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    Trump and Musk Attack Journalists by Name in Social Media Posts

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    Since his inauguration, the president has been quick to demonize what he calls “the fake news media.” On Friday, both men demanded that individuals be fired.President Trump has made clear his animus toward mainstream media organizations. Now he’s getting more personal.Mr. Trump and his key lieutenant, Elon Musk, who has been empowered to run what they call the Department of Government Efficiency as a “special government employee,” have attacked journalists by name in recent days on the social media platforms they own: Truth Social and X.On his Truth Social account on Friday, Mr. Trump called for The Washington Post to fire Eugene Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, and labeled him “incompetent.” Mr. Trump frequently posts on the account to his millions of followers and regularly condemns perceived enemies.Mr. Robinson had written in an opinion column on Thursday that top Republican senators “should be ashamed of themselves” for not standing up to Mr. Trump during the confirmation process for some of his cabinet picks and for not protesting Mr. Musk’s taking an ax to government departments like the United States Agency for International Development, which administers foreign aid programs. Mr. Robinson also appeared on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC on Friday to discuss his column.“So sad to see him trying to justify the waste, fraud, and corruption at USAID with his pathetic Radical Left SPIN,” Mr. Trump wrote. “He should be fired immediately!!!”In an email, a spokeswoman for The Post said: “Eugene Robinson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist with a 45-year record of integrity, professionalism and scrupulous reporting and commentary. The Washington Post stands behind Gene — just as it stands behind all journalists and news organizations dedicated to independent coverage and a free press.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Matea Gold Named Washington Editor of The New York Times

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      Ms. Gold, a managing editor at The Washington Post, is the latest in a series of high-profile departures from the paper.Matea Gold, a managing editor at The Washington Post who until recently was a contender for the newspaper’s top editing role, is joining The New York Times as a senior editor in its Washington bureau.Ms. Gold will be Washington editor for The Times, reporting to its newly appointed Washington bureau chief, Dick Stevenson, the company said on Monday. She starts in January.Since May 2023, Ms. Gold, 50, has been a managing editor overseeing The Post’s political, local and investigative coverage. She was previously the newspaper’s national editor, leading a staff of 150 journalists. Ms. Gold joined The Post more than a decade ago from The Los Angeles Times and has served in a variety of roles, covering politics as a reporter and shepherding ambitious political investigations.Under Ms. Gold’s supervision, The Post’s national staff contributed to Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Post’s national staff also won a Pulitzer for a feature article on the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and end the constitutionally protected right to abortion.Her departure is the latest in a series of high-profile exits from The Post news and opinion departments in recent months.The newsroom has been in turmoil since Will Lewis, the company’s chief executive, abruptly forced out the paper’s top editor, Sally Buzbee, in June. Matt Murray, the former top editor of The Wall Street Journal, has led the newsroom on an interim basis since then. Several journalists from the opinion section stepped down from their positions after Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner, decided shortly before the U.S. presidential election that the paper would not endorse a candidate for president.The Post is searching for a permanent top editor for its news department. Ms. Gold had been considered a candidate for executive editor of The Post, according to two people familiar with the search process. Other candidates include Clifford Levy, a former deputy managing editor of The Times and now the deputy publisher of Wirecutter, The Times’s product recommendation site, and The Athletic, its sports site, the people said. Mr. Murray is also a candidate, the people said.One of the final hurdles is an interview with Mr. Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, who weighs in on hiring decisions for top positions.Ms. Gold joins The Times amid changes in the top ranks of its Washington bureau. The Times announced in November that Elisabeth Bumiller, who had led the bureau since 2015, would be stepping down from that role and returning to reporting. Mr. Stevenson, who has worked at The Times in various reporting and editing jobs for nearly 40 years, will be taking over for her in January. More

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      Why Jeff Bezos Likes ‘Messy’ Meetings

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      The billionaire founder of Amazon spoke with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Summit.Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post, defended his decision to end presidential endorsements at The Post and expressed optimism about a second Trump administration at the DealBook Summit on Wednesday. But he also delved into his personal philosophy in his discussion with Andrew, including how he approaches entrepreneurship and leadership.Why to run a ‘messy’ meetingIn a discussion about how Bezos views his influence, Bezos said he considers himself a wanderer. He added that he applies this mind-set to meetings, and that he is on time only to his first meeting of the day because “I won’t finish a meeting until it’s really finished.” Of this approach, he said:I try to teach, like, really wander in the meetings. There are certain kinds of meetings that are like a weekly business review or something where it’s a set pattern and you’re going through it — that can have an agenda and it can be very crisp. That’s a different kind of meeting. But for most of the meetings that are useful, we do these six-page memos, we do a half-hour study hall, we read them. And then we have a messy discussion. So I like the memos to be like angels singing from on high, so clear and beautiful. And then the meeting can be messy.About the value of running meetings this way, he said:You don’t want the whole thing to be figured out and then presented to you. You want to be part of the sausage-making. Like, show me the ugly bits. And I always ask, are there any dissenting opinions on the team? You know what? I want to try and get to the controversy.How to take a leap of faith as an entrepreneurAndrew asked Bezos where he gets the confidence to create a business that requires as much scale as Amazon or Blue Origin, where at the beginning it can be difficult to see how the full vision could materialize. Bezos said:I think it’s generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity. And so I think entrepreneurs in general, you know, would be well advised to try and bias against that piece of human nature: The risks are probably not as big as you perceive, and the opportunities may be bigger than you perceive.And so you say it’s confidence, but maybe it’s just trying to compensate for that — accepting that that’s a human bias, and trying to compensate against it. The second thing I would point out is that thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘An existential battle’: how Trump’s win is shifting the US media landscape

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      When MSNBC’s morning hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski announced to their viewers last week that they had paid a visit to Donald Trump at his Florida resort of Mar-a-Lago they must have suspected there would be a reaction.The married co-hosts on the liberal news network made hay for years lambasting Trump, especially in the run-up to the presidential election. Now, in the wake of his victory, they told their viewers they were seeking to reset communications with the man they had warned only a few weeks ago was set to bring fascism to America.“Joe and I realized it’s time to do something different,’ Brzezinski told Morning Joe viewers on Monday. “That starts with not only talking about Donald Trump but also talking with him.”Their reward? An online barn-burning by their critics online and a fall in viewer numbers for a show – and a network – already struggling in a rapidly declining US cable news sector. The following morning, broadcast viewing figures for the network plummeted 38%, according to Nielsen Media Research.Yet Scarborough and Brzezinski’s about-face is just one data point in the US media landscape that shows that some core elements of the press in America may be recalibrating its approach to how it covers the second Trump administration and where the all-in oppositional attitude that defined much of the press in his first term is in retreat.Yet the moves come after an election campaign in which Trump frequently attacked the media and dubbed them “enemies of the people”. It comes as his allies have threatened to curb the press and attack their media critics. They have also already launched a wave of multibillion-dollar lawsuits against a host of media companies for their coverage that they often baselessly claim to be bias, such as Trump’s allegation that CBS misleadingly edited an interview with Kamala Harris.Certainly those threats seemed to be at play with MSNBC, which is now also facing an uncertain future as the network is being spun off by its corporate parent, Comcast. A subsequent sale would come under the purview of Trump-appointed regulators.According to Puck News, the couple’s visit to Trump’s tropical paradise was because Scarborough was said to be “petrified” that the president-elect’s Department of Justice would go after him. “That’s what this was about,” a source told the news site about the motive. “It has nothing to do with ratings or Comcast. It’s all about fear of retribution and investigation.”“It was about access and power,” said Jeff Jarvis, a media writer. “But this visit didn’t do anything for access, and they didn’t come back with anything journalistic. They were willing to throw the reputation of the show, their reputations and the reputation of the network over for their own personal fears.”But MSNBC is not alone in facing tough choices. The US media are facing numerous issues: fears over what Trump might do, complex business decisions and interests faced by their corporate owners, and also an understanding that the president-elect won the popular vote, showing that their audiences exist beyond the safe havens of Trump criticism.But these are choppy waters. The Washington Post, famed for bringing down Richard Nixon, has been the focus of controversy under its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, and the British journalist, Will Lewis, he has tasked with running the once-storied brand.The Washington Post lost 250,000 subscribers after it declined to make a presidential endorsement. Bezos defended the decision, triggering suspicion that Amazon’s role as a defense industry data cloud contractor had played a part. But since Trump won, Lewis has not changed tack and a longstanding and widely respected political editor at the paper was reportedly removed from his job last week.The Post’s controversy has played at the same time as the Los Angeles Times made a similar call to block an endorsement of Kamala Harris, also triggering widespread dismay in the newsroom and a questioning of how critical of Trump the newspaper would continue to be.The Los Angeles Times’ billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, framed the matter as an attempt at neutrality, though his activist daughter Nika Soon-Shiong also said the decision was informed by Harris’s continued support for Israel as it wars in Gaza – which he later confirmed in an internal email.After years of anti-Trump coverage under Jeff Zucker, CNN is also effecting course-correction. Last week, the cable news giant’s Dana Bash said it was unclear whether a group of men carrying swastika flags marching in Columbus, Ohio, belonged to the far right or far left.“A group of neo-Nazis paraded through that city wearing, waving swastikas, covering their faces,” Bash said. “We don’t know what side of the aisle this comes from. I mean, typically neo-Nazis are from the far right.” The statement immediately attracted ridicule for its seemingly bizarre attempt at neutrality.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSome at the New York Times, too, are offering a more ameliorated tone than under the first Trump administration, even as the paper has continued to break stories on Trump’s preparations to return to power. The columnist David Brooks advocated soon after the election that Trump is a “sower of chaos, not fascism”, adding: “In chaos there’s opportunity for a new society and a new response to the Trumpian political, economic and psychological assault.”It is certainly a complex challenge. The media’s symbiotic relationship with Trump was both nurturing and self-destructive the first time around as readerships boomed, but a significant chunk of the population – the chunk that delivered Trump back into the White House – became even more hostile to the mainstream media and embraced the idea it was “fake news”.The news industry in the US, with a few exceptions, is on life support as audiences fracture and social media traffic referrals dry up. Social media is more trusted by the public, and the press is now facing a second hostile Trump administration with diminished resources.But would a more restrained approach work? Would it attract readers previously hostile to the media, and would it blunt any attacks from the Trump administration?Some are skeptical.“You’re trying to pursue readers you’ll never have and in the process pissing off the readers you do have,” Jarvis, the media writer, said of outlets playing it safe on Trump. “That’s the paradox – mass media still believes in the mass media. The challenge for journalism now is for people to feel heard and a separation from the power structures of politics and money.”The only network firmly in a good place appears to be rightwing Fox News, which dominated 24-hour news broadcasting through the election cycle and seems confident of its identity as America returns to life under a Trump presidency.Fox News finished the week of 11-17 November with its highest share of the cable news audience in the network’s 28-year history across multiple categories, while MSNBC saw its lowest-rated week in quarter of a century.For some observers, all this makes for worrying times ahead as America confronts a president with openly autocratic sympathies and a radical rightwing agenda.“The press is going to find itself in an existential battle for its own integrity if it does not decide to confront and challenge Trump top to bottom. There’s no way a truly free press can be neutral about lies and broken civic norms and survive,” said Jim Sleeper, author and retired lecturer in political science at Yale University.“If the populace has decided to trade in its freedom and rights for stability and security that authoritarians always promise, then the press has to make a choice and decide that honest journalists are dissidents.” More

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      in Elections

      Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Exchange Posts About Trump on X

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      The world’s two richest men are longtime business rivals, but now one of them has the ear of the next president of the United States.A few months ago, a three-post exchange between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk on Mr. Musk’s X would have passed for petty sniping between billionaire rivals.But times have changed.“Just learned tonight at Mar-a-Lago that Jeff Bezos was telling everyone that @realDonaldTrump would lose for sure, so they should sell all their Tesla and SpaceX stock,” Mr. Musk wrote Wednesday night, referring to two of his companies. He added an emoji for a snickering face, with a hand covering the mouth.“Nope. 100% not true,” Mr. Bezos responded on Thursday morning.“Well, then, I stand corrected,” Mr. Musk wrote back, with a laughing-crying emoji.With President-elect Donald J. Trump’s history of animosity toward Mr. Bezos, the posts carried an unspoken message about Mr. Musk’s growing power within the incoming administration.The exchange — brief, brassy and fairly typical of Mr. Musk’s overwhelming presence on X — could foreshadow a bumpy next few years for Mr. Bezos and the companies he started, Amazon and the rocket maker Blue Origin. It was also a reminder that the power dynamics in the longtime rivalry between the world’s two richest men changed on Nov. 5.Plenty of tech executives have drawn Mr. Trump’s wrath over the last few years. Perhaps none more than Mr. Bezos, largely because he owns The Washington Post, which has frequently written critically about Mr. Trump. (The Post did not endorse a presidential candidate this year, a decision that angered many of its readers and that Mr. Bezos publicly defended.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      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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      Here’s how the American press can survive four years of Trump | Margaret Sullivan

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      Everything we know about the next US president suggests that the press in America will be under siege in the next four years as never before.After all, Donald Trump has portrayed the media as the “enemy of the people”, has suggested that he wouldn’t mind seeing journalists get shot, and, in recent months, has sued CBS News and the Pulitzer prize organization.Now, with what he considers a mandate, he’ll want to push harder.“He’ll use every tool that he has, and there are many available to him,” predicted Marty Baron, the former executive editor of the Washington Post and the author of Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post, published last year.Baron told me on Wednesday that the president-elect had long been on a mission to undermine the mainstream media, and that he would be more empowered in a second term.Every would-be autocrat sees to it, after all, that an independent press doesn’t get in his way. Often, it’s one of the first democratic guardrails to be kicked down as a nation moves in an authoritarian direction.“Trump is salivating at the chance to sue a journalist for a leak of a classified document,” Baron said, perhaps using the century-old Espionage Act to exact a harsh punishment, even a prison term.With an aggressive attorney general – more combative than Jeff Sessions, whom Trump criticized for not being tough enough – that may be doable.And if even more source material is deemed classified, almost any story based on a leak can be depicted as a threat to national security.Another tactic: Trump’s allies will bankroll legal actions against the press, as the tech investor Peter Thiel did in a lawsuit against Gawker in 2016, forcing the media company into bankruptcy while portraying himself as a champion of quality journalism.Baron also sees Trump and friends threatening advertisers whose revenue keeps media companies in business – “and they will run for cover”.Then, if media outlets become sufficiently weakened, his allies may buy them and turn them into propaganda arms.Another likely move is to stonewall the press, making the job of informing the public much harder.Trump’s true believers, installed throughout the government, from the intelligence agencies to the IRS to the defense department, will anticipate what Trump wants and be hostile to reporters, Baron predicted. “Journalists will hit roadblocks constantly.”Toward the same end, legislation that weakens the Freedom of Information Act – which allows the press and the public the right to see much of what their government is doing – would be easy enough to enact with a Trump-friendly Congress.How to defend against all this?Baron hopes that media lawyers are already working on contingency plans to combat these moves, and that the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press will have the resources it needs to help as challenges arise. The non-profit provides pro bono legal representation to news organizations, reporters, documentary film-makers and others; and often contributes court documents to support journalists’ fights to protect their newsgathering.On Wednesday, the Reporters Committee sent out a fundraising email with a dire message beginning: “We won’t mince words – the next Trump administration poses a serious threat to press freedom.”I spoke on Thursday with Bruce Brown, the non-profit’s longtime executive director, who told me it will be important “to separate the daily indignations from the true legal threats” that are likely on their way. But, he said: “We have to prepare and be clear-eyed and get ready to act.”The organization is ready, though, with 20 lawyers on staff, many who worked on these issues during the first Trump administration. “In 2016, we were a third the size we are now, and we have lawyers with vastly more experience.”Major media organizations, he said, “need to stick together and not let him peel them off one by one”.More broadly, Marty Baron believes that the mainstream press needs to work on its trust problem.It needs to improve how it presents itself to the public, given that so many people are willing to believe that today’s journalism is part of the problem rather than a pillar of democracy.Bezos’s decision to quash a Post endorsement of Kamala Harris certainly didn’t help with enhancing trust, though the owner claimed he was motivated by wanting his paper to appear non-partisan; about 250,000 subscribers disagreed, cancelling in anger or disgust.Baron (who was critical of the decision to yank the editorial) urges the press to be “radically transparent” with the public.For example, journalists should provide access to full versions of the audio and video that their stories are based on, and should allow people to examine original documents or data sets.“The message,” he said, “should be ‘check my work’.”Baron also believes “the press has a lot to learn about what people’s genuine concerns are,” and should try harder to reach audiences of all political stripes.Trump’s messages about immigration, he believes, have found such fertile ground partly because of people’s worries, whether evidence-based or not, about jobs and salaries.Rebuilding trust is a long-term project. But the Trump-induced challenges are immediate.To survive them, the press needs to get ready now.

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