That may well be true for a number of people, yourself included. But I do wonder how many of the 250,000 or so up-in-arms readers/workers would take the same principled stance against billionaire interference if the editorial board was about to issue an endorsement of Trump and the same thing happened.
Somehow, I don’t think the Washington Post comments section would be taking the same principled stand, and demanding the paper continue with its endorsement of Trump. That would lead me to believe it is indeed more about the candidate/party than editorial interference.
The current furor is over owner censorship and editorial interference.
If the Washington Post editorial board were to hypothetically prepare an endorsement of Trump, I agree that people would also be upset, but for a different reason.
For me, in the case of editorial interference, I’m upset, but I haven’t yet actually cancelled my subscription. In the latter case of a hypothetical Trump endorsement, I would cancel my subscription immediately.
Why? Because Trump is not a normal politician, but is an threat to democracy—someone who does not even pretend to respect the democratic process, who tried repeatedly to overturn the will of the people in the last election to the point of encouraging an armed mob to overrun and desecrate the U.S. Capitol in a last-ditch attempt to subvert the process, and has stated clearly and repeatedly that his aim if re-elected is to dismantle the rule of law, arrest his enemies, bring the army to police our streets, shut down the free press, and deport millions of undocumented immigrants (which will simultaneously cause a humanitarian crisis while also creating an economic crisis, exacerbated only by his promised trade war). I personally am unable to maintain much of a relationship with any Trump supporter, much less one I am paying for as a consumer.
I think a lot of the people that are upset are considering not endorsing anyone on par with endorsing Trump. Think of it like your left-leaning friend voting for Cornell West/Jill Stein. It’s not a Trump vote, but it might as well be.
No. Just…fucking…no. The issue isn’t that the editorial board of the Washington Post decided a priori to no longer publish endorsements (which they are, in fact, still doing for local candidates and their non-voting D.C. Representative); it is that the billionaire owner of the paper, a day after executives from his aerospace startup, Blue Origin, met with Trump and his campaign officials, dictated to his pet publisher and CEO to override the editorial board’s prerogative and ordering them to not publish the already drafted endorsement for Harris. This wasn’t some sudden attack of journalistic ethics or a desire to avoid the appearance of bias in reporting; it was literally an oligarch—one of the richest people in the world who, if he desired to do so, could fund his own ‘dark money’ campaign against an aspiring demagogue with some small fraction of his net worth—deciding that it was better to preemptively curry favor with a self-declared would-be dictator to protect his business interests.
Stop papering over this as if this is just business as normal. This is how fascist gains hold in a society, and I don’t mean that as just an academic theory but as literally how the Nazi party came to rise from being a mob of thugs with a buffoonish leader to running all of a previously democratic Germany as a complete autocracy, implementing ‘racial purity laws’ to intern, sterilize, and then institutionally slaughter 17 million people and start a global war that resulted in many millions of more deaths. The Nazi Party was failing, virtually bankrupt, and Hitler was regarded as a gadfly before he got powerful industrialists to not only back his campaigns but to use their power to shut down critics, suppress political dissent in their employees, and boost him to complete control after which he established special courts to persecute his political enemies and dismantle all democratic institutions. The parallels for anyone who has studied the late Weimar era and the rise of Nazism are stunning and it is frankly frightening just how willing a substantial polity of Americans are to retread that same tragic route. And it all starts with just a little light suppression, a dash of equivocation, and a lot of people just shrugging and and saying, “Das ist nicht mein Problem.”
Just cancelled my Amazon Prime membership. It won’t make any difference to Jeff Bezos or Amazon, but I’ll be fucked in a poke if I give another dime to that motherfucker.
I notice here that you’re conflating bias with partisan which isn’t always the same. Elimination of bias is impossible. Every news outlet has it. Claiming to be unbiased is actually one of the most insidious forms of narrative-pushing. That’s why bias transparency is superior - you can get a meaningful narrative from “You know that we favor human rights, so here’s our take on XYZ”.
There’s a deep-rooted misperception that there exists a mythical beast called “unbiased reporting”, which can be identfied by a roughly equal balance of negative stories about all factions.
While it’s true that we could suspect partisanship from outlets that (for example) never makes Republicans look bad, this is easily gamed by actors like Fox who add token criticism of Republicans. And of course in the reality-based environment where the conservative faction has followed Trump off the deep end, the “equal criticism” approach becomes an outrageous bias of its own. It’s not biased or partisan to suggest that Trump is uniquely horrible. It’s not sound journalistic practice to paint Harris as remotely comparable.
It’s hard to dispute the circular logic that stories are only believable if they are believed. But I would very strongly dispute the idea that credible news is about reporting whatever people feel like believing. That’s called entertainment, not news, though it’s what many networks are doing nowadays.
As I’ve said before, back in 2019 or so my mother’s friend Helga said ‘Trump’s rise to power reminds me of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.’ I would dismiss such a statement from most people as hyperbole. Helga was a Holocaust survivor. She had a number tattooed on her arm in the camps. She went to schools to give lectures on the Holocaust and bigotry in general. Coming from Helga, that sentence is based on a bunch of facts and piles of evidence and it continues to terrify me.
It’s less than a ten minute read. I’d like to humbly suggest it as ‘required reading.’
Note that Laurence Britt did not start with Donald Trump and reason backward (in fact, Britt wrote this piece in the Spring of 2003). Instead, his 14 points are derived from his analysis of:
the following regimes: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia.
My suggestion? Pause after reading each of the 14 points, and reflect on Trump since about the middle of 2015.
Also, this is the transcript from a story from On The Media, a public radio program. It includes an interview with Jason Stanley, a Yale professor who explains why Trump is a fascist.
My grandma was a holocaust survivor (fled Germany soon after kristallnacht as an adolescent and then spent WWII in hiding in the Netherlands) and she saw the parallels. She was only alive for the 2016 campaign and the early part of his presidency. When Trump got elected my mom (and I believe my grandma) repeated what my grandma had told me when I was very young – no one believed “it” could happen in Germany.
The Yale professor in the On The Media story I linked to described his grandmother’s experiences as “a cultured German Jewish woman, an actor for Max Reinhardt and Fritz Lang, living in a fancy area of Berlin.” And that “there was a widespread thought that the antisemitism wasn’t serious, it wasn’t to be taken literally.” The parallels are very disturbing.
I doubt not making an endorsement is even going to help Bezos significantly if Trump wins. There is a history there. And in terms of space exploration he has more reason to favour Musk.
Economist excerpt:
America may well breeze through four more years of Mr Trump, as it has the presidencies of other flawed men from both parties. The country may even thrive. But voters claiming to be hard-headed are overlooking the tail risk of a Trump presidency. By making Mr Trump leader of the free world, Americans would be gambling with the economy, the rule of law and international peace. We cannot quantify the chance that something will go badly wrong: nobody can. But we believe voters who minimise it are deluding themselves.
The case against Mr Trump begins with his policies. In 2016 the Republican platform was still caught between the Mitt Romney party and the Trump party. Today’s version is more extreme. Mr Trump favours a 20% tariff on all imports and has talked of charging over 200% or even 500% on cars from Mexico. He proposes to deport millions of irregular immigrants, many with jobs and American children. He would extend tax cuts even though the budget deficit is at a level usually seen only during war or recession, suggesting a blithe indifference to sound fiscal management. These policies would be inflationary, potentially setting up a conflict with the Federal Reserve. They would risk igniting a trade war that would ultimately impoverish America.
…conflagrations [in Ukraine, Taiwan and the Middle East] would test Mr Trump in a way that his first term did not. His glib promises to bring peace to Ukraine in a day, and his open-ended encouragement of Israel’s offensives, are not reassuring. Even worse is his contempt for alliances. Although these are America’s greatest geopolitical strength, Mr Trump sees them as scams that let weak countries scrounge off its military power. Bluster and threats may see Mr Trump through, but they could equally destroy nato. China will be watching as it weighs up how aggressive to be against Taiwan. Asian allies may calculate they can no longer trust America’s nuclear guarantee. The risks for domestic and foreign policy are amplified by the last big difference between Mr Trump’s first term and a possible second one: he would be less constrained.
…[Harris] has ordinary shortcomings, none of them disqualifying. Some of her policies are worse than her opponent’s, for example her taste for regulation and for further taxing wealth-creation. Some are merely less bad, on trade and the deficit, say. But some, on climate and abortion, are unambiguously better. It is hard to imagine Ms Harris being a stellar president, though people can surprise you. But you cannot imagine her bringing about a catastrophe. Presidents do not have to be saints and we hope that a second Trump presidency would avoid disaster. But Mr Trump poses an unacceptable risk to America and the world. If The Economist had a vote, we would cast it for Ms Harris.
For whatever reason, Musk’s SpaceX has accomplished a lot more than Bezos’ Blue Origin. (And that annoys me, mostly because a college friend works at Blue Origin.)
