Here’s a new slogan that seems good for the sanctimonious, yet corrupt, brain trust The Washington Post: Democracy dies in the darkness of Jeff Bezos’ wallet. The newspaper, which has long capitalized on its reputation as a principled enemy of a paranoid, authoritarian Republican regime, announced Friday that it will this time (or never again) endorse a presidential candidate, despite the fact that the twice-deposed President criminally convicted Donald Trump, Richard Nixon appears to be nothing more than a piker in the field of unhinged abuse of maximum executive power.

The newspaper that still has the audacity to portray itself as a heroic guardian of the country’s embattled democracy has taken over the MAGA thugocracy under the flimsiest pretext imaginable: it plans to preserve an “independent space” for voters who don’t want to be told. who to vote for, editor-in-chief David Shipley told outraged newspaper employees in what NPR media reporter David Folfenflik called a “tense meeting.” Never mind that Americans have already been told to vote in every conceivable public location, and they seem to be showing up with their delicate sensibilities intact. It doesn’t matter that the whole point of an op-ed is to gather voices discussing what people should say and do. And it doesn’t matter that there is no such thing as an impartial “independent space” in a battle over how and whether America’s formal democracy can survive. What Shipley actually did was say, “My corporate paymasters want to wallow in Donald Trump’s tax cuts and avoid jeopardizing their lucrative federal contracts,” but the false rhetoric of casual journalistic objectivity is much better suited to editorial meetings where you’re trying to care ensure that reporters adhere to the management line.

Shipley had reportedly already lined up an endorsement from Harris, but according to the After‘s own reporting was overruled by After owner and retail predator Jeff Bezos, the centibillionaire owner of Amazon. During Trump’s first administration, the then-president threatened to withhold major tax breaks and postal subsidies in retaliation for the After‘s critical reporting on Trump. When the editors were considering her 2020 endorsement, Bezos approved the choice of Joe Biden; This time, the newspaper owner is hedging his bets against economic sanctions during a second Trump term, not to mention resolving several pending antitrust actions against his company that are unlikely to break through in a Harris administration. And like his fellow billionaires, King Amazon is clearly excited about the prospects of more money in his coffers, thanks to Trump’s promise to continue doling out giveaways to our economic oligarchy.

It’s worth noting that the same scenario played out at the Los Angeles Timeswhere its billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked the newspaper’s planned endorsement of Harris. Soon-Shiong is not only a standard-issue plutocrat with a pharmaceutical fortune sure to thrive under a more lax Trump-appointed FDA, but is also a longtime friend of Elon Musk, the man-child centibillionaire who has gone all in for Trump’s re-election. . (Indeed, in a fine irony, the After published a front-page report on how Musk’s Starlink satellite company will rake in billions more in government money in a second Trump term, just on the day the paper’s executives announced their craven capitulation to Musk’s would-be benefactor.)

What’s different about the shameful? LA times The saga is that Marial Garza, the editor of the newspaper’s editorial pages, recognized the real journalistic and political stakes of having the newspaper’s voice suppressed by the dictate of a billionaire. “I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not comfortable with our silence,” Garza said Columbia Journalism Review editor Sewell Chan:

In dangerous times, honest people must stand up. This is how I get up.… This is a point in time where you speak your conscience no matter what. And an endorsement was the logical next step after a series of editorials we wrote about how dangerous Trump is to democracy, about his unfitness to be president, about his threats to jail his enemies. We have argued in editorial after editorial that he should not be re-elected.

As for David Shipley, here’s the brutal assessment of one After employee: “The story about Shipley has long been that he got the job because he knows how to deal with rich men.” Jacob Heilbrunn, a former colleague of Shipley’s at The New Republicagrees: At the time he was a “serious, conventional liberal,” but “now seems to have turned into a totally empty suit.”

While Shipley said he owned the AfterFollowing Murdoch’s cowardly decision at that heated staff meeting, the official reason for it was published under the byline of Bezos’ handpicked publisher, Will Lewis, the former Murdoch lackey still deep in the fallout of the British phone hacking scandal.

In an arrogant and obtuse editorial, Lewis dismissed the newspaper’s recent history of presidential endorsements by citing its disapproval during the 1960 presidential race — a statement of supposed journalistic principles that largely succeeded in being as vapid as it was pompous. are: “We have said and will continue to say, as reasonably and candidly as we know how, what we believe on the emerging issues of the campaign,” the 1960 editorial read in part. “We have tried to express our views as honestly as possible, guided by our own principles of independence, but free from commitment to any party or candidate.” Translation: We do not view candor as anything other than an expedient rhetorical position, and must avoid the obvious moral implications of our own journalistic work.

That is also the core of Lewis’s own slapdash argument. While rejecting the idea that his quisling pose can also function as “a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or a condemnation of another,” Lewis maintains that it is in fact “consistent with the values ​​that the After has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in the service of American ethics, reverence for the rule of law and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.” If the After cherishes these values, it is objectively impossible to balance them with serving an election that could restore maximum power to a multi-convicted lawbreaker, fanatic, molester, abuser of executive power, and self-appointed agent of political retribution whose own regard former cabinet members as a fascist. Readers of the AfterLewis’s editorial page would have been better served with a completely blank space or a horoscope or a play on words, rather than Lewis’s self-congratulatory bilge.

Yet long-suffering After readers might not be all that surprised by Lewis’s moronic, self-defeating reasoning. This was also the newspaper that spent three years covering the damning news that Supreme Court Justice wife Martha-Ann Alito, advocating for Trump’s maximum executive power and gleefully destroying women’s rights to their own bodily autonomy denounced, made a U-turn: The flag was lowered outside the couple’s home as a gesture of solidarity with the failed coup of January 6. And according to NPR’s Folfenflik, Lewis ditched the prospect of an exclusive interview with him in exchange for the writer’s promise to bury developments in the phone hacking case. in his reporting.

This is a universe so far removed from the high standards of character and public probity that Lewis claims to uphold by embracing a morally indefensible stance of nonalignment in a moment of democratic crisis. But it’s what you get when you staff the top of a masthead solely with people who know how to deal with rich men.