IN THE DARK

The Tim Campbell cartoon above aptly pictures the humiliating capitulation that Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos forced on what has long been a bastion of democracy and investigative journalism, when he overrode a decision by the Post board, in the run-up to the 2024 election, to endorse Kamala Harris for president, and to give their reasons why.

I have no personal bone to pick with Bezos. As an independent writer, I'm really grateful to Bezos's organization for creating Kindle Direct Publishing, which I consider the greatest publishing equalizer since the Gutenberg printing press. KDP is a highly democratic and necessary medium for writers whose work might otherwise never come to light. That said, however, in the case of the Washington Post, Bezos’s judgment couldn’t have been more ill-advised.

The fact is that what the Washington Post sells isn’t merely newspapers and online information. What it sells is trust and journalistic integrity, both in its investigative coverage and in its editorial observations. And once that trust is broken, you can’t simply say, “Well, it was just this one time. From now on, it’s a clean slate and we’ll be trustworthy again.”

In everyday life, once caught in a lie, it becomes difficult to ever regain the complete trust of those around us, often even that of the people closest to us. This is even more true for newspapers, some of whose reputations have been irrecoverably damage by a single poorly sourced story. What Bezos’s erroneous decision not to let the Post pronounce its honest view of the consequences of another Donald Trump administration tacitly indicates to the public is, "Well, maybe another Trump presidency won't be so bad for American democracy after all," when the truth is that is stands to be devastating, as the Post's journalists and board know all too well.

What publisher Bezos did by intervening in what should have been a journalistic rather than business call was, basically, to censor, in an arbitrary act of corporate despotism, one of the erstwhile most courageous and democratic organs of the free press in the US. His silencing of the editorial board is, nevertheless, and unfortunately, a sign of the times.

We should make no mistake. The real threat to American democracy is the dominance of oligarchic corporate influence over every aspect of American life. Money and power, in other words, over truth and democracy. In-coming and former President Donald Trump is just the tool for it, and the caricaturesque symbol of it—a highly pernicious effect, rather than the root cause.

The op-ed attached below and published, at the time, by Boston University, further explains the significance of Bezos’s shortsighted move.

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2024/lack-of-endorsement-shows-bezos-willing-to-bow-to-trump/