Trump Shows Why Billionaires Owning Newspapers is a Bad Idea
The news that Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post (WaPo), has blocked its editorial staff from endorsing a presidential candidate is disturbing on two levels. One level of concern is about the power a billionaire has over the discourse of ideas in our body politics. The fact that one rich guy gets to shut down the opinion of the journalists who report and offer commentary on the news is a First Amendment nightmare. The other level is why Bezos has chosen to do so. It speaks to the danger of Donald Trump returning to office and how much he has already damaged U.S. democracy.
Bezos is not the only billionaire pulling editorial endorsements. A similar situation has happened on the West Coast with the Los Angeles Times. There, billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong has blocked its editorial board from endorsing a candidate. Both newspapers had planned to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris.
These billionaires clearly don’t believe in democracy. When Soon-Shiong learned that the subscribers had begun canceling their subscriptions because of his decision, his answer bordered on snarky (The Guardian, 5/25/24.)
“I hope that they understand by not subscribing, it just adds to the demise, frankly, of democracy and the Fourth Estate.”
In other words, Soon-Shiong knows his action aids in the erosion of America’s democratic republic and furthers it towards being the totally oligarchical authoritarian government that has been growing since the passing of Citizen’s United in 2010. He is fine with this.
For those who would question if editorials and opinion pieces are even supposed to be a part of a newspaper’s job, a reminder: there is a long history in America, and in Europe, of having the newspaper editorial as a way to present the informed opinion on a topic of interest to the public. Julie Firmstone, a professor of journalism and political communication at the University of Leeds, wrote this about the role of the editorial in America.
“The creation of the editorial column in the United States in the 1920s enabled a strict separation of fact-based “objective” journalism from opinion. Editorials were introduced as a vehicle to illustrate to readers a newspaper’s independence from the government on a daily basis.”
Of course, if you go back to the early days of America, the Federalist Papers were a series of newspaper articles designed to both inform, spark discussion, and hopefully persuade the American public that the Constitution was a good idea. This fact is immortalized in the song “Non Stop” from the musical Hamilton. Billionaires like Soon-Shiong and Bezos are playing the role of Aaron Burr, acting out of fear and refusing to take a stand to save the American Constitution. Their behavior is the opposite of being a patriot.
What is the “Fourth Estate”?
For those who may not know what Soon-Shiong means by the Fourth Estate, the term is used to describe the role of the free press in a democracy. A free press covers the news of the day and gives commentary on it, regardless of what the government may or may not want to reveal. This allows people to discuss different points of view and come to their own conclusions.
America’s Founding Fathers knew that they needed to have a free press as a way for “We the People” to have a check on their elected leaders. It was thought to be so important for a democratic republic that they put it in the First Amendment.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Interestingly enough, the term “Fourth Estate” is said to have come from Edmund Burke, an 18th-century English philosopher who some see as the man who laid “the foundation for modern conservatism” (Online Library of Liberty). The quote is known second-hand, as it is reported by historian Thomas Carlyle in “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Lecture V.”.
“Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.”
Whether Burke truly coined the phrase or simply used it in a 1771 British parliamentary debate on having the press in the House of Commons, an 1858 book by Thomas Macknight (History of the life and times of Edmund Burke, p. 407–467) shows he certainly agreed with its sentiment. This importance of the fourth estate is one of the few ideals that both true conservatives (non-MAGA), Democrats, Liberals, and even socialists (Cambridge University Press) agree on.
A great example of this breath of agreement is seen in these words of Thomas Jefferson.
“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. but I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.” (Extract from Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787)
Jefferson valued a free press as the space to debate ideas about government so much that he praised the greatness of the Federalist Papers—despite some of them being written by his political enemy, Alexander Hamilton.
Why Billionaires Shouldn’t Own News Media Outlets
Bezos is not unaware of the importance of a free press. He knows exactly what his choice does to our democratic norms. In 2016, Vox (10/20/2016) reported how Bezos had been speaking up on the issue of Trump and what Trump’s actions could do to our media.
“To try and chill the media and threaten retribution and retaliation, which is what he’s done in a number of cases, it just isn’t appropriate. (…) We have freedom of speech in this country, it’s written into the Constitution. There are a bunch of nations that have written constitutions that they don’t pay any attention to,” he continued. “It is inappropriate for a presidential candidate to erode that around the edges. They should be trying to burnish it instead of eroding it.”
Despite how “inappropriate” such actions are, when Trump became America’s 45th president, he went after Bezos’s companies. He didn’t just trash-talk them either, although he did plenty of that, including consistently calling the Washington Post the “Amazon Washington Post.” In 2018, he forced the U.S. Post Office to “reevaluate” its relationship with Amazon (NYT, 4/12/18). The following year, Trump arranged for the Pentagon to not award Amazon Web Services (AWS) a $10 billion-dollar contract to develop a cloud infrastructure, a job that AWS was considered to be the logical choice for (BBC, 10/12/19).
Given this history, every major CEO—including Bezos—knows what a second Trump term will look like for those Trump perceives as his enemies. They know that the over “100 threats” (NPR, 10/21/24) to punish those who oppose anything about him is neither a joke nor just a possibility. Trump’s already done so once—tto Jeff Bezos.
Forget whatever convoluted logic Bezos presents for his decision because it doesn’t add up (WaPo, 10/20/24). His opening argument is that “people don’t trust the news media. Well, how exactly does a last-minute change in endorsement policy in the most important election since 1860 endear trust? It doesn’t. What it does show is that Bezos has a lot of fear that a Trump win would lead to even more retaliation if he let that endorsement of Harris run.
To be fair, no one should expect a major business to prioritize anything but its bottom line. Corporations are not charged with having to “promote the general welfare.” of the nation’s people. That is the job of the federal government. (Don’t believe it? Go read the U.S. Constitution.)
These billionaire newspaper owners are making a business decision based on what Trump did the last time and his specific threats to go after news and media companies (Associated Press, 12/05/23) if elected again. The problem we are facing is that a newspaper isn’t an ordinary business. It’s also a pillar of democracy.
While small businesses have direct connections to their communities and thus an interest in their welfare, large corporations are not designed to care about the welfare of anyone beyond their shareholders. Now, with the presidential race tied between rebuilding America’s tattered democracy or collapsing into a complete fascist regime (one complete with rounding up a massive ethnic group of people and putting them in internment camps), Bezos and Soon-Shiong have chosen to not allow their newspapers to do their job. It’s just business, but it begs the question of how we’ve ended up in this dilemma. The answer may be in the story of the most recent major paper to pull its endorsement of Harris.
Hiding Behind Hedge Funds and Holding Companies
USA Today has joined the two billionaire owners who have ordered their newspapers to subvert US democracy in the name of profit. Both theflagship paper and its 200 affiliate newspapers will not be publishing an endorsement for the presidential election.
At first glance, the USA Today move seems different because it appears to not be owned by a single billionaire. A longer look proves otherwise.
The owner of USA Today was tracked down by the Capital Research Center project: influencewatch.org. It first notes that the paper is owned by the Gannett News organization. However, that American institution was bought out and merged with the company GateHouse, which is owned by the New Media Investment Group and managed by the NYC investment group Fortress. In turn, Fortress is owned by SoftBank, which is a Japanese investment holding corporation. Softbank was founded by and is to this day run by Masayoshi Son, a Japanese billionaire.
That’s right. USA Today is owned by yet another billionaire. Hence, USA Today, which in 2018 ran an opinion piece explaining the history and importance of the newspaper editorial, is now saying it won’t be doing a presidential endorsement “this year” but “may still endorse candidates at the state and local levels at their own discretion” (CNN, 10/29/24).
Ostensibly, this decision was made by Kristin Roberts, Gannett Media’s chief content officer, not Masayoshi. However, when Gannett was sold to New Media, the only thing that mattered was to make it profitable. Thus anyone put into management had to have the profit motive—not journalist integrity—as the priority.
Josh Benton of Havard’s Nieman Lab broke down the overarching purpose of the merger of Gannett with Gatehouse in an episode of NPR’s All Things Considered
“The Gannett that we have now is the result of the merger of two very large companies. The idea was that an individual newspaper might struggle on its own, but if you buy enough of them, you can extract as much of the cost of producing the newspaper from the local community as possible. You cut down on print days. You have the page layout and editing done elsewhere. The thought was you could achieve these economies of scale and make a profitable business. The problem is, as part of the merger, Gannett took on a lot of debt, and they have to pay off that debt. So they need revenue. And the way that they have been doing that is by cutting costs to the bone. That means cutting staff and cutting the quality of their newspapers.”
No organization is going to admit they are willing to cut quality to gain profit. However, Poynter (05/11/23) reported that starting in December 2022, three years after that 2019 merger, there was a “mass exodus among top executives"—including “nearly the entire USA Today masthead.“ In other words, many people with decades of experience in journalism integrity have left.
The Model for Gannett
Gannett isn’t the only major news organization to suffer this kind of fate. The Tribune Company has gone through this twice. It was once a huge organization that owned major newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, and the Baltimore Sun. They also owned things like major real estate, a baseball team, and TV stations.
The first time the company was bought out was by Sam Zell in 2007. He may have been the first of these modern-era billionaires to buy a group of newspapers without ever having, in the words of the NYT, “run a newspaper.” His inexperience showed because, whatever good intentions Zell may have had to “not sell off assets,” by 2008 he’d run the company into bankruptcy. Forbes put this solely on Zell.
“Bad economy or not, if it wasn’t for Zell and the enormous debt load he packed on the company, Tribune Co. would be trundling along profitably. (…) Zell blew it by treating the purchase of this august newspaper company like, well, like just another real estate development.”
Tribune Company came out of bankruptcy in 2012. They ended up with “eight major daily newspapers and 23 TV stations,” with the controlling interest being held by several hedge funds, all of which intended to sell off the bulk of the newspapers (Reuters, 12/31/12). Soon-Shiong’s 2018 purchase of the LA Times became one of those sales.
Despite the ongoing downturn in the newspaper business, the slimmed-down company was staying in the black. Then, in 2021, the Tribune Company was bought out by Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund started by Randall D. Smith. This was a brutal, hostile takeover — and that’s not just an opinion from the Associated Press — Google it.
Alden essentially did the same thing as Zell and saddled the debt-free company with a ton of debt. It then began slashing the staff at all the newspapers. The Tribune Company had all of its papers end editorial endorsements in 2022. At the time, the Associated Press (10/26/22) said this was “part of a trend"—one that was occurring because of our polarized times and the fear of losing subscribers. They also presented this argument.
“For all the effort that news organizations have made in crafting compelling endorsements, there have always been questions about whether those arguments have much influence, particularly in high-profile races.”
The problem with this take is that the point of an editorial endorsement isn’t to swing an election. It’s about offering a paper’s opinion, a point of view based on the facts, for the electorate to consider. That’s part of the Fourth Estate’s job. How that opinion is received is not.
Is it Fair to Blame Billionaires for the Failing Fourth Estate?
Now, billionaires are not the sole cause of problems in the newspaper business. The traditional model of news distribution has been upended by the rise of the internet, blogging, and social media. Forbes (12/21/23), in accessing the large number of layoffs across the industry in 2023, gave this litany of reasons for it:
(…)challenging economic headwinds, inflation, a sluggish ad economy, competition, shifts in consumer behavior, less than robust subscriber counts, changes in corporate strategy, reorganization, ongoing adjustments post-Covid, advances in technology such as AI, and placating Wall Street investors.
So, according to Forbes, there are only three reasons connected to the billionaire class: However, what happens when you remove those three reasons? Do all of the other reasons cause the same effect?
The Case of the New York Times
In this election cycle, NYT did publish an editorial endorsement, which, like WaPo, they’ve done for decades. Are they not in fear of angering Trump or his supporters? Why has their choice of action been different from these other major newspapers? Some might be surprised at the answer.
One major difference is that the Times has been owned and run by a member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family since 1896. The family also owns the controlling shares in the larger New York Times Company. While the company is currently worth $9.06 billion, none of the Ochs-Sulzberger are billionaires.
How is this possible? It’s because, despite being a publicly traded company, the family’s controlling interest is not in some investment holding company. A Vanity Fair article about the hit TV show Success“ noted that “the Sulzbergers operate the Times under a family trust designed to prevent individual heirs from selling out.” ( The Ochs-Sulzberger family is the inspiration for the Pierce family in Succession.)
Perhaps this is what makes the NYT different in the current newspaper landscape. Maybe. It still is a billion-dollar for-profit business, and it has the usual concerns of keeping subscribers that all newspapers do. To that point, the paper recently announced that it will no longer be doing editorials on political races in New York. So, NYT isn’t completely immune to not wanting to upset subscribers. However, the paper will be keeping its 160-year tradition of editorials on presidential races.
In terms of profits, the NYT has kept its concerns local. They don’t want to offend local subscribers, friends, sources, or the mayor of New York. Or maybe they’ve decided they don’t have the bandwidth and resources to cover the local races at that level. What they are not worried about is upsetting a possible President of the United States and having their publishing license taken away, or having that president send an angry mob to attack the NYT building.
The NYT’s approach is the exact opposite of what USA Today has said. They have permitted their affiliates to comment on local races. Here is part of their public statement that was sent to several major news outlets:
“While USA TODAY will not endorse for president, local editors at publications across the USA TODAY Network have the discretion to endorse at a state or local level. Many have decided not to endorse individual candidates but rather, endorse key local and state issues on the ballot that impact the community. Why are we doing this? Because we believe America’s future is decided locally — one race at a time” (Lark-Marie Antón, spokesperson for USA Today.)
USA Today’s reasoning sounds very much like the reasoning that has resulted in the issue of abortion rights being given to the states. Both are deliberately erroneous; they ignore the larger truth of how the issue is no more a state’s right issue than slavery and the Fugitive Slave Laws were. All of these things are about human rights.
It’s true that local politics are important, but national politics affects every single community across the nation. Every newspaper should be weighing in for their communities. However, when the name of your paper is “USA Today,” to say that you are not going to comment on the leadership of the nation is an egregious dereliction of duty to the role of the Fourth Estate. The same goes for any newspaper that claims to be of national importance.
NYT takes the role of the Fourth Estate seriously. It’s why their choice has been to weigh in on issues that affect the nation and not so much that of a particular state. It stands in sharp contrast to the aforementioned papers owned by billionaires and holding companies. Unlike those newspapers, The New York Times is not treated like a commodity to be bought and sold. Instead, the owners see its primary purpose as good journalism and doing due diligence as a member of the Fourth Estate. You may not like the point of view they present, but at least they present it.
WaPo also used to take the role of the Fourth Estate seriously. After all, they are who broke the Watergate scandal. Today, regardless of how he tries to spin it, the primary purpose is obviously to protect Bezos and his companies. The same goes for the other newspapers owned by billionaires, holding companies, and hedge funds.
In the case of Bezos, the day after his own WaPo editorial on why his decision was brilliant and good for journalism and the country, the paper published an opinion piece by the media critic Erik Wemple. His wry reasoning speaks to why billionaires owning newspapers is problematic. The line that stands out is this:
“Oligarchs who use their editorial boards to pronounce on the world have injected some whimsy into American history.”
By definition, an oligarch does not believe in or support democracy. It is the problem with the billionaire class in general, but it is especially daunting when they own something that is supposed to play a part in maintaining one.
Ultimately, The Choices To Not Run Presidential Endorsements Shows The Danger of Trump
In 2016, Bezos was fine waxing poetic about democracy and the wrongness of Trump’s actions. Even after seeing Trump get away with abusing the government’s power against him, WaPo ran an endorsement for then-candidate Joe Biden. After Biden won, Trump directed his followers to violently attack the U.S. Capitol. His campaign speeches have gotten more unhinged with promises and musings about keeping an “enemies list” (Associated Press, 12/05/23) and having a “firing squad.” for former Representative Liz Cheney (Reuters, 11/01/24). Meanwhile, the Republican-packed Supreme Court has ruled that Trump has “presidential immunity” for crimes committed or might commit while in office (Reuters 07/01/24).
Given the things mentioned above, one can almost understand Bezos’s and the other billionaire’s fear of speaking out against him. Yet, there’s also the New York Times. Their non-billionaire, non-oligarchy owners are facing the same thing: financial punishment and possible violence under Trump’s fascist regime if he wins.
The difference between the NYT owners and the billionaires seems to be the understanding of the role a newspaper is supposed to take in a democracy—and caring enough about democracy to honor that commitment above everything else. When someone like Trump gets into government and can create an anti-democracy movement like MAGA, it becomes clear that billionaires aren’t fit to do the job of maintaining the Fourth Estate. If Harris wins, this is something that can possibly be addressed by looking at anti-trust laws. Unfortunately, at this moment, it’s too late to do anything about it. All we can do is vote blue and pray.
