US elections: Media gives up election recommendation under pressure

Subscription election campaign in the USA –

“Cowardice”, “shame” – readers criticize self-censorship of the US media

The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times wanted to recommend Kamala Harris as president. Now they have been kicked back by their very rich owners.

Willi Winkler

Published today at 11:18 am

Break with tradition: Under pressure from its owners, the Washington Post is giving up its tradition of recommending elections.

Photo: Pablo Martinez (Keystone)

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In the summer of 2013, the glorious Washington Post was up for sale. It only caused costs for the owners. Forty years earlier, its reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward had uncovered the Watergate affair, the break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters. One of the instigators, former Attorney General John Mitchell, defended himself against the revelation with a particularly disgusting joke. If the story were published, “Katie Graham’s tits would be in huge trouble.”

The story was published anyway, and Mitchell and his henchmen had to resign, and eventually even the president. This journalistic feat was most recently glorified in Steven Spielberg’s 2017 film “The Publisher” with Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham.

Her heirs sold the loss-making newspaper to someone who until then had had little to do with newspapers but knew a lot about the business. Jeff Bezos is the founder of Amazon and has achieved such fabulous wealth that it wasn’t difficult for him to purchase the distressed newspaper for 250 million. When he took over eleven years ago, he assured employees in a statement, which can still be read online free of charge for non-subscribers, that he would not intervene in day-to-day journalistic business. «The newspaper will remain committed to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners. We will follow the truth no matter where it takes us.”

He then invoked the heroic tradition in which journalists had stood up against power, in the case of the Post even against the President of the United States, then Richard Nixon. He celebrated the “courage” of researching at any cost, even at the risk of having a part of his body compromised. “But if it comes to that,” it says there for everyone to read, “thanks to Mrs. Graham’s example, I’m ready for it.” Since last Friday it has been clear that if there is any doubt it is not him.

Led the Washington Post during the Watergate scandal: publisher Katharine Graham, in her office in 1997.

Foto: Ruth Fremson (Keystone)

Jeff Bezos did not agree that his newspaper was making election recommendations as it had done in the past three and a half decades. The editorial team had already prepared the election recommendation, which unsurprisingly should apply to Kamala Harris, but she was not allowed to appear. As the New York Times reported, among others, editor-in-chief Will Lewis had to announce the owner’s decision as a decision by the editor-in-chief. Not all readers were gratified by this example of journalistic courage. By midday on Sunday, the Washington Post’s website had collected more than 32,000 comments alongside Lewis’ statement, describing the newspaper’s behavior in many variations as “cowardice” and “disgrace.” Several thousand took the statement as an opportunity to cancel their subscription.

A few days earlier, the Los Angeles Times had also announced that, unlike before, it would not be making any election recommendations. In 2015 it was acquired by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, who now spoke out against the will of the editorial team and thus against supporting Harris. His daughter Nika then added that the lack of support for Kamala Harris allowed the “justifications for the widespread attacks on journalists and the continued war against children” in the war in Gaza to be criticized.

However, Soon-Shiong assured that this was the opinion of his “progressive” daughter, not that of the owner family. He didn’t have to add that as a biotech entrepreneur he is dependent on government contracts that the declared friend of Israel Donald Trump could have from next January.

Donald Trump, Microsoft boss Satya Nadella and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos at a round table in 2017. Bezos has owned the Washington Post since 2013.

Foto: Alex Brandon (Keystone)

Totalitarianism researcher Timothy Snyder describes the behavior of the Washington Post and the LA Times as “anticipatory obedience,” according to the Guardian. But it might be a little simpler. For the columnist Robert Kagan, who terminated his contract with the Washington Post on Friday after twenty years, there is a connection: Only after Bezos had neutralized his newspaper did Trump meet with the managers of Blue Origin, the aviation department of Bezos, who can also hope for government contracts. If Trump wins the election, Kagan wrote on The Daily Beast, there will be plenty of self-censorship in the media, “a lot of changing course just to avoid punishment.”

Donald Trump invokes the “enemy within”

In the past week alone, Donald Trump has invoked the “enemy within” three times. He announced that there was no problem with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, but with internal enemies. The enemy within is Kamala Harris, is the Democrats, is the newspapers that don’t think he’s as great as he thinks of himself, that perhaps, like the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, supported the storming of the Capitol on January 6th January 2021 has been described as an attack on American democracy. For Trump, who has his own ideas about democracy, the storm was “a beautiful thing.”

In 2017, just weeks after the start of Trump’s first presidency, the Washington Post proudly posted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on its website. From then on, Bezos’ newspaper fought Donald Trump bitterly. Times are no longer quite as heroic as they were during Watergate; they cannot be so when the Postal Service runs a $100 million deficit in 2023, as the still-profitable New York Times reported.

Bezos’ newspaper is at least fighting back: on Saturday, the only daily cartoon that appeared was a black smeared piece of paper.

Katharine Graham quotes at the end of her memoirs, which are published in German under the beautiful title “We print!” appeared, the motto of her husband, who died in 1963 and who published the weekly magazine Newsweek in addition to the Post: “We will continue to try to work on the inevitably impossible task of delivering the first draft of history every week.”

The US media in the election campaign

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