What is happening with editorial boards is not normal. You need to understand this first.
They are not part of the newsroom, so anyone telling you that is lying. What happened at the LAT and WaPo are the beginning. Have you not read history? They come for you. You just think it’s more steps away.
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The issue isn’t that billionaires owning papers is new. It’s the billionaires hewing to Trump, when previously they were willing to publicly feud with him as people would do in a free society. A good example is Bezos versus the US government over the issue of USPS carrying Amazon packages. Since they’re now showing signs of obedience to Trump in fear of being punished, important scholars are pointing out that it’s a huge problem with a long history in the collapse of democracies into autocracies. It’s a critical force multiplier for the worst and most dangerous features of a fascist government.
I already said this to you, with citations, as did others. You’re so excited about making your point and convinced that you know better that I suspect you’ll just repeat your previous point of view, pretending I said nothing of interest. I eagerly invite you to do that again, if you like.
You clearly are in the field. Or somewhere off in socialism land, but the point remains: We cannot do this again. It turned out pretty bad for Hoover. Things got slightly worse in Germany.
I think you and CrimeDad are kind of talking past each other.
Since they’re now showing signs of obedience to Trump in fear of being punished, important scholars are pointing out that it’s a huge problem with a long history in the collapse of democracies into autocracies.
I think this is simply the intrinsic interplay of the capitalist class and autocrats, though. They (millionaires, billionaires, etc) will, as a group, always protect themselves first when an autocrat comes along.
You are looking at the situation and saying, “Well, them kowtowing is clearly evidence that an autocrat has come along, because when it’s not an autocrat they don’t kowtow”, and CrimeDad is looking at it and saying, “Yes, but they’re just the indicator, they should never have been expected to try to stop this. They just intrinsically will align themselves with autocrats in order to maintain their positions of power, but despite that we’ve allowed them to take control of a core protection of our democracy (press freedom)”.
I just do not understand this worldview that the billionaires are supposed to have protected journalism, let alone served as an important bulwark against fascism. It was already game over if that’s the case.
It looked a fuckload better when the alternative was venture capital. I wrote a post praising Bezos at the time, which didn’t age well.
WaPo could certainly have done worse. It’s not unreasonable to expect that a billionaire might look after a newspaper like a rare classic car or other vanity purchase, that he would be content to keep it running nicely even if it’s ostensibly a poor investment.
A poor investment would be an improvement.
Called it.
