Preemptive Compliance: The Fourth Estate Is Caving In Expectation of Trump Victory
First, the LA Times and now the Washington Post, formerly iconic newspapers, fall in line to support Trump.
First, it was the Los Angeles Times. The newspaper’s billionaire owner prevented his editors from publishing an endorsement for Kamala Harris. The editorials editor, Mariel Garza, resigned the following day, explaining that as a leading newspaper whose role in the Fourth Estate is to sound alarm bells when democracy is under assault, the newspaper was failing America and its citizens.
“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent,” Garza said. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up (Los Angeles Times Editor Resigns).”
The owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, claims he asked his editors to analyze how Trump and Biden’s policies affected the country and then let readers draw their conclusions without the weight of the paper guiding them. Soon-Shiong didn’t find the “analysis” thorough enough, so he claims the editorial board’s “silence” gave him the right to quash any endorsement for Harris.
Patrick Soon-Shiong is the latest South African-born billionaire whose questionable understanding of democracy — thanks to his upbringing in South Africa — is using his financial power to silence the power of the truth. In times past, before the gutting of the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan and the subsequent rise of extremist talk radio (Rush) and then Fox News, American journalists were expected to inform the public, defaulting to balanced fairness. Soon-Shiong, like his fellow countrymen Elon Musk and Peter Thiel — who coopted Nate Silver, the former founder of the reliable 538 polling site — is falling back on his South African authoritarian roots to silence Americans and dismantle one of our most fundamental traditions, the freedom of the press. Two more board members resigned in protest of Soon-Shiong’s blatant interference.
It didn’t take long for the world to react to this outrage. So as not to be outdone in his preemptive fawning over America’s first-ever openly fascist president and dictator-in-waiting, Jeff Bezos announced that his newspaper, the famous Washington Post, would also withhold an endorsement.
“The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election,” wrote Will Lewis, The Post’s chief executive. “Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”
The Post has endorsed presidential candidates since 1976, Mr. Lewis wrote, when it gave its stamp of approval to Jimmy Carter, who went on to win the election. Before that, it generally did not make presidential endorsements, though it made an exception in 1952 to back Dwight Eisenhower (It Will Stop Endorsing Presidential Candidates).
What we are seeing taking place is a complete meltdown of our democracy. Two of the most influential newspapers, even despite the apparent right-ward tilt of the Washington Post in the last few years at the behest of Bezos, who wants more conservative opinion writers, are signaling to the current presidential favorite, Donald Trump, that they will be obedient pawns in his fascist takeover of our nation. Bezos has billions of dollars in contracts with the federal government, and that is why he wants Trump to know that he and his newspaper have no hard feelings, “Mr. President.”
It is known as “preemptive compliance,” and the more it looks like Trump will win, the more we will see the key elements that support the foundations of our democracy fall into place. The signaling coming from two billionaire business owners whose investments in two of the nation’s formerly most important voices in reporting truth in our country is that when Trump enters the room, they will be willing to stand at attention just like he wished they would do. (Trump was very impressed by the way North Koreans reacted when Kim Jung-Un walked into the room and wished that Americans reacted that way when he entered.)
The former owner of the Washington Post, Katherine Graham, is undoubtedly turning over in her grave at what is happening in our country and at her beloved paper. Bezos, a bizarre, middle-aged man who ditched his wife by seducing his friend’s wife — and then getting her a massive boob job — has decided to turn the critical paper into a Wall Street Journal-type rag that plays up the erratic fascist to protect his contracts with the government. This means that when Ms. Graham decided to publish the Pentagon Papers, which brought down the Nixon presidency, Bezos’s Post would have sat on them to protect his billions.
What happens to the hundreds of millions in the dawning fascist America is not of concern to people like Bezos and Soon-Shiong. They will be perfectly safe if they fawn, look the other way, and shut their mouths.
They will profit quite handsomely, while the rest of us wither away into irrelevance.