Jeff Bezos fuels the far-right’s next insurrection
Jeff Bezos fuels the far-right’s next insurrection
His phony "defense" of journalism invites years of new attacks on democracy
Welcome to a Tuesday edition of Progress Report.
I spent much of last night working on this 50-state voter guide, which keeps expanding as I try to present perspectives and endorsements from labor unions, issue groups, and local media. I’m polishing it off and it will be out to you tomorrow. This will be a bigger — and earlier — enterprise in future election cycles.
Tonight, we’ll take a quick look at a handful of headlines and then dig deeper into the latest developments in the Jeff Bezos scandal, which is spreading across political media and is no doubt indicative of a larger problem.
Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.
🙈 😵💫 God bless America: Sometimes you come across a simple news story that feels like it perfectly encapsulates everything about a complicated moment in time. This story, about a very unpleasant voter in Texas, could be the ending of a Twilight Zone episode about the Trump era. The quotes are incredible.
💊 😤 Watch this: If you have time for a short video that will make your head spin, check out my latest piece at More Perfect Union, about the plight of CVS workers.
🚨 🏫 Nazi alert in Maryland: Ryan Gidursky, the pale loser and right-wing activist who called Mehdi Hasan a terrorist on CNN last night, has a long history of working with white nationalists like Richard Spencer, begging the question of why he was invited on CNN in the first place.
His main gig is trying to “unwoke” public schools by protesting Black authors and trying to infiltrate school boards, and his 1776 Project PAC is going big on those local elections in Maryland this year.
🎲 🏀 Jackpot: The casino and gambling industry has spent a whopping $40 million on a ballot initiative that would legalize sports betting in Missouri. It is $9 million more than the previous record spend, but will be a drop in the bucket of what casinos and sports books make if they’re cleared to get vulnerable people hooked on parlays while paying far less tax revenue than what they initially promised.
The name of the group sponsoring this amendment, Winning for Missouri Education, sounds more like a teachers committee than a bunch of casinos who really just want to bait dudes into betting on the Chiefs.
Jeff Bezos just did the far-right a gigantic favor
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos became the richest man in the world by selling cheap knockoffs on an inescapable, pseudo-populist platform that was rigged to his advantage, but it’s quickly becoming clear that he can’t run the same hustle in the news business.
After a tumultuous weekend in which more than 200,000 readers canceled their subscriptions to the Washington Post to protest his decision to kill the editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, Bezos on Monday night published an op-ed in the paper defending the move. While offering no insight into the process that led to the decision, Bezos presented the last-minute silencing of his editorial board as a principled decision made in the best interests of the news industry and a public that has lost faith in it.
“Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose,” Bezos wrote. “It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.”
Bezos makes it clear that he views ending the Post’s tradition of endorsing presidential candidates from here on out was part of an effort to rebuild the paper’s credibility with the public, but that willfully misrepresents why a recent Gallup poll found Americans’ trust in media at a record low.
The trend lines show that a majority of Republicans have not trusted the mainstream press since 1988, when right-wing talk radio became nationally syndicated and conservatives began their war on the “liberal” media. Fox News came along in 1996 to accelerate the process, and conservatives’ faith in media (and reality) has cratered since Trump started screaming “fake news” back in 2016.
Instead of trying to address good-faith criticisms of his paper, Bezos is instead adopting right-wing slander against his own staff, which he then reinforces by vowing to “not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance.”
Early in his piece, Bezos calls journalism “our profession,” stealing valor from actual reporters and editors in order to inflate his media bonafides and ally himself with the pursuit of the truth.
“I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled… I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests,” Bezos wrote. “It hasn’t happened.”
Challenge accepted: A guy worth $177 billion deciding to lay off hundreds of middle class journalists to save some cash, as Bezos did in late 2023, is a textbook example of an owner imposing their own interests on a paper. So is deciding to hire a damaged Rupert Murdoch protege to run one of the nation’s most important news outlets, then continuing to stand by him as he is engulfed in a scandal that torched whatever credibility he had left.
There’s nothing in Bezos’s life outside of his time owning the Washington Post that might encourage confidence in his commitment to the greater good, either — just ask any Amazon warehouse worker — and his name has become so synonymous with extreme greed and ruthlessness that asking readers to simply trust his altruism feels more like he’s trolling the common folk who don’t own their own multimedia empire.
Whether he’s being smug or really is delusional about his public image, the “challenge” he issued indicates a total lack of understanding how media outlets retain their credibility and what has made people outside of the right-wing echo chamber lose faith in the press. That he had to insist that it was just an unfortunate coincidence that the CEO of his rocket company met with Trump the same day that the Harris endorsement was killed would be too on-the-nose for good satire, but as is generally the case, it’s the stuff that the public doesn’t know — or thinks it doesn’t know — that really fuels conspiracies.
As he must be aware, the general public really has no idea whether or not Bezos has been a good owner for the Washington Post and its journalistic mission; people rarely read the newspaper, much less the media business section. Unless his tenure ends in a scorching disaster or best-selling tell all about his stewardship, it’s safe to say that people never will have any insight into his tenure. They will hear about conflagrations like this one, though, and knowing that the deeply unpopular comic book supervillain that owns the famous paper got involved in controversial editorial decisions.
Canceling the endorsement was damaging enough, and if Bezos actually cared about the paper’s reputation, he wouldn’t have doubled down like this. But he chose to undermine the Washington Post’s current staff and draw attention to his ownership a week before the election, which has about a 50% chance of ending with Trump and his allies refusing to acknowledge the results and attacking the media as a proxy reality.
There is no conventional upside to this move for the paper: Bezos said himself that nobody cares about editorial page endorsements, readers are revolting, staffers are speaking out and quitting, and the conservatives to whom he pandered in his op-ed hate him more than anybody and are unlikely to suddenly feel inspired to subscribe to the Post. They have their own parallel media ecosystem and plenty of billionaires to suck up to them.
As for Bezos, there was plenty of long-term reason to make this decision. Tech moguls have been slithering back to Trump over the past few weeks in case he wins the election, and for Bezos, keeping Amazon and Blue Origins’ federal contracts are more than enough incentive to deal with a PR headache for a little while.
An opportunistic wave of cynics
The fallout isn’t going to hurt him financially: The roughly $10 million in lost revenue that the Post faces from those subscription cancellations is just a little bit than the $7.9 million that he made every single hour last year.
It would be a leap to seriously suggest that Bezos axed the endorsement in an attempt to sabotage the paper, but this does give him a lane to institute some major structural and philosophical changes at the newspaper. Bezos could spin the liberal outrage over his decision as a clear sign that the Post had a well-known bias, then use it to gut the staff, higher-ups, and editorial board dissidents to be replaced by conservative hatchet men like Will Lewis, the scandal-scarred Post CEO.
Given permission to cancel the endorsement by the example set by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the LA Times, Bezos has now seemingly inspired the Gannett bosses, who oversee the largest newspaper chain in the country to go public with the same decision: As of Tuesday afternoon, USA Today and its network of more than 200 local newspapers will no longer make presidential endorsements.
The national paper, which launched in 1982, had never waded into presidential endorsements until 2016, when USA Today’s editorial board issued an un-endorsement of Trump, urging readers not to vote for him.
“From the day he declared his candidacy 15 months ago through this week’s first presidential debate, Trump has demonstrated repeatedly that he lacks the temperament, knowledge, steadiness and honesty that America needs from its presidents,” the paper’s board wrote in late September of 2018.
The editorial went on to make its case against the then-GOP nominee in a scathing, receipts-filled list of condemnations and allegations. The list should seem familiar:
He is erratic
He is ill-equipped to be commander in chief
He traffics in prejudices
His business career is checkered
He isn’t leveling with the American people
He speaks recklessly
He has coarsened the national dialogue
He’s a serial liar
USA Today went one step further in 2020, throwing its full support behind Joe Biden. Gannett says that it made the decision last year to put an end to USA Today’s endorsement era, so either the company believes that Trump has really cleaned up his flaws or there are ulterior motives at play.
Choosing to announce the change now, after Bezos caught the flack and while Trump still has a 50% chance of winning the presidency again, suggests that the decision certainly has something to do with owner Apollo Global Management, an asset management firm founded by three Trump mega-donors, not wanting to anger him.
All of this points to the peril of having billionaires and giant Wall Street firms so firmly control our most essential public-serving private institutions. At best, they will wring it for profits, dismantling them over time to reach shareholder goals or prepare them for sale, and there is every chance that they are used to advance a more pernicious agenda.
The prime example here is Sinclair Broadcast Group, the “family owned” conglomerate that owns 294 television stations in 89 markets across the country. Avowed conservatives, the Sinclair family inserts right-wing propaganda in its stations’ local newscasts, and now it is in the midst of dismantling the iconic Baltimore Sun newspaper, which it bought several years ago.
The company is locked in a bitter contract dispute with the CWA, the union that represents the paper’s rank and file reporters and editors (full disclosure: I’m a member of the CWA via More Perfect Union), and just shut down its features desk in a callous escalation of the fight.
What the MSG rally exposed
It is deeply annoying and cynical that Bezos’s justification for the endorsement decision echoes a lot of good-faith criticisms of the legacy political media, then prescribing what is the opposite of a useful solution. Whether he actually has the Washington Post pursue a new strategy of cowardly false balance remains to be seen, but it’s not as if the paper has always been fearless in its coverage of our long national political downfall.
Neither, of course, has any major corporate-owned outlet, which became very apparent this weekend.
After a week in which Trump emerged unscathed from credible accusations of both sexual assault and loving Hitler, I was surprised by the national awareness of and outrage over what happened at his Bund rally at Madison Square Garden. It was of course abhorrent that the twerp warmup “comic” called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage, but Trump himself says more vile things on a daily basis. So why did these slurs connect?
After thinking about it for a while, I went back to something I wrote just a few days earlier: The reality is that only Trump’s most dedicated followers are deeply aware of the frequency of his tangents about sharks and his beach body, manifold misstatements and mistakes, hallucinated conversations, and outbursts of anger.
For the most part, Trump’s slurs and racial defamations are summed up in disinterested little paragraphs and anodyne headlines that have the effect of anesthetizing them for the public. There was no such filter to catch the toxicity that spewed out from the MSG event, which millions of people watched either via stream or social media clips that quickly went viral on a Sunday evening.
I don’t know whether the backlash will have any tangible impact on the election, but it’s a shame that it took so long for it to happen at all. It’s also a shame that the right is already running with a distortion of Joe Biden’s response to the racist rally, attacks that some political reporters are happy to use to fuel the final leg of this interminable horse race.
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Great article but its so sad, the cowardliness or lack of responsibility on behalf of most of the major newspapers in the country at the major crisis of democracy in America! The answer may be to require that major media including TV be owned by the public, not one billionaire or ultra-rich family. Sad, sad, sad. The only short answer is to boycott the Post and Amazon which my family has done.
Thanks for this piece and please include the link for "This story, about a very unpleasant woman in Texas" as you seem to have mistakenly left it off