The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

UNDISCLOSED LOCATION – “These are the times that try men’s souls,” Tom Paine once wrote in a famous essay drumming up support for the American Revolution.

The American Crisis: By Thomas Paine – 1776

Now a woman writer named Margaret Sullivan, formerly the media columnist for The Washington Post, writes a Substack blog column and produces a podcast called “American Crisis.”

I wonder what will happen to it if Kamala Harris wins the election next week in a landslide, and Trump is shuffled off into the sunset along with his heroes Adolph Hitler and King George III?

“We needed courage” from The Washington Post, she wrote this week. “We got cowardice.”

She was talking about the decision by Post owner Jeff Bezos and publisher Will Lewis not to publish an editorial in the can endorsing Harris for President over the fascist dictator wannabe Donald Trump, on the very day Trump was spotted greeting executives of the Blue Origin space company, also owned by Bezos, in Austin, Texas.

The Washington Post says it will not endorse a candidate for president

“Jeff Bezos owned the Washington Post the whole time I was the media columnist there from 2016 to 2022, and I thought he was a pretty good owner,” Sullivan writes. “Marty Baron, a strong journalist with a stiff spine, was the top editor, and Bezos stayed out of the prize-winning editorial functions of the paper.”

But Baron retired in 2021. Since then, she says, Bezos, who moved to Washington in 2016, “has become more intrusive.”

He made an ill-considered hire for publisher last year in Will Lewis, a freewheeling Brit who is a veteran of various Murdoch publications. Post editorial page editor David Shipley resigned because of the decision.

At the same time, billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the Los Angeles Times in 2018, also canceled publication of a similar editorial endorsing Harris.

Jelani Cobb, Columbia Journalism School dean, charged that the refusal to endorse in this extraordinarily consequential election “tacitly equalizes two wildly distinct candidates, one of whom has tried to overturn a presidential election and one of whom has not.”

A statement from a group of columnists at the Washington Post, including Eugene Robinson, Ruth Marcus, Perry Bacon, Catherine Rampell and a few others, called the decision not to endorse “a terrible mistake,” and wrote that it represents “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love.”

At the heart of it is the knowledge of what the Post stood for since the Watergate era when, under the great publisher Katharine Graham and editor Ben Bradlee, Sullivan writes, “the paper bravely revealed the corruption of the Nixon administration and had a hand in bringing him down.”

“Trump is much worse than Nixon,” Sullivan said. “But the paper is no longer a beacon for democracy.”

“This is a moment for the institution to be making clear its commitment to democratic values, the rule of law and international alliances, and that threat that Donald Trump poses to them — the precise points The Post made in endorsing Trump’s opponents in 2016 and 2020,” the Post columnists write. “There is no contradiction between The Post’s important role as an independent newspaper and its practice of making political endorsements, both as a matter of guidance to readers and as a statement of core beliefs.”

When Soon-Shiong bought the Los Angeles Times and when Bezos bought the Post, these moves were heralded as public-spirited efforts to help save journalism in a troubled financial era for newspapers. And there’s no doubt that both papers have done important work, Sullivan says.

“But with their core values so callously betrayed — whether out of the owners’ fear of intimidation or pure financial self-interest or both — an indelible stain remains, just as it does at Elon Musk’s execrable dismantlement of Twitter.”

“Billionaires, pretty clearly, are not going to save us,” she says. “Quite the opposite.”

“What should the response be?” She asks. “There’s only one available at the moment. Caring citizens and all defenders of democracy need to do everything in their power to vote Trump out, and begin the long road toward reform of a broken nation.”

So that probably means canceling your digital subscription to the Post, which I plan to do next week after the election. To be honest, I was planning it anyway, since the paper has gradually gone down hill over the past couple of years, with all the layoffs of important writers since the paper announced it would be losing about a hundred million dollars this year.

“This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty. Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners),” former Post executive editor Martin Baron, who led the paper while Trump was president, said in a text message to The Post. “History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

In a column published on The Post’s website Friday, Publisher William Lewis described the decision as a “return to the newspaper’s roots of non-endorsement.” The Post began regularly endorsing presidential candidates in 1976, when the paper endorsed Jimmy Carter “for understandable reasons at the time.”

“We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable,” Lewis wrote. “We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”

But that is a lie, and the American people who are not stupid enough to vote for Trump will see through this decision, which will only cause the paper to lose even more money in the days ahead.

Actions have consequences. In this American crisis, it requires all hands on deck to save this democratic republic. If the Post is going to jump ship at this juncture, we will transfer to another ship.

We join The New York Times in endorsing Kamala Harris for president, as the only patriotic choice.

The Only Patriotic Choice for President: Kamala Harris
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