Our Endorsement: Save Journalism from the Billionaires

This year’s most notable newspaper endorsements are the ones that never happened.

Just days before the presidential election, the billionaire owners of two of the country’s most important newspapers, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, blocked their own editorial boards from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris over former President Donald Trump.

Hundreds of thousands of outraged subscribers have reportedly been canceling their subscriptions, several journalists have resigned in protest and the publishers’ excuses for their own cowardice have been confusing, muddled and downright pitiful.

But some good can still come from this mess: We can finally stop pretending that billionaires will ever save journalism.

Journalism’s ‘false saviors’

Maybe, like me, you never had much faith in the professed altruism of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who bought the Post from the Graham family in 2013, or in Patrick Soon-Shiong, whose main attraction when he took over the Times in 2018 was that he wasn’t Rupert Murdoch. Both men had already squandered most of their goodwill when they slashed hundreds of newsroom jobs earlier this year. Downsizing their newsrooms right before such a consequential election showed their true colors.

As New York’s Sarah Jones wrote at the time about journalism’s “false saviors”:

“Owners like Soon-Shiong sound noble at first, but ultimately they prioritize profit over the public interest. Their goals, then, are at odds with the purpose of journalism. Media workers can’t serve the public if there are no opportunities for them to do so. By cutting jobs in journalism, the ruling class cedes ground to the rabid right-wing media — whose benefactors are committed to an ideological project.”

The billionaires have demonstrated where their allegiances lie — and how little the professed small-d democratic missions of their publications truly matter to them.

The publishers tried to claim that their 11th-hour abandonment of presidential endorsements represents a newfound commitment to nonpartisan neutrality (at the Times) or a declaration of their independence and commitment to “readers’ ability to make up their own minds” (to quote the Post). In a follow-up Op-Ed, Bezos insisted that he dropped presidential endorsements to help journalists “increase [the Post’s] credibility” — though he clearly hasn’t given much thought to what corporate media might have done to lose so much trust. A billionaire owner spiking stories to appease vindictive political candidates certainly doesn’t inspire readers.

What the non-endorsements are really about

The billionaires’ own blatant conflicts of interest undermine their own arguments. For his part, Soon-Shiong — who made his money in health care and biotech — owns companies that “regularly seek FDA approval for new drugs, vaccines and therapies and federal funding for research,” according to reporting by the excellent Popular Information newsletter.

Amazon does even more business with the federal government, including multibillion-dollar cloud-computing contracts it holds with the CIA, Department of Defense and National Security Agency. Bezos also owns a private space-exploration company called Blue Origin, which is building a lunar lander for NASA.

Trump reportedly met with executives at Blue Origin — a competitor of Elon Musk’s SpaceX — the same day that the Post killed its editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. Longtime Post columnist and editor Robert Kagan, who quit after the endorsement fiasco, calls the meeting a “quid pro quo.” 

Bezos writes that the timing of the meeting was a total coincidence and explains he can’t help it because “every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials.”

His former employees don’t buy it. “Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do, and then met with the Blue Origin people,” Kagan told The Daily Beast. “Which tells us that there was an actual deal made.”

A costly ‘side hustle’

Canceling subscriptions is a natural form of protest when a publication abandons its principles, but the journalists in these newsrooms will feel the pain from those actions more than their bosses. This is the problem with continuing to allow the wealthiest elite to control so much of our media system — and praying noblesse oblige will produce accountability journalism.

As Popular Information’s Judd Legum writes, “The apparent capitulation to Trump illustrates the danger of billionaires scooping up major media organizations as a side hustle.” He continues:

“For nearly everyone, the price Bezos paid for the Washington Post is an unfathomable amount of money. For Bezos, it's less than half the $575 million he paid for his new 417-foot superyacht, Koru, and its 246-foot support yacht, Abeona, which has a helipad, accommodations for staff, and storage for smaller boats and jet skis.”

Bezos did not get to the point where he could afford such yachts through his dedication to journalistic integrity. He became the second-wealthiest person in the world by prioritizing the bottom line.

In the end, the disappearance of a few newspaper endorsements isn’t going to make the difference in the outcome of this upcoming election. But how we decide to respond to billionaire media owners will have tremendous consequences for whether we still have a democracy or an informed citizenry.

Putting the public good over corporate profits

Democracy, alas, doesn’t die in darkness, as the Post slogan claims. It dies in Sun Valley, where the billionaires gather every year to swap, sell and consolidate what’s left of the mainstream media.

As we at Free Press have argued for years, journalism is a public good that requires a massive increase in public funding. Yet corporate-funded fear-mongering over so-called government meddling has sunk even the most modest efforts to increase public funding or diversify media ownership — even as government policies are used to enrich already huge companies.

Meanwhile, big broadcasters are still getting rich off runaway media consolidation and the broken campaign-finance system that floods the airwaves with noxious political attack ads. These broadcasters have leveraged their financial and political power to sabotage any journalism-policy proposals that don’t stuff their pockets and give them more sway. So again the news-consuming public is left to the mercy and whims of these billionaire owners to cover — or more often, neglect to cover — what’s happening where they live.

Instead, when it comes to the future of journalism, we must demand that our elected officials put the public’s needs above corporate profits. We should stand with the workers in these newsrooms committed to doing good work despite the actions of their bosses. We must invest in the independent and locally controlled nonprofit outlets reinventing local journalism, many of whom are part of Free Press’ growing Media Power Collaborative. They need our support.

We should dare to dream, as my colleagues at Media 2070 are doing, of a future for journalism built around repairing our communities, not exacerbating their problems. We can’t chart a just future if we don’t first address the many harms of the past grounded in racism and discrimination.

In the end, we can lament this latest endorsement controversy as just another low point in the decline of journalism. Or we can channel that outrage toward solutions that would actually serve local communities.

Imagine it: a media system that’s accountable to the public, not just the whims of the yacht-buying elite.

I think that’s something we can all endorse.

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