization have made their jobs redundant.Baloney. Even if they’re being rewarded, there’s no reason why the “free market’ would reward vast multiples of what the rich were rewarded with decades ago.The market can induce great feats of invention and entrepreneurship with lures of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars – not billions.As to the rest of us succumbing to labor-replacing globalization and labor-saving technologies, no other advanced nation has nearly the degree of inequality found in the United States, yet all these nations have been exposed to the same forces of globalization and technological change.In reality, the ultra-wealthy have rigged the so-called “free market” in the US for their own benefit. Billionaires’ campaign contributions have soared from a relatively modest $31m in the 2010 elections to $1.2bn in the most recent presidential cycle – a nearly 40-fold increase.What have they got for their money? Tax cuts, freedom to bash unions and monopolize markets and government bailouts. Their pockets have been further lined by privatization and deregulation.The third myth is that they’re superior human beings.They portray themselves as “self-made” rugged individuals who “did it on their own” and therefore deserve their billions.Bupkis. Six of the 10 wealthiest Americans alive today are heirs to fortunes passed on to them by wealthy ancestors.Others had the advantages that come with wealthy parents.Jeff Bezos’s garage-based start was funded by a quarter-million-dollar investment from his parents. Bill Gates’s mother used her business connections to help land a software deal with IBM that made Microsoft. Elon Musk came from a family that reportedly owned shares of an emerald mine in southern Africa.Don’t fall for these three myths.Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke.The so-called free market has been distorted by huge campaign contributions from the ultra-rich.Don’t lionize the ultra-rich as superior “self-made” human beings who deserve their billions. They were lucky and had connections.In reality, there is no justification for today’s extraordinary concentration of wealth at the very top. It’s distorting our politics, rigging our markets and granting unprecedented power to a handful of people.The last time America faced anything comparable was at the start of the 20th century.In 1910, former president Theodore Roosevelt warned that “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power” could destroy American democracy.Roosevelt’s answer was to tax wealth. The estate tax was enacted in 1916, and the capital gains tax in 1922.Since that time, both have eroded. As the rich have accumulated greater wealth, they have also amassed more political power – and have used that political power to reduce their taxes.Teddy Roosevelt understood something about the American economy and the ultra-rich that has now re-emerged, even more extreme and more dangerous. We must understand it, too – and act.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionInequalityTax and spendingJeff BezosElon MuskBill GatescommentReuse this content More