Jeff Bezos is the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, responsible for killing a recent endorsement of Kamala Harris. Photo via AP/zz/Dennis Van Tine/STAR MAX/IPx

Politics

POV: Washington Post’s Pathetic Lack of Endorsement Shows Bezos Willing to Bow to Trump

Decision “tacitly signals to others that a second Trump term may not be so bad. This is a horrible misjudgment”

What exactly does Jeff Bezos’ $204 billion net worth buy him if not fearlessness in the face of a carnival-barking, would-be authoritarian who is basically a coin toss away from being, yet again, president of the United States?

Is he really afraid of a hike in postal fees or that a few Amazon contracts will be killed?

Bezos is the owner of the Washington Post, where perhaps they need to change their slogan from “Democracy Dies in Darkness” to “Reputations are ruined in silence.” The Post, as you may have read, announced last Friday that it won’t endorse a presidential candidate for the first time since the 1980s. There is literally no other way to read this than Bezos is practicing what has become the gloomy watchword of an anxiety-ridden month: anticipatory obedience.

This decision, announced by the chronically embattled Post chief executive officer Will Lewis, came after Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong killed that organization’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. The Post editorial board had also planned to endorse Harris before Bezos killed it.

It would be easy to call this a dark week in American media, but that’s nowhere near enough. It is a shameful one, disgraceful, laced with what former Washington Post editor Marty Baron immediately called out on X as “cowardice.” You can accuse a media organization of many things, but when you get to any variation of the word coward, know the wheels are off.

It’s not just that Donald Trump has been unceasingly combative with media institutions, convincing his base that we’re “fake news,” describing us time and again as the “enemy of the people,” pointing out journalists at his rallies and suggesting violence against them, and most recently threatening to revoke broadcast licenses for respected network news operations like ABC and CBS because they did fact-checking and editing.

It is all that, and it’s more than that.

We should accept blanket responsibility in the media for failing, yet again, to understand the mindsets and motivations of Trump’s many supporters, who make up literally half of America. We were not aggressive enough in questioning whether Harris should have been anointed the nominee without any visible process, not confident enough to question the degree to which identity politics has occupied the Democratic Party, not persistent and curious enough to understand the quiet financial hardships that are unfolding not just in Midwestern states, but also on streets, in homes, right here.

But amid these failures, there are other absolute truths that must be spoken, and spoken again: Trump is a dangerous man. As Barack Obama, among others, has taken to saying on the stump, Trump will do nothing to address those economic hardships. He will do everything possible to settle his perceived scores, and he is making no secret of that.

And as many others have noted, though perhaps not frequently and loudly enough: all the guardrails that were on Trump’s first tumultuous term, those adults in the White House and leading the agencies who did their valiant best to distract Trump and stymie his toddler-like impulses—they are all on the outside now, mostly warning the electorate that America may not survive another Trump term. Add to that a Supreme Court that has essentially given him a stay-out-of-jail card for past and future actions.

To put it another way, Trump’s second term won’t just be without guardrails, won’t only be filled with his pacifiers. It will be driven by people goading him toward more divisive, dumber, un-American escapades—Stephen Miller, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Elon Musk. As the New York Times wrote in another editorial about the dangers of Trump, published on the same day that the Post announced its acquiescence, “Donald Trump says he will prosecute his enemies, order mass deportations, use soldiers against citizens, play politics with disasters, abandon allies. Believe him.”

We generally accept that American politics will have tinsel-spined figures like Republican Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, a Trump detractor-turned-cheerleader who, when asked this week on CNN about retired General John Kelly’s comments that Trump is a fascist who pined to have generals like those of Adolf Hitler, said, “I know the media likes to talk about the salacious stuff.” I guess we do.

But the Washington Post? The organization that published the Pentagon Papers, that took down Richard Nixon through brave and exquisite reporting, that has held presidents to account before that and since like few others?

It’s not that newspaper endorsements are effective at swaying voters. They’re not. But when an institution like the Post practices a pathetic form of anticipatory obedience, it tacitly signals to others that a second Trump term may not be so bad. This is a horrible misjudgment.

It’s not Donald Trump whom Jeff Bezos should fear. It’s the readers of his news organization who are already defecting. And it’s the chaos and division that could lie ahead, the dreadful future Bezos lacked the guts to oppose.

Brian McGrory is chair of the College of Communication journalism department and a professor of the practice of journalism. He is the former editor of the Boston Globe and is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at brian.mcgrory@bu.edu.

This commentary was originally published in the Boston Globe on October 26, 2024. 

“POV” is an opinion page that provides timely commentaries from students, faculty, and staff on a variety of issues: on-campus, local, state, national, or international. Anyone interested in submitting a piece, which should be about 700 words long, should contact today@bu.edu. BU Today reserves the right to reject or edit submissions. The views expressed are solely those of the author and are not intended to represent the views of Boston University.