Wide awake in Seattle
Magpie zen
The gray lady of Northwest journalism clears her throat for Kamala Harris
Here in the compressing vortex of the 2024 election(s), I hesitate to imagine what Wednesday, a week from now, will be like. There’s nothing in my lifetime that compares to our present, both in terms of next Tuesday’s consequences and its depressing strangeness—the strong possibility that Americans may elect someone who (with his supporting cast of enablers) promises to govern like a dictator and use the government to suppress and persecute his critics.
It’s bizarre to me that the election is even going to be close, given how clear the choices are. And still… I remain an optimist at heart and can find the patch of blue above the racist, misogynist, testosterone-bro-vibe-bullshit-“dog-ate-my-footnotes-but-so-what?” fascist bent of Trumpism. I believe it is the emerging reaction to it. It’s a growing conviction that we’re better than this and will refuse to succumb.
On Monday I wrote about the strong and growing reaction to Amazon-founder and current Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to withhold the Washington Post’s editorial board endorsement of Kamala Harris for President. Bezos is not a native son of the Northwest but he did move to Bellevue in 1994 to start Amazon, which profoundly altered our commercial landscape. It also made him a super- billionaire—his wealth now estimated at more than $200 billion. So it is conspicuous that the family-owned Seattle Times (which has traditionally leaned conservative in its editorial outlook) decided to have some fun—at Bezos’s expense—in its full-throated endorsement of Kamala Harris. This is the headline over the endorsement:
You can read the full text of the piece, here though there is a paywall.
In the endorsement, under the byline of the paper’s current publisher (fourth generation) Frank Blethen and editorial page editor, Kate Riley, Blethen, the two write this, for starters:
As one of the country’s very few family-owned and -operated metro newspapers left, The Seattle Times is also apparently one of the few whose editorial board is willing to endorse presidential candidates. (For the record, the board, which operates independently of the newsroom, backed Vice President Kamala Harris Sept. 1.)
This is unfathomable, given that the other leading candidate clearly threatens the foundation of our 248-year-old American democracy and the rule of law.
How does it happen that someone as selfish and destructive as former President Donald Trump could actually become our president — again? After he fanned the Jan. 6 insurgency, after his felony convictions and after a civil court ruled he committed sexual assault?
Their endorsement concluded with this piece:
We were pleased The New York Times joined our editorial board in endorsing Kamala Harris. In fact, NYT Opinion doubled down, making a dramatic statement by filling the front of its Sunday section with just 23 words. In large, bold type, the NYT editorial board made this indictment:
DONALD TRUMP SAYS HE WILL
PROSECUTE HIS ENEMIES
ORDER MASS DEPORTATIONS
USE SOLDIERS AGAINST CITIZENS
ABANDON ALLIES
PLAY POLITICS WITH DISASTERS
BELIEVE HIM.
Trump has become shameless in his pronouncements of his plans and his denouncements of so many Americans. He can only set the country back and put our nation at risk.
The Seattle Times editorial board, and the Blethen family, enthusiastically endorse Kamala Harris.
The Washington Post continues to reel under the backlash of Bezos’s decision, due in part to a clumsy effort to mislead readers into thinking Bezos was above the fray and that it was his handpicked publisher, Will Lewis, who’d made the call. It was clearly Bezos’s call, has he made clear in a column he wrote Monday, outlining his reasoning. Ironically it was entitled “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media.” Well, yes, and the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plains. Do we need to peer, again, into the profitability of deception FOX News perfected in its efforts to help Trump promote the Big Lie? Maybe the biggest reason Americans don’t trust the news media is because they don’t trust its owners.
But I digress.
From the frontlines of this year’s battle for the swing states, I received a long comment from an old friend, and former colleague who lives in Washington D.C. and has been traveling to Pennsylvania, going door-to-door on getting out the vote for Harris/Walls. Here’s a part of it that I just have to share:
As for the Jeff Bezos’s decision on behalf of the Wash Post, I'm not surprised. He is a businessman. Democracy and "policy" are merely soft luxuries that clutter his bottom line. Regrettably, the news business, you know best of all, is increasingly dependent on billionaire rescuers who own papers for vanity, not the public interest.
For me the larger fear is what Jeff Bezos fears that caused him to pull his punches. Bezos is merely a predictable reaction to a larger force that causes even this power plutocrat to quake in his boots.
I've seen fear close up in the eyes of dems peaking out from doors I have been canvassing for GOTV in southern PA counties (York and Hanover). After some long (too hot) days walking around rural PA towns (York and Hanover) and knocking on doors, I have gathered some scary impressions of our democracy. notably these are generally red towns in rural PA with a smattering or registered DEMs we are trying to GOTV. On Sunday the T--p signs seemed particularly thick around Hanover, PA.
For reasons that were not evident immediately, the canvassing coordination operation was hidden in the back of an industrial/warehouse park with no signs to direct traffic because they said the signs are all stolen within an hour of posting, and they are afraid of T-P people physically attacking or intimidating the volunteers. So, it took a while to find the in marked warehouse door even after using the street address in Google maps. To get someone to direct you to the canvassing coordination place, you had to loiter around until one of the volunteer scout patrols sees you as not a threat and invites you where to go. When I was knocking on doors some folks would talk freely others pleaded with me to get off their porch, whispering through a crack in the door that they did not want any of their neighbors seeing them talking with me (festooned with "Volunteers badges" on a lanyard around my neck). The canvass staff give tips about parking your car so that your DC license plates are not visible. I felt like it is as close as I'll ever come to the French Underground in "Army of Shadows."
The TV in PA and at my Mom's house in Delaware, which is a Philly market) is filled with T-p ads (featuring photos of Sam Brinton) saying that Harris will sexually mutilate your children at school and force your girls to share sport fields and locker rooms with trans students, repeated over and over again. Fascism is here.
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—tjc
