Pearl River The one thing that all of these billionaires promise when they buy big-city and national newspapers is that there will be editorial independence. They all say that, just because they have the most money with millions and billions to spare, that doesn’t mean that they will impose their opinions on the news. They all claim that readers can trust the newspapers because they will be fact-based, and not just microphones for the owners’ opinions. This week, it turns out, people can put those claims in the long list of billionaire promises they aren’t worth two cents, or maybe I should say, the price of the daily paper in Washington, DC and Los Angeles, California.
The Washington Post is owned by one of the richest men in the world, Jeff Bezos, who made most of the money as the founder of Amazon, and now runs Blue Origin, as well as other holdings. The editorial endorsement of VP Kamala Harris had already been written, and in a meeting in Miami, he scuttled the endorsement, forcing the paper to abandon a practice over the last 50 years of stating where it stood for its readers. There are now reports that he met with Trump the same day and some are saying he made a deal to benefit Blue Origin, his space company, which has fallen behind billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX, in exchange for the Post walking on this election. Oh, the games rich people all play together!
The Los Angeles Times is the most prestigious paper in the West and certainly in California and is owned by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong who made his pile as a doctor with shrewd investments. The head of his editorial department has resigned since they had already decided to endorse Harris. His daughter is claiming the endorsement retreat has to do with the Gaza war, but if trust is gone, credibility is right behind it, and that’s very, very hard to believe. Both have now critically damaged their brands and have rebellions of different kinds in their newsrooms where some of their reporters and editors, no matter how well paid, had bought their bull about editorial independence, not that either of these guys necessarily care.
Perhaps the point is best made by the Post’s great humor columnist, Alexandra Petri. In her column on her paper’s non-endorsement, she pokes at the paper by noting that it falls on her to endorse Kamala Harris. Her column might be a more powerful piece than the ditched endorsement. She has a baby coming with a due date of January 6th, 2025. She wants a better world for him and for all of us living in the country now. She ridicules the Bezos attempt to say he’s going back to the old tradition over 50 years ago of non-endorsement, because there were a lot of things that didn’t happen in the past that need to happen now. Mainly she makes the point about how important elections are, especially this one, and why it doesn’t work to walk for the readers or for the sake of the country and democracy. As she says,
…if I were the paper, I would be a little embarrassed that it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement. I will spare you the suspense: I am endorsing Kamala Harris for president, because I like elections and want to keep having them.
As she closes her column, she speaks for all newspaper workers and many others saying,
I’m just a humor columnist. I only know what’s happening because our actual journalists are out there reporting, knowing that their editors have their backs, that there’s no one too powerful to report on, that we would never pull a punch out of fear. That’s what our readers deserve and expect: that we are saying what we really think, reporting what we really see; that if we think Trump should not return to the White House and Harris would make a fine president, we’re going to be able to say so. That’s why I, the humor columnist, am endorsing Kamala Harris by myself!
That’s not funny at all. It’s deadly serious. Vote, because it’s important, even if you don’t make another bunch of millions and own a newspaper. None of us can walk away from this election. It’s too important.