In 1974 reporting by The Washington Post brought down a US president, Richard M Nixon. President Trump can sleep easy. There is no chance that will happen again while Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, owns the newspaper.
Last week the proprietor ordered that the range of opinions expressed on the comment pages of the newspaper will be drastically limited to Trumpian themes.
“We are going to be writing every day in support and defence of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos declared in a message to staff also posted on social media. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
Bezos’s intervention is a far cry from his stance in 2013 when he bought the paper for $250m and told staff, as reported by Chris Cillizza, then one of them: “You guys are the experts in the journalism world, not me. I am not going to tell you how to do your jobs or what to say.”
Bezos pledged then that the paper would continue to have “the courage to say follow the story, no matter the cost”. He hired Marty Baron, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor from The Boston Globe. Baron in turn adopted “Democracy dies in darkness” as The Post’s motto.
Now Baron is tearing into the owner he once served loyally.
“It’s craven. He’s basically fearful of Trump. He has decided that, as timid and tepid as the editorials have been, they’ve been too tough on Trump,” Baron warned. “We’re at a point where we’re not having a difference of opinions, we’re have a difference about what the facts are.”
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The turmoil is just one strand in the way the mainstream media in the US are being coerced to bend the knee to the new administration, at the expense of their commitment to factual and impartial journalism and seemingly in defiance of their rights as protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
The White House is openly threatening and punishing news organisations which challenge Trump. Other key players, such as Bezos at The Post, do not need to be coerced because they are complying voluntarily.
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What George Orwell, the lay patron saint of English language journalism, wrote about Fleet Street in the 1940s now applies to the American tech sector; it is indeed “extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics”.
Bezos contributed $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund and joined Elon Musk and the bosses of tech giants including Facebook, Apple and Microsoft as a VIP guest at Trump’s swearing-in. Amazon Prime paid Melania Trump $40m for a documentary. The first lady will pocket $28m of that herself.
Bezos’s written instruction to The Post is a modern classic of what Orwell called “newspeak” in his novel 1984. Newspeak distorts and even reverses the commonly understood meaning of words. As he bans diverse opinions from his paper, Bezos claims “freedom is ethical – it minimises coercion”. Except by him.
Marty Baron retorted: “Bezos argues for personal liberties. But his news organisation now will forbid views other than his own in its opinion section.”
David Shipley, The Post’s opinion editor, resigned last week. In truth, the editorial independence of the newspaper which once exposed the Watergate scandal has long been in decline under Bezos’s ownership.
There were more resignations by senior staff last year when Sir Will Lewis, the former Daily Telegraph and Murdoch executive brought in as CEO by Bezos, ruled that The Post would immediately abandon its decades-old practice of endorsing political candidates. An editorial backing Kamala Harris had already been agreed but was never published.
Earlier this year the artist Ann Telnaes quit after more than a decade on the paper when her cartoon depicting Bezos among Trump’s sycophants was dropped. Last month, the paper turned down $115,000 and refused a wraparound cover advertisement asking: “Who’s running this country: Donald Trump or Elon Musk?”
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Trump repeatedly declared that he would not mind if someone assassinated the press pack covering his campaign rallies.
Since returning to the White House he has sued major TV networks including ABC and CBS, and has received at least $20m in settlements in spite of the legal weakness of his cases. He has replaced the head of the FCC, the US media regulator, and ordered it to investigate the public service television and radio stations, PBS and NPR.
Both the president and Musk have called for “a long prison sentence” for makers of 60 Minutes, the US’s most venerated TV current affairs show, for the way they handled an interview with presidential candidate Harris. Trump refused his 60 Minutes invitation, preferring Fox News and friendly podcasters.
Meanwhile, Trump has appointed the youngest-ever White House press secretary. Karoline Leavitt, 26, has been a Trump devotee since she was a teenager and cancelled her maternity leave to come back and serve him following the Pennsylvania assassination attempt. She has led the administration in moving against the legacy media with intimidation and retribution.
The Associated Press, the non-for-profit news agency founded in 1856, is the closest thing the US has to the BBC in terms of institutional standing.
By tradition its correspondent asks the first question at all White House briefings. AP has now been banned altogether from White House pool access because it has refused to adopt Trump’s term “The Gulf of America” in place of the internationally accepted Gulf of Mexico.
Political correspondents and news organisations have been told that, from now on, the White House, not them, will decide who has direct access to the president for pool coverage in the Oval Office and on Air Force One.
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AP and Reuters were both excluded from Trump and Vance’s televised meeting with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office on Friday. But there was a place for Brian Glenn from the far-right streamer Real America’s Voice. He lit the blue touch paper for the row by asking the Ukrainian president why, not if, he was showing disrespect by not wearing a suit.
NBC, The New York Times, NPR, and Politico have been “rotated” out of their long-established workspaces in the White House and the Pentagon. NY Times bureau chief Peter Baker commented that the new system “amounts to a signal to news outlets to follow the White House line or be kicked out as well”.
American journalists take themselves much more seriously than their British counterparts. This is mainly because, unlike us independent outsiders, they are recognised in the constitution collectively as an important check and balance on politicians, with freedom of the press enshrined in the US Bill of Rights.
Mainstream print and broadcast outlets are under intense pressure from digital platforms, which have drained off most of their advertising revenue, undermined their copyright, and facilitated competing voices with no professional or ethical standards.
The liberal media should also blame themselves for embracing cancel culture.
At the height of Black Lives Matter unrest, two opinion page editors were driven out of The New York Times by colleagues after publishing an op-ed by a US senator making the legitimate, though controversial, argument that the military should be sent in to help the police with demonstrators.
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Trump is deliberately exploiting all these developments to advance his post-truth agenda. He is moving to shut down anyone who stands in his way with factual argument, be they political opponents, the forces of law and order, the courts, the military or the media.
Democracy could indeed die in this darkness. So could The Washington Post.
It lost 10% of its subscribers after the political endorsement ban. Readership is likely to haemorrhage further following this latest clampdown on content. If this happens Bezos is unlikely to care much.
Like Musk’s trashing of Twitter, turning once-trusted outlets into instruments of propaganda will have two main beneficiaries: President Trump and the tech billionaires looking for regulatory favours.
