WAS: What Adults are Saying about Courage
Bezos and Shoon-Siong play Neville Chamberlain. How quaint.
Many like to whistle that newspaper endorsements for Presidential candidates is a quaint but irrelevant practice that matters only to serving papers and doesn’t move votes. Perhaps that’s how they greeted recent disclosures the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post are two major editorial pages who this year will not offer a Presidential endorsement. This perspective might be soaked in a calculated, modern appraisal of news media where highly fractured audiences are informed by a multitude of sources—some of which have nothing to do with the practice of journalism. That appraisal might be right. But the absence of an endorsement judged as “no big deal” is not.
No question the practice of newspaper endorsements recalls a time of basic electoral traffic control. As far back as the party press, what paper’s declared had an important “agenda setting” effect on the entire ballot—not just the top. Today that tradition has dwindled to be about two, more specific things: 1) Political symbolism, and 2) a reminder that at some of our remaining large newspapers editorial boards are still rightly pursuing its role of the 4th estate. The dual decisions by the above newspapers, long regarded as essential national organs (not just local) of political discourse, means they have willingly abdicated that role.
Moreover, its been done mere days before arguably the most contested Presidential Election in the modern era. Its not as though the major candidates lack political, policy or institutional differences. In fact so distinct are the candidate’s governing intent that the list of commonalities is far more brief than differences. Since the beginning of the republic, this is precisely the situation for which news Editorial Boards were made and their import is still true even in today’s era of diluted influence. It is precisely these same boards, from these two newspapers, that now sit disgraced in their collective unwillingness to fulfill that role.
The obvious question is why? Reportedly the word to offer no word came from billionaire owners whose business holdings are broad and only recently have included interests in Main Stream Media (MSM). Patrick Soon-Shiong and Jeff Bezos are two feather’s from the same bird, namely, gauche, nouveau riche who are happy to do their part in returning America to yet another Gilded Age. While their amassed fortunes are impressive both have publicly-stated business ambitions that are more about market dominance than any democratic imperative. Perhaps that’s why both acquired struggling newspapers in the first place?
The other nagging query is what does this have to do about the asymmetry that is Trump politics? It reasons all in power and dough and and ego live in a ways to maintain that. Fair enough. But in the name of perpetuating optimum outcomes of self-interest, trying to split the proverbial child for divorcing parents is a lose/lose proposition. That’s exactly the path on which the owners of papers have embarked. For such folk newspaper ownership is simply another transactional commercial opportunity. Community need and informational utility are minimal concerns. Besides those issues are so yesterday, before the age became again Gilded. You know, quaint.
For a character who has now ballooned to spend inordinate time to be a caricature of himself, with the gilded, Trump’s mania carries weight. That’s because all the Gilded folk are doing the same as Bezos and Soon-Shiong. To be fabulously wealthy means to hedge your bets to stay that way all the time. Behavior is for the real competition of gold bars, and the more ephemeral chits of power and cool. That approach sounds exactly like the rationale Neville Chamberlain gave to the world about the Nazis in 1939.
So for CYA Bezos and Shoon-Shiong have become capitulators on behalf of their very public institutions. In their towers or gated estates they sit with impunity after fomenting chaos at precisely the moment when their paper’s had the opportunity (obligation?) to serve the public interest. Ironically, the waves of subscription cancellations surely to follow this outrage will only further weaken already tenuous bottom lines. Maybe that’s what both wanted in the first-place; a two-for-one deal where graces with Trump are good and nattering editorialists are gone. How quaint.