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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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      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

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      in US Politics

      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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      in Elections

      Corporate America Braces for Trump 2.0

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      The race for the White House is deadlocked, but business leaders aren’t taking chances, reaching out to the former president to rebuild relations.Are business leaders already banking on a second Trump presidency?Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesDo C.E.O.s think Donald Trump will win? As the presidential race nears its end next week, the most notable public sound from many C.E.O.s and businesses on the election has been silence — and Donald Trump’s camp is increasingly interpreting that as a sign that corporate America may be preparing for him to win.New reports show that top business leaders, including Silicon Valley heavyweights, have reached out to the former president, seemingly looking to rebuild relations and protect their businesses if Trump defeats Vice President Kamala Harris.Business leaders are privately discussing how to prepare for a Trump return. Attendees at a gathering last week of the Business Council, an invite-only association of C.E.O.s, talked about steps to take in case Trump goes after perceived enemies, according to The Washington Post.“I’ve told C.E.O.s to engage as fast as possible because the clock is ticking,” an unidentified Trump adviser told The Post. “If you’re somebody who has endorsed Harris, and we’ve never heard from you at any point until after the election, you’ve got an uphill battle.”Big Tech leaders are among those trying to reboot relations. In recent weeks, Trump has said that he has spoken with Tim Cook of Apple and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet. He has also heard from Mark Zuckerberg, and CNN adds that Andy Jassy of Amazon has reached out.The reason for such outreach is clear, Trump associates told CNN: Trump has gone after many of their companies and re-establishing relations is at the least a hedge in case he wins next week. (An unidentified source told CNN that Jassy’s call, made at the company’s request, was a general exchange of pleasantries.)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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      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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      in Elections

      The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times Endorsement Calls Are Self-Sabotage

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      I can think of some compelling reasons that leading independent newspapers should not be in the business of endorsing candidates for president.Unfortunately, the acts of self-sabotage by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times do not reflect any of them. And so one more bulwark against autocracy erodes.The owners of both papers took as long as possible to reveal what they had already concluded: For the first time in years — since 2004 for The Los Angeles Times and 1988 for The Post — each would refrain from endorsing a presidential candidate. This inspired Donald Trump’s campaign to whoop that even Vice President Kamala Harris’s “fellow Californians know she’s not up for the job.” The Times’s editorial editor, Mariel Garza, resigned and said the decision made the organization look “craven and hypocritical.” Others followed.The Post’s endorsement of Ms. Harris had reportedly already been drafted, only to be shelved on the orders of its owner, Amazon’s founder, Mr. Bezos. But it fell to the paper’s publisher, William Lewis, to announce the decision, saying, “We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.” Its editorial editor, David Shipley, in the face of his mutinous editorial board, said he owned the outcome, which he called a way of creating “independent space” for voters to make up their own minds.I’m not worried that Post and Los Angeles Times readers will have trouble deciding how to vote. I’m worried they’ll have trouble deciding whom to trust.Both papers are owned by billionaires — Patrick Soon-Shiong at The Times and Mr. Bezos at The Post — and it is this grim similarity that raises alarms, especially in the case of The Post, whose “Democracy dies in darkness” motto now moans like an epitaph. Rightly or wrongly, readers will reasonably conclude The Post backed off an endorsement of Ms. Harris to protect the owner’s business interests. Those interests are vast, spread across commerce, the military and, increasingly, the frothing frontiers of artificial intelligence. How now can readers trust The Post’s often excellent news coverage of those topics, which are core to its mission? It did not help the paper’s credibility when, on the day the nonendorsement was announced, Mr. Trump was spotted greeting executives of Mr. Bezos’ Blue Origin space company in Austin, Texas.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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      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