I wasn’t sure where to put this story about Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, announcing basically an edict from now on the WP will only publish stories advocating freedom and free markets.
(My Irony Meter seems to be shattered into a million flaming pieces, so I’m not sure if there’s any irony here).
But I couldn’t find a quite appropriate thread and ISTM a general discussion of the state of free speech could be good. There’s a thread about the AP being blocked from press briefings, but I wanted to make a general one.
I can’t tell if this is suggesting that the paper will become more unfriendly to Trump, who is against freedom and inarguably against free markets, or if we’re in upside-down-land and they’re going to be more supportive. Either way, I completely agree with Chefguy.
As I have said before, I lived in northern Virginia from birth til age 16. The Washington Post was trustworthy, respectable and truthful all that time. IIRC This is the paper Woodward and Burnstein worked for when they published the Watergate story.
This is not just another media outlet falling. This is a huge deal.
The Post’s opinion editor should not have stepped down! He should have commissioned pieces on how the new administration threatens “personal liberties” and “free markets.”
I came to that conclusion after the Post published endorsements of all but four of Trump’s nominees for Cabinet secretaries and heads of independent agencies (something it has not done with previous administrations), which of course followed pulling an editorial board endorsement for Kamala Harris to avoid an appearance of partisanship. Fuck the Post and good luck to everyone fleeing it.
It is certainly the death knell for “old media”, although frankly that vine has been withering for decades with local dailies shriveling up due to lack of ad revenue and major papers and televisions stations being consolidated under a handful of large corporations. There is some great opinion/editorials on Substack and other online sources, and good investigative journalism being done under the aegis of ProPublica, Associated Presss, and a few other international news cooperatives but the kind of reporting on municipal and statehouse issues that we used to take for granted is all but gone.
I’m not even necessarily disagreeing with you, but I mean, newspaper owners determining the content of their newspapers has largely been the rule rather than the exception throughout much of US history.
Right. I think this example is a bit nuanced, maybe not the best one to have started this thread with, but I’ve done it now.
If the letter really reflected how the WP will write, then it’s an issue for FOS, but a relatively minor one. The owner of a publication has the prereogative to decide “this is going to be a conservative newspaper” [ETA: As We_re_wolves_not_werewolves correctly says], but going so far as to say upfront what direction all their writers are always going to come from is a bit much.
In theory though this would mean frequently criticizing MAGA, who are up in everyone’s grill, banning everything from trans in the military to paper straws. Let alone their meddling with the markets.
But I think I would not be alone though in thinking the subtext here is toeing the MAGA line. That no-one is allowed to advocate for “woke”, “leftist” positions, but, for the most part, they will turn a blind eye to all that Magamusk do. Obviously that’s a much bigger issue.
It’s also what free speech is about. Free speech doesn’t mean accurate, truthful, or even useful speech. We have YouTube, Twitter, and all that other crap where people use their right to free speech more than any other time in history.
Well, just now I did agree that the owner of a publication can impose editorial direction, even if Bezos has gone further than usual. (and is probably signalling that this will become a MAGA propaganda outfit, like X, FOX, Truth social etc).
But you seem to be defining free speech in a way where there could never be any impingements on it. We can always say it doesn’t matter if I restrict the speech of others because, hey, youtube exists.
Folks should note that the, condensed, First Amendment says, Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of the press
not, Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom to a press
Fair enough. To be honest though, I think it’s a red herring to see this purely in constitutional terms. While some actions appear to me to be unconstitutional (e.g. the school book bans) it appears that it’s also possible to exert a lot of pressure on media companies to say the “right” things about this administration with things like access to press briefings and just the repeated threat of litigation from an authoritarian government. They don’t need to write a new bill.
In related news, Paul Krugman has quit the NYT and started publishing on substack, due to the immense new constraints the paper put on his columns and newsletter.
I wondered, for a bit, if this means that Marc A. Thiessen, the Post’s most Trumpist columnist, would be fired. But – not likely. For one thing, Thiessen, despite aligning with Trump most of the time, opposes tariffs. As for personal liberties, the meaning of that is particularly hard to pin down without explication. You might say that unfettered migration is part of personal liberties. In that case – Thiessen would be fired for defending Trump’s anti-immigrant measures. But Bezos may only mean personal liberties for Americans.
On it’s face the Washington Post is adopting the Wall Street Journal model of good hard news journalism combined with a right-wing pro-business editorial page. If that’s what it is, I will keep my subscription for now.
P.S. I rarely read the Wall Street Journal, so my judgment concerning their coverage is conceivably dated.
Read the Columbia Journalism Review too. A great source of news.
Yeah, that’s a sensible course. Otherwise you’re punishing the journalists who do good journalism for the misfortune of having a craven owner.
The WSJ is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who now apparently hates Trump. The paper has kept its pro-business slant, which means that its editorials necessary object to the insane tariffs and other anti-business Trump proposals. His other paper, the New York Post, is putting anti-trump headlines on its front page, like the recent one showing a big picture of Putin with the headline This Is a Dictator, after Trump referred to Zelensky as one.
The number of people who read newspaper opinion columns rather than the front page headlines is rather small. I was appalled when I first read this report, but I’ve calmed down because, you know what? It really doesn’t matter. Newspaper op-eds are as dead as print newspapers themselves. And Bezos will reverse course in 2029 when a new president reverses every one of Trump’s idiocies.
It’s about a half-hour, but it talks about FB’s history of content moderation by varying methods and to varying degrees, and their recent apparent pivot which … well … may have come about as a result of Trump’s direct threats to Mark Zuckerberg.
“Every accusation is actually a confession.”
It also may explain why some billionaires (some needed little encouragement to begin with) have seemingly ‘come around’ to the thinking of the current administration and decided that … maybe fascism is worth a try.
When I think of the title of the OP, I’m constantly reminded of Isaac Asimov’s great quote:
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
–Isaac Asimov
Of course, the current iteration of conservatives frames this all as a free speech issue. Take away their right to misinform, disinform, propagandize, spin beyond any semblance of recognition, and abjectly lie, and you’ll leave them with nothing.