The Top of the Heap
The national newspapers are alright
If Kamala Harris defeats Donald Trump, as Economic Principals expects that she will, the four big English-language newspapers in America will have been a major factor – perhaps the major factor, aside from the candidates themselves. EP reached this conclusion by reading the papers daily.
The national dailies – The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and the Financial Times – constitute the apex of the information ecosystem that produces the first draft the American narrative. Their conduct throughout the three-year campaign has been vigorous, sophisticated, and, for the most part, even-handed. Hearts on sleeve are different matters.
No other organization come close, not even Bloomberg News, whose extensive newsgathering operations and influence suffer from lack of national newsprint. A second echelon produces some news that enters the narrative, but usually serves as echo-chamber for reporting they read in the newspapers. This second card includes Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, Politico, the Christian Science Monitor and The Guardian. Several recent start-ups are also part of this scene, among them ProPublica, the Marshall Project, Axios and Quartz.
The third tier consists of all manners of internet amplifiers: broadcasters, newsletters, podcasts, blogs, and chat rooms. Their aggregate influence is enormous; a few enjoy considerable heft. When a particular outlet reaches a certain level of influence, it begins its ascent towards the newspapers themselves (see the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Heather Cox Richardson, and, if not yet, veteran newspaperman Seymour Hersh).
The fourth echelon consists of professionally published books, the most successful or interesting or thoughtful of which also reach national newspaper pages.
The news this week has been that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, declared there would be no presidential endorsement from The Washington Post, which he owns, lock, stock, printing presses, and internet servers. Several senior staffers quit the paper. Some 250,000 subscribers canceled, around 10 percent of the paper’s subscriptions, according to leaks.
On the surface, there was nothing especially wrong with this. The Wall Street Journal hasn’t endorsed a candidate since 1928 (though its Friday editorial, “How Risky Is a Trump Second Term?” read like a cautious one). Instead, editorial board members are instructed to write essays evaluating each candidate’s strengths and weaknesses.
Nor did Bezos’s decision to hire an English newspaperman with an inclusive investigation behind him to serve as the Post’s publisher seem more than a venial sin. William Lewis, then a Rupert Murdoch employee, maintained he was not involved in a phone-tapping scandal. On the other hand, everyone recognizes that the Post’s web operations needs work to compete with The New York Times.
The most troubling problem was the suspicious timing of his last-minute decision. Perhaps wonted fear stemmed from the polls, perhaps from a direct or indirect warning from some powerful Trump supporter. Was it coincidence that led the billionaire owner of The Los Angeles Times to make the same decision at the same time? We may speculate, but we’ll never be certain. In any event, Bezos will have learned a lesson.
Journalist Adrian Monck, an Oxford-based once-a-week newsletter writer whose 7Things@Substack.com EP especially enjoys, last week cited four more contradictions in the op-ed piece Bezos wrote for his paper explaining his no-endorsement decision.
Claiming “principle” whilst blaming “inadequate planning;” advocating transparency but providing minimal detail on the decision process; acknowledging he’s “not an ideal owner” whilst making unilateral editorial decisions; arguing against perceived bias whilst creating a larger perception problem through your own intervention.
To which EP wishes to add a sixth problem with Bezos’s argument. He wrote:
In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalism and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.
Bezos’s failure to disaggregate the shorthand “the media” shows he doesn’t yet understand the mission of the newspaper he bought. Sure, it exists to make money, but it will take time and a good deal of further investment to make the Post profitable. Meanwhile, the Post isn’t supposed to be credible to “the public,” whoever that is. Its reputation depends upon its peers, and knowledgeable critics. The rest is trickle-down.
It may not matter. EP has always believed that Donald E. Graham, the Post’s majority owner and chairman of his family’s holding company’s chose to sell to Bezos at a substantial discount, compared to what others were willing to pay -- $250 million vs. three times as much.
Why? Because, as he said at the time, he came to know Bezos and trust him, at least more than the rest. The two and presumably their spouses met at Herbert Allen Jr.’s low-key, low-profile annual retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho, sometimes billed as summer camp for media billionaires. Graham knew the Bezos family included three sons and a daughter. He may have entertained hopes for succession.
After all, that’s how Don Graham inherited his newspaper. His grandfather, Eugene Meyer, bought it in 1933 for $825,000 at a bankruptcy sale, having offered $5 million for it four years before. Meyer resigned about the same time from his position as Herbert Hoover’s chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, to serve as publisher of the dilapidated Post. He poured money into the paper year after year, until it competed favorably with the dominant Washington Star and eventually displaced it.
After twenty years, Meyer turned over control of the Post to the charismatic Philip Graham, who had married his daughter Katharine, called Kay. In due course, Graham bought Newsweek magazine and appointed Ben Bradlee the Post’s editor. After Graham’s death, at 48, in 1963, Kay Graham took over and piloted the paper through the turmoil of the Watergate scandals and severe union problems, before passing it on to her son Don. As publisher, Don Graham further burnished the Post’s reputation for fairness.
Jeff Bezos has his share of conflicts. Amazon, the colossal online retailer he and his then spouse, MacKenzie Scott, had built from a start-up book business. Today Amazon is ripe for a breakup, as is its competitor Walmart, on voluntary or Sherman Antitrust Act terms. Bezos may not be the Post ideal owner, as he acknowledged in his newspaper last week. But he is one of the world’s wealthiest men, and he has three sons and a daughter.
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