NPR is now reporting that for the first time since 1988, The Washington Post will not be endorsing a candidate for president in the upcoming elections. This was not the decision of the paper's staff, but appears to come after the direct intervention of conservative publisher Will Lewis and the paper's owner, billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
The editorial page editor, David Shipley, told colleagues that the Post's publisher, Will Lewis, would publish a note to readers online early Friday afternoon.
Shipley told colleagues the editorial board was told yesterday by management that there would not be an endorsement. He added that he "owns" this decision. The reason he cited was to create "independent space" where the newspaper does not tell people for whom to vote.
That is a self-evidently misleading and hackish claim. The paper has not shied from endorsing candidates until this very moment, and the paper has, to its credit, previously been plain in its condemnations of Donald Trump's myriad apparent criminal acts. On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump orchestrated a coup attempt that led to violence inside the U.S. Capitol. He promises militarized internment camps for migrants, both legal and not. After his presidency he was caught hoarding an immense cache of classified national secrets in his for-profit club; he lies to the public with reckless abandon, and promote hoaxes that encourage anti-democratic violence.
There is simply no question on his unfitness for office, and it is the essential function of the press to expose and condemn such corruption—but our press is owned, outright, by immensely wealthy people, and many of those wealthy people have government contracts that will depend on staying in the good graces of the next administration, whether it be a democratically elected presidency or the elevation of a new regime promising the ideological purge of government and a Holocaust-scaled effort to round up all those Trump has declared to be "enemies."
Jeff Bezos has weighed the threat to his nation against the threat to his pocketbook—and chosen his own interests.
Bezos is not alone in thwarting his owned media outlets' journalistic independence in a pre-election bid to ingratiate himself to Trump if Trump should win. Los Angeles Times editor Mariel Garza resigned, along with two members of the paper's editorial board, after billionaire Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked his paper from issuing a Harris endorsement. Like Bezos, Soon-Shiong's wealth depends in large part on government cooperation; a displeased future Trump administration could easily retaliate against him by intervening in Food and Drug Administration reviews of his products, and Trump has promised such retaliations if elected.
So Soon-Shiong, like Bezos, will now pretend that the differences between a moderate Democrat and the leader of a coup-attempting fascist movement already responsible for violence, a convicted felon whose political strategies revolve entirely around promoting false hoaxes for the sake of instilling public fear, are too nuanced for his paper to come to a conclusion on. Because he is a coward, and because he values himself over his country.
We are witnessing the final acquiescence that dismantles democracies and brings fascists to power: The willing compliance of a nation's most powerful and wealthy figures, not because they endorse the fascist cause but out of an eagerness to preemptively cater to leaders who promise, straight-out, that they will inflict punishments on anyone who does not align themselves. America has been in this position before, held captive to the wealthy and the corrupt. And America has a long history of supporting and appeasing fascist causes; Trump's America First slogan was taken directly from one of the most prominent.
But it's not clear whether America has ever faced a fascist threat in which such an overwhelming proportion of its most wealthy citizens have all assembled behind a man and a movement that outright boasts of its own corruption.
In refusing to oppose a plainly corrupt seditionist for fear of monetary repercussions, Bezos has betrayed his country. Soon-Shiong has betrayed his country. It is not a matter of partisanship; if we are to have a "free press," then the press must at minimum be permitted to both expose corruption and punish that corruption with public condemnations of those behind it. By putting their thumbs on the scales, both have sabotaged the "free press" for their own self-interests.
Those who profess to not be able to tell the substantive difference between the backers of a coup and the opponents of one are lying, and there is only one reason to lie about such measures. It is a means of throwing their lot in with the seditionists without explicitly saying so. It may be due to cowardice.
But, just as likely, it is an intentional move to bring Trump's fascist promises to fruition.
UPDATE: Lewis' attempt to explain his Trump-boosting act as principled is as absurd as you would expect from a Murdoch protege. And we now know that the Post's editors had already drafted the paper's expected endorsement of Harris when Lewis and Bezos made the decision to kill it.
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