There are ominous portents for American democracy, with potential global ripples, in US media owners’ veto of their newspapers’ presidential endorsements, for fear of political repercussions.
Last week, on October 25, it emerged that Jeff Bezos had overruled an editorial the 146-year old newspaper he purchased in 2013, the Washington Post, had drafted to endorse Donald Trump’s rival in the 2024 US presidential election – the Democratic Party candidate, Vice-President Kamala Harris.
The editorial was spiked pretty late in the election calendar: only eleven days to the November 5 polling date.
As reason for the reversal, The Post’s publisher and CEO, William Lewis, said that the paper was returning to its roots as an “independent” outlet which didn’t indulge in presidential endorsements in its earlier history. Lewis also said the decision reflected the paper’s trust in its “readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”
He is a billionaire two hundred times over, exalted even among the rarefied caste of ‘New Industry Titans’ said to wield “immense… power and influence” in the US and around the world. His conglomerate, Amazon, employs over 1.5m people and turned in revenues of $574.8 billion in 2023, representing 2% of US gross national income and second only to Walmart’s in worldwide ranking. Yet, with all that heft, Amazon founder and executive chairman, Jeff Bezos, is seemingly spooked by Donald Trump’s possible return as American president. He appears petrified about the consequences to his business of offending the notoriously vengeful former president.
It is hard to square these ostensible reasons against known facts. It’s true that in its earlier history, the Post shied away from presidential endorsements. It had made an exception in the 1952 election when it endorsed the Republican Party candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a popular and highly decorated war hero who had been Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II, and who’d planned two of the most consequential military campaigns that enabled allied victory: the 1942/43 North African campaign and the 1944 invasion of Normandy.
After that, the Post recoiled from endorsements in the next five presidential elections. It wasn’t until 1976, 24 years and six election cycles later, that the Post picked up again, that year endorsing the Democratic Party candidate, Jimmy Carter. Since then, the paper regularly endorsed candidates, typically Democratic, abstaining only in the 1988 presidential election. So, it’s a bit disingenuous to claim that the newspaper is returning to norm by reversing itself this year.
It is downright inartful to say, as publisher Lewis did, that the decision was made because the Post trusts its readers’ ability to decide for themselves. This is bizarre in all kinds of ways. Does it mean that the paper didn’t trust its readers’ ability when it previously offered endorsements?
Mind you, the Post is abstaining only from presidential endorsements: it will continue to endorse candidates for other category of elections – governorship, Senate, House of Reps, etc. So, is the publisher of the Washington Post implying that the paper’s readers are perfectly capable of making up their own minds in presidential elections, but can’t quite manage the feat in down-ballot elections without the Post’s guidance?
Quite bizarre!
Besides, a newspaper’s electoral endorsement isn’t an instruction to its readers whom to vote for. That would be election interference. It is simply an expression of the paper’s own values and preferences, which some readers may agree with and probably take into consideration, and others might not; just as with other op-eds.
None of the reasons adduced by the Post’s publisher to explain his newspaper’s sudden retreat survives close scrutiny.
The reason – the alarming reason – definitely lies elsewhere: in Donald Trump’s sinister and often repeated promise to punish his political rivals and their media enablers, if again elected, and in Jeff Bezos’s concern to protect his sprawling business interests. Bezos is probably hedging against fascistic reprisals should Trump return to power, likely unbounded in the face of the US Supreme Court’s expansive ruling on presidential immunity, which I discussed in a previous Awka Times article.
In an apologia of sorts Jeff Bezos wrote on October 28 – amid a din of denunciations for his decision, staff resignations and over 250,000 reader cancellations – he insisted that he had made a “principled decision,” claiming it’s all about changing the impression of bias that pervades the media and restoring trust.
He stated there had been “no quid pro quo” with any of the campaigns in arriving at that decision, despite the fact that senior managers from his aerospace company, Blue Origin, had met with Trump on the very day the decision to pull the Harris endorsement was made. He dismissed suspicions about making the decision so close to the election, saying it was merely “inadequate planning.”
In some comments that greeted the effort, readers basically told Bezos to ‘buzz off’, and not to take them for fools.
The truth is, try as he might, Jeff Bezos cannot shake the impression of being compromised, of offering what Timothy Snyder, in his book, On Tyranny, calls “anticipatory obedience.” Snyder argues in the book that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.”
In Bezos’s case, however, it appears to be a strategic move for self-preservation: an endorsement of Harris could jeopardize his business interests if Trump wins. By ‘defecting’ from Harris and choosing not to endorse anyone, Bezos likely safeguards his business interests regardless of who wins, potentially enhancing them should Trump prevail. In game-theoretic terms, Bezos’s action combines a ‘minimax strategy’ with a ‘neutral positioning’ akin to ‘defection’ within the Prisoner’s Dilemma framework, producing a dominant-strategy equilibrium aimed at minimizing risk and ensuring self-preservation. Yeah, I learned all that business school!
Bezos may dress up his decision to disallow the Post’s proposed Harris endorsement in high-minded language about media neutrality and independence, but it’s at bottom about his bigger business interests. His other companies – particularly his cloud business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and his aerospace company, Blue Origin – have significant contracts and business dealings with the US government, worth far more in strategic and financial terms than his loss-making newspaper which he’d purchased for a paltry $250m.
AWS, for instance, provides cloud computing services to key US government agencies, including the CIA, NASA, and the Department of Defense. Notably, in 2013, under the Obama-Biden administration, AWS won a competitive bid against IBM for a landmark 10-year, $600 million cloud computing contract with the CIA. This contract is considered a major step forward in enhancing inter-agency collaboration and operational efficiency across the intelligence community.
Similarly, in December 2022, AWS was one of four bidders, alongside Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, awarded a hefty $9 billion contract under the Biden-Harris administration for the Pentagon’s Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) programme. This triumph followed a tumultuous history with the project’s predecessor, Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), during Trump’s presidency, in which Amazon – initially considered the frontrunner – had been mysteriously excluded.
Amazon had sued the government on grounds of political interference. The company claimed that it had been passed over in the $10 billion contract because Trump used his power to influence the decision, as part of his “personal vendetta” against Bezos and his newspaper, for perceived critical coverage. Ultimately, on July 6, 2021, the JEDI project was canceled by the Pentagon, paving the way for the JWCC initiative, for which AWS successfully submitted a bid.
Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s aerospace company, is actively involved in NASA’s Artemis programme, specifically as part of the Artemis V mission. NASA awarded Blue Origin a $3.4 billion contract in May 2023 to develop a lunar lander, called the Blue Moon, which is intended to transport astronauts to the Moon’s surface as part of the Artemis V mission scheduled for 2029. This lander will dock with NASA’s lunar Gateway station, where crew transfers will occur in lunar orbit before the landing. Notably, Bezos’s Blue Origin competes with other aerospace companies for business on the NASA space programmes, including SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk who’s been openly and unabashedly cozying up to Trump in this election cycle.
In addition to these contractual engagements, Bezos and his companies actively lobby the government on various policy issues, including tax policies, intellectual property rights, e-commerce and cloud computing regulations, and what have you. It’s a tangled web.
Against this backdrop, we can begin to meaningfully compute the Amazon founder’s sensitivity about the Post’s attempted endorsement of Kamala Harris. It was certain to have irked Donald Trump. The situation might be different were Harris comfortably ahead in the polls. However, in a tight race, with the outcome uncertain, Bezos could not risk offending the notoriously volatile and vindictive Trump. Recall the contentious $10 billion JEDI contract under the Trump administration.
Amazon’s loss of that contract might never have been salvaged had Trump been re-elected. Nor would Bezos be likely to have had the successes he’s had with the Biden-Harris administration.
The lofty pronouncements by Bezos and his principals about principles and media independence, in my opinion, pale in significance against the backdrop of his broader business interests.
Mind you, Jeff Bezos is not alone in nixing his editorial board’s plan to endorse Harris. In fact a few days prior, Patrick Soon-Shiong, billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, similarly vetoed his board’s Harris endorsement plan. Observers speculated that the medical investor and transplant surgeon’s decision might not be unconnected with his pharmaceutical ventures’ need for seamless Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approvals, making it prudent to avoid conflicts with a potentially intrusive White House.
Soon-Shiong’s case had an interesting twist. Amid criticisms of his intervention, his Millennial daughter, Nika, a politician and activist, shared with the media that her family – having experienced apartheid in South Africa – saw this as a protest against the present administration’s support for Israel’s actions in Gaza. The sentiment sounded lofty, like the principled pronouncement of the Post’s publisher, Lewis. But no sooner had Soon-Shiong’s daughter made the lofty claim than her father shot it down, saying she spoke only on her own behalf and that she neither holds any role at the Times nor participates in editorial decisions. Ouch!
Editorial endorsements remain an optional tradition, shaped by each newspaper’s philosophical outlook. Some publishing giants have long abandoned the practice, among them the Wall Street Journal which hasn’t endorsed a presidential candidate since Herbert Hoover in 1928.
Others recently retreated, citing strained resources and the peril of polarizing readers. Yet, stalwarts like the New York Times and The Guardian persist, viewing endorsements as an editorial duty, especially in fractured times.
Until recently, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post stood among the holdouts. But these majors, initially minded to endorse Harris, have been dissuaded by billionaire owners fearing political reprisals should Trump triumph.
It is a striking commentary on American democracy. Once a beacon to the world, America now finds itself categorized among ‘flawed democracies’ in the Economist’s Democracy Index, a reflection of its ever coarser political culture and persistent political dysfunction. During the last Trump presidency, abuses of power had surfaced, raising concerns of graver breaches should he return. Warnings of authoritarian tendencies have emerged from within Trump’s former inner circle, with several advisers, including his former vice-president, declining to back his current bid.
Trump’s campaign rhetoric, laden with ominous threats against critics, the press, and vulnerable groups, alongside pledges to wield absolute authority, gives weight to these forebodings.
The recent actions of media moguls like Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, overruling their own editorial boards’ endorsements in fear of a potential Trump return, underscore the precarious path of American democracy.
Marxists have long argued that a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” rules society, with the capitalist elites holding both economic and political reins. Yet, as seen with Vladimir Putin in Russia and other autocrats elsewhere, political juggernauts can also subdue economic elites. America’s current trajectory hints at such a dynamic under Trump, igniting fears of democratic backsliding and increasing autocratization worldwide.
In his write-up on October 28, Washington Post owner, Jeff Bezos framed his “wealth and business interests” as “a bulwark against intimidation,” insisting he was not under pressure but had acted on “principle” in vetoing his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris.
That may be, but logic and optics strongly suggest otherwise.
*Posted on X by @RealOlaudah
By Chudi Okoye
