Is Democracy Already in the Dark? | Media on Blog#42
No more Democracy Dies in Darkness at WaPo...
This is the alert pushed out by the Washington Post right after Joe Biden gave the last address of his presidency yesterday. Before my eyes even transmitted the text to my brain, what glared at me was the usage of quotes on the word ‘oligarchy.’ In this case, it is clear to me that this usage of single quotation marks is as “scare quotes.”
As a reminder, the function of quotation marks, other than quoting a person or text, includes expressing doubt about the topic at hand. Wikipedia defines scare quotes as:
Scare quotes (also called shudder quotes[1][2] or sneer quotes[3][4][5]) are quotation marks that writers place around a word or phrase to signal that they are using it in an ironic, referential, or otherwise non-standard sense.
Given the past few weeks’ worth of news WaPo has made, when it comes to how dependent the newspaper has become on its owner’s political bent and business interests, my screenshot above should be taken as a clear portent of what’s to come.
To answer my own question, I think we’ve been in the semi-dark for some time, just by virtue of the silos we’ve erected around parts of our population. Now, with the changes at many “liberal” media outlets, we may well go into full darkness shortly.
While the Washington Post is hardly the only news outlet that’s gone hard-right, it is the one I am focusing on today. I must also point out that I’ve been writing about media bias since the 2016 election, when my 2015 piece on what was being done to Bernie Sanders’ candidacy was published in Alternet. I was told, some time later, that the piece caused quite a bit of blowback. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then.
The media landscape has changed in so many ways since 2015 that the topic merits a mini-series of articles, if one is to be thorough in the treatment of, not only media bias, but the veritable problem news has become as a consumer good and a service to our nation.
Focusing back on the Washington Post, my hometown newspaper (I was born in DC) was in trouble when Jeff Bezos purchased it from the Graham family in 2013. Bezos invested quite a bit of effort in improving the Post’ performance, establishing a decent digital presence and membership, and generally doing what’s needed in order to bring profit back to an illustrious organization. Bezos’ choice to hire Will Lewis as his new publisher to take the Post to the next level may very well may end up in the paper suffering a setback that only new ownership may cure.
My assumption is that Bezos only looked at the political bent and degree of success achieved by Lewis with the Wall Street Journal’s digital operation, but ignored the UK phone hacking scandal before making his final hiring decision. On the surface, with respect to both the news and editorial sides, Bezos’ apparent hands-off approach seemed to have ended with the yanking of the editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. In reality, the hiring of Will Lewis was a big red flag. Sally Buzbee, the Post’s former executive editor, quit because Will Lewis wouldn’t allow the paper to fully cover new developments in the phone hacking case that he, himself, played a part in.
NPR’s David Folkenflik’s reporting on what has been going on is a pretty good one.
As an oligarch in a full-fledged oligarchy, media ownership is risky business if you aren’t in the center of the inner circle of the ruling clique. Bezos isn’t in the right clique, Musk is. Things become riskier if you own a variety of very successful businesses, and even more so if some of those businesses depend on government contracts. Both Bezos and Musk businesses depend on the largesse of the U.S. federal government. In fact, one can say that Musk made most of his billions thanks to the U.S. taxpayer.
What is an oligarch to do?
Bezos needs to figure out how to stay off of Trump’s radar for a multitude of reasons.
If Trump’s tariffs get enacted, Amazon will see a sharp drop in business as goods begin to double in price and Prime subscribers can no longer afford them.
Staying on Trump’s good side means preventing his newspaper from reporting negatively on the administration.
Getting more government contracts and competing with other oligarchs in the same government contracting spaces in the context of oligarchy
In an oligarchy, the relationships and interactions between those in control, peers, and various cliques is essential to maintaining one’s status.
Rupert Murdoch’s business is and has always been the news business, as questionable as practices by those businesses have been, whether in print or broadcast media. That isn’t the case with Bezos. He’s a relatively new entrant in that market, so it shouldn’t be surprising that his ownership of WaPo has become problematic in a very burdensome kind of way. Being an innovator in tech, retail, and logistics doesn’t prepare you in any way for newspaper ownership and stewardship, whether in a democracy or oligarchy.
So, the question one must ask, as Trump is about to take over, is whether Bezos will keep the Washington Post as a means to ingratiate himself with Trump through control of the newsroom and editorial pages - or - whether he will rid himself of a burden that may well pose a risk to his other businesses.
All that said, if Bezos does keep WaPo, there will be a lot to deal with for as long as he interferes with the day to day in the newsroom, and for as long as Will Lewis remains publisher. Just in the last month, the Post has bled a considerable number of newsroom and editorial staff, a quarter million subscribers, and layoffs in the past weeks due to poor performance resulting from the upheavals. Bezos has plenty of cash. Were he to decide to remake the business and hire an all-sycophant staff, it is within his means to do it. Is Bezos that obstinate? If this is a point of pride, Bezos has shown a high degree of stickwithitness throughout his career, beginning in the 1990s.
Meanwhile, things are deteriorating at WaPo. Here is a collection of skeets by Oliver Darcy, creator of Status News and former CNN media reporter and critic:
In the end, all of media is trying to figure out how to best position themselves for the next four years. Oliver Darcy will remain an excellent source of information on the internal goings on in the press - something that NYU professor of journalism, Jay Rosen, highlights here:
The New York Times, not devoid of its own problems, has been hiring some of the best who’ve left WaPo. As well as it is doing, there is no way NYT can keep hiring people who either leave due to interference or are made to leave their respective illustrious newspapers due to cutbacks.
As an example of that, yet another high profile WaPo executive is leaving. Where will he go? Word from Oliver Darcy is that he may well end up at CNN.
So… How much more bruising can our media take and our nation remain relatively well informed?
I will look at that next.
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