Democracy dies in staff meetings

October 28, 2024

Waning solar eclipse near Kimberly, Oregon, 8/22/17

One bloody mess after another

I woke up very early Friday morning choking on blood. The crimson-scarlet-purple flow was coming from inside my lower jaw, from the site where a molar had been yanked out a week earlier. The gum had been sutured but as the dissolvable stitch-work unraveled it (apparently) unloosed the wall of a blood vessel. When I woke up at 1:37 a.m. I wasn’t sure how much blood I’d already lost. So I put on shoes and real pants and drove myself to an emergency room where a calming and diligent ER doc worked to staunch the bleeding. When nothing else worked, he re-sutured the site which, of course, involved wincing injections to numb the gum. If you have a happy place in your imagination, it’s where you try to go when you see a big needle aimed at your gums.

The new stitch-work worked until it didn’t. As I was driving back home the profuse bleeding returned. Thus, as the sun came up on a lovely autumnal day, I made my way to an oral surgeon on the other side of town. This involved more needles and numbing and another suturing of the site, plus a new prescription for pain killers.

Blessedly the bleeding finally subsided, but then the pain got worse.

This time it wasn’t from my mouth but—as I explained to my son when he called to check on me—from my eyes and ears. I was learning, as many others were, that two great American newspapers—the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post—had let it be known that their billionaire owners (Patrick Soon-Shiong at the Times and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos at the Post) had decreed that neither paper would publish editorial endorsements for President. This, despite the fact that both papers have published news stories and editorials bitingly critical of Donald Trump—not just over Trump’s bigotry and compulsive dishonesty but his denunciation of the American press as “the enemy of the people.”

Publishing an endorsement for President this year would be too divisive Soon-Shiong proclaimed. Bezos left the talking to the Post’s publisher and CEO Will Lewis who did himself (and Bezos) no favor by saying that the paper was “returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates”—despite the fact that it has endorsed presidential candidates in every election except one (1988) in the past fifty years.

“This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” former Washington Post executive editor Marin Baron.

The response inside the two newspapers was swift, with resignations from the editorial page editor, and two editorial board members at the Times, and, at the Post, the resignation of editor-at-large Robert Kagan and a slew of public and published criticisms from prominent staff members, including Pulitzer Prize winners. Thousands of Post subscribers canceled their subscriptions. Even the paper’s star cartoonist, Ann Talnaes mocked the decision by drawing a dark shadow over the Post’s Trump-era promotional tag Democracy Dies in Darkness. The paper’s most famous reporters—Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein—publicly denounced the decision.

On the other hand, I do think the comedian Bill Maher has a valid point—that we journalists are a bit full of ourselves if we think voters in Presidential elections are on pins and needles waiting for an editorial board to tell them how to mark their ballots.

That said, I was surprised by how upset I was.

Maybe it was the concurrent pain of a mouth under repair. It’s hard to know for sure. It’s also ironic. In my career, I’ve resigned three positions due to disputes over journalism ethics. If that’s me being stubborn, I’ll own it: it has made me a difficult person to employ, let alone live with. For better or worse, I’m incapable of working for people whom I don’t trust or respect. Life is too short. Hence this Substack project, The Daily Rhubarb, where I work for myself.

I realize most of what bothers me is below the waterline of this controversy. In a column published yesterday, veteran Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote about the flak he was already receiving from some readers because he didn’t resign in protest over the Bezos’s decision. This, even though he was among the paper’s prominent writers who organized themselves to protest it. In appealing to Post readers not to cancel their subscriptions Milbank connected two dots: the fact that the newspaper, just hours earlier, had won three prestigious Pulitzer Prizes for its reporting and, still, the newspaper was losing more than $1 million a week. In short, one of America’s most crucial journalism projects is forced to rely upon a billionaire’s largesse to keep it afloat.

Here’s part of what Milbank wrote:

“Boycotting the newspaper won’t hurt Bezos, whose fortune comes not from Post subscribers but from Amazon Prime members and Whole Foods shoppers. His ownership and subsidization of The Post is just pocket change to him. And if readers want to strike a blow for democracy, they’d achieve more by knocking on doors and making calls for Harris for the next eight days. But boycotting The Post will hurt my colleagues and me. We lost $77 billion last year which required a(nother) round of staff cuts through buyouts. The more cancellations there are, the more jobs will be lost, and the less good journalism there will be. If Trump wins next week, the institutions of our democracy will be under threat like never before.”

Milbank put his finger on the increasingly conflicted and unstable economics of American media, where journalistic excellence is no guarantee of solvency and may even be at odds with a publisher’s vanity (think Elon Musk and Twitter) or more lucrative enterprises.

Today’s Daily Rhubarb is free to all readers here, at Rhubarb Salon, but please consider a paid subscription The Daily Rhubarb at the link below, thanx, tc

When I heard the news about Bezos’s decision I was sad and angry for Milbank and the rest of the Post’s journalists, for the fine work they’ve done with their reporting to show just how dangerous a threat Donald Trump is to our democracy. Whether he realized it or not, when Bezos decided the Post would make no endorsement in the 2024 Presidential election he was casting aside his journalists’ exemplary work to call out Trump’s threats to democracy and the free press. So, yes, though I was spitting blood for other reasons, I was also was angry on their behalf.

Years ago, when my son, Devin, was still in town (before heading off to college) he asked if we could go see the film “Spotlight” (2015) together. I hadn’t yet heard of the movie. It’s about a team of investigative reporters at the Boston Globe that uncovered a notorious sex scandal that would engulf the Catholic diocese in Massachusetts and its legions of supporters in New England. The film, starring Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo and Sacha Pfeiffer, went on to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, in large part for how it realistically portrayed the life of journalists working under extremely difficult circumstances. As I watched, it brought back a flood of memories of what it was like when I was a father to young children and the lead reporter on a small editorial team that was methodically uncovering the fraud(s) in Spokane’s River Park Square scandal in 2000 & 2001. Nothing came easy in those years, least of all sleep.

One reason “Spotlight” came to mind is that Martin “Marty” Baron appears in the film, played by actor Liev Schreiber. At the time Baron was the editor of the Boston Globe, where “Spotlight” is still the longstanding investigative reporting team for the paper. Baron was subsequently recruited (2013) to be the executive editor for the Washington Post, where he worked until his retirement in 2021. The Post won several Pultizer Prizes on Baron’s watch.

Baron hasn’t spoken out much since leaving the newspaper, but he did Friday: “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” he wrote. “Donald Trump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate Jeff Bezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

Bullies can smell fear, and when they do they let the fearful do their work for them. I wonder how many times we have to learn this.

—tjc