Talkin’ Trash

U.S. presidential sayings that will go down in history:

“government of the people, by the people and for the people”

“ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country”

“we’re like a garbage can of the world”

The Guardrails Are Already Crumpling – by Jonathan V. Last

ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, the Washington Post announced that it would not be making an endorsement in the presidential race. After that, a number of things happened very quickly.
First, the paper’s former executive editor Marty Baron called the decision “cowardice.”
Second, at least one senior Post opinion writer resigned.
Third, it was leaked that the editor of the editorial page had already drafted the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris when publisher Will Lewis—who is a new hire, hailing from the Rupert Murdoch journalism tree—quashed it and then released a CYA statement about how the paper was “returning to its roots” of not endorsing candidates. The Post itself reported that the decision was made by the paper’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Everything about this story feels like a tempest in a teapot, a boiling story about legacy media fretting over itself in the mirror.
It’s not.
It’s a situation analogous to what we saw in Russia in the early 2000s: We are witnessing the surrender of the American business community to Donald Trump.
No one cares about the Washington Post’s presidential endorsement. It will not move a single vote. The only people who care about newspaper editorial page endorsements are newspaper editorial writers.
No one really cares all that much about the future of the Washington Post, either. I mean, I care about it, because I care about journalism and I respect the institution.
But this isn’t a journalism story. It’s a business story.
Following Trump’s 2016 victory, the Post leaned hard into its role as a guardian of democracy. This meant criticizing, and reporting aggressively on, Trump, who responded by threatening Bezos’s various business interests.
And that’s what this story is about: It’s about the most consequential American entrepreneur of his generation signaling his submission to Trump—and the message that sends to every other corporation and business leader in the country. In the world.
Killing this editorial says, If Jeff Bezos has to be nice to Trump, then so do you. Keep your nose clean, bub.
We have seen this movie before.
The year was 2003, and the scene was Russia, where Vladimir Putin, still in his first term as president, had not yet let the mask slip.
Putin was carefully consolidating power and he realized that the same oligarchs who had supported him initially were also a source of danger. Their money and control of important industries—especially the media—gave them independent bases of power. And every autocrat knows that dictatorship only works when his subjects understand that the only power they may have is the power he grants them.
At the time, Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the wealthiest man in Russia. He controlled Yukos, a massive oil company he cobbled together from formerly state-owned assets. He had the kind of wealth and power that made him untouchable, and he started making noises about getting more involved in politics—maybe even running for office.
So Putin had him arrested.
You may not remember this, but the Khodorkovsky case was a major piece of international news at the time. In the West, people weren’t quite sure what to make of it. Khodorkovsky’s people waged an aggressive PR campaign on his behalf claiming that his arrest was politically motivated and that Putin was becoming a thug.
Putin’s side portrayed it as an anti-corruption move, since Khodorkovsky was no angel.
Here in the West, we were all still giddy over glasnost and the end of the Cold War. We didn’t want to believe that Russia might be plunging back into authoritarianism. So people mostly took a wait-and-see approach.
But the Russians understood.
Khodorkovsky was convicted and sent to a labor camp in the Russian Far East while the government confiscated Yukos and redistributed it to Putin’s cronies. Khodorkovsky’s money, his power, his connections—none of it could protect him from Vladimir Putin.
The rest of the oligarchs got the message. If Putin could get to Khodorkovsky, he could get to anybody.
And so the oligarchs fell in line and ceased to be a source of concern to Putin. Instead of alternative power centers, they became vassals.
Which is exactly what Jeff Bezos has just taught Jamie Dimon and every other important American businessman.
These guys can hear the music. They’ve seen the sides being chosen: Elon Musk and Peter Theil assembling with Trump’s gangster government in waiting. They see Mark Zuckerberg praising Trump as a “badass.” And now they see Bezos getting in line, too.
What’s remarkable is that Trump didn’t have to arrest Bezos to secure his compliance. Trump didn’t even have to win the election. Just the fact that he has an even-money chance to become president was threat enough.
Or maybe that’s not remarkable. One of Timothy Snyder’s rules for resisting authoritarians is that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” People surrender preemptively much more often than you might expect.
Two weeks ago, Ian Bassin and Maximillian Potter wrote what might be the most prophetic essay of the year. They warned about “anticipatory obedience” in the media.
Seventeen days later, Bezos made his demonstration.
In case you needed reminding: The “guardrails” aren’t guardrails. They’re people.
And they’re already collapsing. Before a single state has been called.

kudos to NYT.  wonder if/when wapo’s draft endorsing kamala will show up before election.  here’s another take from c j review no less:

The Washington Post opinion editor approved a Harris endorsement. A week later, Jeff Bezos killed it. – Columbia Journalism Review

On Friday, the Washington Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, announced that the paper would no longer make endorsements for president—after its journalists had already drafted an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. The decision was made by Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner.
Over a period of several weeks, a Post staffer told me, two Post board members, Charles Lane and Stephen W. Stromberg, had worked on drafts of a Harris endorsement. (Neither was contacted for this article.) “Normally we’d have had a meeting, review a draft, make suggestions, do editing,” the staffer told me. Editorial writers started to feel angsty a few weeks ago, per the staffer; the process stalled. Around a week ago, editorial page editor David Shipley told the editorial board that the endorsement was on track, adding that “this is obviously something our owner has an interest in.”
“We thought we were dickering over language—not over whether there would be an endorsement,” the Post staffer said. So journalists at the Post, in both the news and opinion departments, were stunned Friday after Shipley told the editorial board at a meeting that it would not take a position after all. This represents the first time the Post has sat out a presidential endorsement since 1988.
The meeting was quickly followed by an opinion essay from publisher Lewis, who wrote, “We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable. We don’t see it that way.” In a news story, the Post made clear that the decision came from Bezos.
NPR reported that management had known for weeks that there would be no endorsement, and that Shipley, in breaking the news to his staff on Thursday, said he “owns” the decision. However, my source disputed that account, saying that Shipley very much seemed on board with the endorsement and that the decision to pull it appeared to have been made within the past few days.
The move follows one by my former colleague Mariel Garza, who resigned on Wednesday from her position as the editorials editor at the Los Angeles Times in protest of a decision by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the publisher, to block the editorial board’s plan to endorse Harris. The Times did not make presidential endorsements from 1976 through 2004 but resumed the practice in 2008 and endorsed Democrats in the past four elections.
The decisions at both newspapers have angered staff members, who point out that both papers have published editorials for more than nine years now describing the threats Donald Trump poses to American democracy; his constant stream of falsehoods; his role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol; his public policies; and his promises to be a dictator—for one day, at least—if elected.
Ian Bassin, a democracy expert, calls these moves “anticipatory obedience”: fear by owners that if Trump wins he could take vengeance on companies that cross him. They noted that the leadership at CNN and the Post changed after the Trump administration tried to block the takeover of CNN’s parent company and tried to deny a cloud computing contract for Amazon, Bezos’s company.
Bezos bought the Post in 2013, from the Graham family, for $250 million. Soon-Shiong bought the Times in 2018, from the Tribune Company, for $500 million. Both billionaires initially attracted praise but have since come under fire. Neither paper managed to be a breakout economic success; both have had layoffs. In each newsroom, respected editors were brought in (Sally Buzbee at the Post, Norman Pearlstine and Kevin Merida at the Times) only to later leave under pressure or in frustration.
Martin Baron, who edited the Post from 2012 to 2021, winning wide acclaim for his leadership of the newsroom during the Trump presidency, issued a statement to NPR denouncing the last-minute decision to withhold an endorsement. “This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty,” he said. “Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
Opting against endorsements has drawn harsh scrutiny on social media. Many readers—more than thirteen hundred at the Times and around two thousand at the Post, according to a report by Semafor—have canceled subscriptions. Others have asked (reasonably, in my view) why newspapers endorse candidates at all—and whether endorsements have a negative influence on the balance and objectivity they expect from news coverage.
The most serious allegation, though, is that Soon-Shiong and Bezos are trying to hedge their bets out of fear that their business interests could be harmed during a second Trump presidency. Soon-Shiong, who made his fortune as a biopharmaceutical innovator, is working on new drugs that would presumably require FDA approval. Amazon faces an antitrust lawsuit, brought last year by the Biden administration, that will take years to litigate or settle.
There is one difference between the situations at the Times and the Post. The Times has provided no explanation of its decision not to make a presidential endorsement, nor has it reported on the resignations of Garza, Robert Greene, and Karin Klein—all editorial writers whom I oversaw when I served as editorial page editor of the Times in 2020 and 2021. In several confusing tweets, Soon-Shiong and his daughter Nika attempted to explain what happened. Soon-Shiong asserted that he had asked the editorial board to write a nonpartisan, side-by-side analysis of where the candidates stood on various issues, and that the editorial board chose to remain silent—an account that Garza denies. (On X, Elon Musk replied to Soon-Shiong: “Makes sense.”) Then, Nika wrote on X that she agreed with the editorial board’s “decision”—in her characterization—but attributed it to the “genocide” going on in Gaza, arguing that the Biden-Harris administration hasn’t done enough to rein in Israel’s military intervention, which has claimed thousands in casualties. The tweets left Times staffers uncertain whether Musk, pro-Palestinian peace activism, or some other force was driving the decision.
In contrast, Lewis portrayed the Post’s decision as “returning to our roots,” though the paper’s practices, over the years, have been inconsistent. It endorsed Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, but declined to make an endorsement of either Richard Nixon or John F. Kennedy in 1960. In 1976, it endorsed Jimmy Carter. Lewis wrote of Friday’s decision: “We see it as consistent with the values the Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects. We also see it as a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds on this, the most consequential of American decisions—whom to vote for as the next president.”
It was a far more coherent statement than anything the Times has offered. But in both newsrooms, journalists’ unions have expressed outrage. “We are deeply concerned about our owner’s decision to block a planned endorsement in the presidential race,” the Los Angeles Times Guild said. “We are even more concerned that he is now unfairly assigning blame to editorial members for his decision not to endorse.”
The Washington Post Guild was not buying their boss’s logic. “The message from our chief executive, Will Lewis—not from the editorial board itself—makes us concerned that management interfered with the work of our members in editorial,” the union said. “According to your own reporters and Guild members, an endorsement for Harris was already drafted, and the decision not to publish was made by the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos. We are already seeing cancellations from once-loyal readers. This decision undercuts the work of our members at a time when we should be building our readers’ trust, not losing it.”

from msn:

The Washington Post’s cartoon team has taken a measure of revenge on the newspaper’s decision to avoid making a formal presidential endorsement with a dark formless image clearly designed to skewer the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan that the outlet adopted during billionaire Jeff Bezos’s ownership.

 

click for wapo’s very own prize-winning cartoonist’s Opinion | Ann Telnaes cartoon on The Post not endorsing a presidential candidate – The Washington Post

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