Amazon owner Jeff Bezos killed the Washington Post editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris causing a major uproar. The LA Times’ billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong did the same thing two days ago. Editors are resigning, people are unsubscribing. It’s freaking out everyone in journalism. But this is actually bigger than journalism which is already in crisis for a hundred different reasons.
Everything about this story feels like a tempest in a teapot, a boiling story about legacy media fretting over itself in the mirror.
It’s not.
It’s a situation analogous to what we saw in Russia in the early 2000s: We are witnessing the surrender of the American business community to Donald Trump.
[…]
Following Trump’s 2016 victory, the Post leaned hard into its role as a guardian of democracy. This meant criticizing, and reporting aggressively on, Trump, who responded by threatening Bezos’s various business interests.
And that’s what this story is about: It’s about the most consequential American entrepreneur of his generation signaling his submission to Trump—and the message that sends to every other corporation and business leader in the country. In the world.
Killing this editorial says, If Jeff Bezos has to be nice to Trump, then so do you. Keep your nose clean, bub.
Last reminds us of the early 2000s in Russia when Putin, realizing that the oligarchs who had supported still maintained enough power to oppose him if they chose to, arrested the most powerful oil tycoon in the country ostensibly on charges of corruption.
Khodorkovsky was convicted and sent to a labor camp in the Russian Far East while the government confiscated Yukos and redistributed it to Putin’s cronies. Khodorkovsky’s money, his power, his connections—none of it could protect him from Vladimir Putin.
The rest of the oligarchs got the message. If Putin could get to Khodorkovsky, he could get to anybody.
Trump isn’t even the president yet. He can’t arrest anyone right now and, God willing, never will be able to. But these guys have all seen that Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and the other tech-bro billionaires all lining up and they’ve decided that it doesn’t serve them to get on the other side of him.
Democracy expert Timothy Snyder has pointed out that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.”
I don’t care about newspaper endorsements and most people don’t. But the fact that in both of these cases the papers’ ownership stepped in and stopped them at the last minute is seriously alarming. I don’t know if beating Trump can stop this premptive slide toward authoritarianism among the billionaires but I know that losing to him won’t.
This is yet another motivation to get out the vote. These billionaires only have one vote each. For now.