CONFIDENTLY WRONG
With Bezos at the Helm, Democracy Dies at the Washington Post Editorial
Board
In the Soviet Union, everybody was aware that the media was controlled by
the state. But in a corporate state like the U.S., a veneer of independence
is still maintained, although trust in the media has been plummeting for
years.
by Alan Macleod
June 18th, 2021
Mint Press News
By Alan Macleod
WASHINGTON The Washington Posts glaring conflicts of interest have of
late once again been the subject of scrutiny online, thanks to a new article
denouncing a supposed attempt to soak billionaires in taxes. Written by
star columnist Megan McArdle who previously argued that Walmarts wages
are too high, that there is nothing wrong with Googles monopoly, and that
the Grenfell Fire was a price worth paying for cheaper buildings the
article claimed that Americans have such class envy that the government
would destroy [billionaires] fortunes so that the rest of us dont have to
look at them. Notably, the Post chose to illustrate it with a picture of
its owner, Jeff Bezos, making it seem as if it was directly defending his
power and wealth, something they have been accused of on more than one
occasion.
There was considerable speculation online as to whether Bezos himself wrote
the piece, so blatantly in his interest it was. Unfortunately, this sort of
speculation has raged ever since the Amazon CEO bought the newspaper in 2013
for $250 million.
Undue influence
Being owned by the worlds richest individual does not mean that The
Washington Post and its employees are rolling in dough themselves. Far from
it: Bezos revolution at the newspaper, which has led to both increased
pageviews and company value, has been largely based on simply squeezing
workers harder than before. In an interview with the Columbia Journalism
Review, management acknowledged that Post reporters are pushed to produce
almost four times as many stories as their peers at The New York Times.
Furthermore, the Post writes and rewrites the same story but from slightly
different angles and with different headlines in order to generate more
clicks, and thus more revenue. Thanks to new technology, reporters every
keystroke is monitored and they are under constant pressure from management
not to fall behind. The technique of constant surveillance is not unlike
what hyper-exploited Amazon warehouse workers who wear GPS devices or Fitbit
watches have to endure.
Bezos is currently worth a shade under $200 billion, with his wealth nearly
doubling since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. With such
a fortune to protect, the obvious solution is to acquire media outlets to
control the narrative in the face of rising public disenchantment with
rampaging inequality. Omar Ocampo, a researcher for the Program on
Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, said
that this is a common tactic among the super wealthy. Billionaire ownership
of major news outlets is but another tool the billionaire class deploys for
the purpose of wealth defense. It gives them the power to set the terms of
the agenda and influence public opinion in their favor, Ocampo told
MintPress.
But Bezos is far from the only senior figure with questionable connections.
The companys CEO, Frederick Ryan, was a senior member of the Reagan White
House, rising to become the 40th presidents assistant and later the
chairman of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. He later became CEO
of Politico. In the Posts announcement of the hiring move, they themselves
noted that among Ryans biggest achievements at their rival outlet was
helping the news organization win a lucrative advertising deal with Goldman
Sachs and host presidential debates before the 2008 and 2012 Republican
primaries.
Another neoconservative in a key position is Editorial Page Editor Fred
Hiatt. Under Hiatts tenure, anti-establishment columnists like Dan Froomkin
were let go and warmongers like the late Charles Krauthammer, Paul
Wolfowitz, and David Ignatius moved in. After being so wrong on such a huge
story as the invasion of Iraq, hawkish ideologue Fred Hiatt should have been
terminated as editorial page editor, Jeff Cohen, former Professor of
Journalism at Ithaca College and founder of media watchdog group Fairness
and Accuracy in Reporting, told MintPress, adding:
In a decent media system, someone who has been so inaccurate on so many
issues as Hiatt would not be in a powerful media position two decades later.
Powerful voices in U.S. media often argue that society should be a
meritocracy with advancement based on ability or achievement. Hiatt
proves that the U.S. corporate media system is just the opposite a
kakistocracy where the unqualified and unprincipled rise to the top.
Other highly questionable hires include Jerusalem correspondent Ruth Eglash,
who spent seven years putting out content that was often indistinguishable
from Israeli government propaganda. At the time of her hire, activists
highlighted the conflicts of interest she had, given her husbands job as a
PR rep for the country. In November 2020, Eglash quit the Post to become
chief of communications for the Israeli ambassador to the United States and
United Nations. My experiences as a journalist have afforded me a great
instinct of how to better tell Israels unique story, she said, adding a
strong U.S.-Israel relationship and showcasing Israels successes to the
world has [sic] always been a passion of mine.
At the center of the news cosmos
The Washington Post is among the most powerful, influential, and widely-read
media outlets in the United States. Its position as the dominant newspaper
in the nations capital reinforces its place as a thought-leading,
agenda-setting publication. Whatever appears in the Post will likely be in
the rest of the nations media, so authoritative is its reputation.
There are no more important pages than its editorial section, where its
board comes together to lay out the collective wisdom of its most senior
journalists and editors. Through its editorial page, the senior staff lay
out the newspapers line to others and broadcast what they see as the
correct position on the most pressing issues of the day. Hence, editorials
are essentially instructions to their well-heeled and influential readers in
D.C. and around the country on what to think about any given subject.
This is particularly troublesome as, despite the fact the newspaper presents
itself as a defender of liberty and a champion of the people (its tagline is
Democracy Dies in Darkness), the editorial board has represented the
interests of the powerful over ordinary Americans on issue after issue. The
following editorials are examples of this in action.
Could we be any more pro-war?
The Posts editorial board has generally been extremely supportive of
whatever conflicts the U.S. has started, and has consistently warned against
ending the violence. In a 2015 editorial entitled Drone strikes are bad; no
drone strikes would be worse, it balked at the idea of stopping the highly
controversial bombing campaigns throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
By that time, President Barack Obama was bombing seven countries
simultaneously. Nevertheless, the Post argued that drones had successfully
defeated Al-Qaeda and that the use of drone strikes shouldnt be up for
review.
In recent times, the rising newspaper of record has also been a driver of
increased hostilities with China, describing Beijings militarys moves in
the South China Sea as provocations against the U.S., spreading rumors
about the COVID-19 viruss origin, and demanding American companies like
Apple resist Chinas tyranny and begin to relocate their production
facilities elsewhere to punish the Chinese government.
On Latin America too, the editorial board has proven to be extremely
hawkish. It immediately endorsed a U.S.-backed far-right coup in Bolivia in
2019, insisting that there could be little doubt who was ultimately
responsible for the chaos: newly resigned President Evo Morales. The Post
condemned him for refusing to cooperate with Bolivias more responsible
leaders, who were organizing his overthrow, and chastised him for using the
word coup for what was going on. Morales, they concluded, was a victim of
his own insatiable appetite for power and his inability to accept that a
majority of Bolivians wanted him to leave office.
In 2002, the paper also supported a coup against Hugo Chavez, falsely
claiming the Venezuelan president had ordered the shooting of thousands of
demonstrators and absurdly asserting that theres been no suggestion that
the United States had anything to do with [it].
The WaPo editorial board's less than subtle take
The WaPo editorial boards less than subtle take on drone warfare
In more recent times, it has demanded more action to unseat Chavezs
successor, Nicolas Maduro, including supporting U.S. sanctions that have now
killed over 100,000 people, according to a United Nations rapporteur. The
Posts justification in 2017 was that Maduro was on the verge of carrying
out his own coup, abolish[ing] the opposition-controlled legislature,
cancel[ing] future elections and establish[ing] a regime resembling that of
Cubas none of which has happened. In its efforts to oust the
democratically-elected leader, the Post even aligned itself with Donald
Trump and endorsed far-right coup leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuelas
legitimate president, a position some polls have suggested as little as 3%
of Venezuelans hold.
The editorial board has expressed its desire to see regime change in
leftist-controlled Nicaragua, too. President Daniel Ortega, it claims, is
taking a sledgehammer to opposition against him, while it also demands
that the U.S., which has done nothing but offer mild verbal opposition to
his rule, do more. What happened to the U.S. of the 1980s, which spent so
much money and political capital to promote democracy in Nicaragua? they
ask sadly.
In reality, of course, the U.S. is currently trying to strangle Nicaraguas
economy through sanctions. And in the 1980s, Washingtons democracy
promotion agenda included the funding, training and arming of fascist death
squads who wrought havoc across Central America, killing hundreds of
thousands in genocides from which the area may never recover. The architects
of the violence were found guilty in U.S. courts, while the Reagan
administration was tried and convicted by the International Court of Justice
on 15 counts that amount to international terrorism. That the Posts
editorial board remembers that history as promoting democracy is
particularly worrisome.
Fake news, fake newspapers
The Washington Post was the key supporter of fake news detection system
PropOrNot, which was almost immediately exposed as a fake operation
itself, forcing the newspaper to publicly distance itself from its own
reporting. Yet it was the Post itself that perpetuated the most notorious
and damaging fake news story of the 21st century: the Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction hoax and Saddam Husseins fictional links to al-Qaeda.
In a highly influential editorial entitled Irrefutable the Post wrote
that, after watching Secretary of State Colin Powells speech at the United
Nations, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses
weapons of mass destruction
And [Powell] offered a powerful new case that
Saddam Husseins regime is cooperating with a branch of the al-Qaeda
organization that is trying to acquire chemical weapons and stage attacks in
Europe.
No page was more crucial in propelling the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq
than the Posts editorial page which beat the drums for war in a couple
dozen editorials in the six months leading up to the invasion, Cohen told
MintPress, adding:
The Posts op-ed page was almost as cartoonishly wrong on Iraq, offering
little dissent or corrective to the editorial pages jingoism especially
in that pivotal media moment following Colin Powells error-filled U.N.
speech. While the editorial page offered up its Irrefutable verdict, the
op-ed pages liberal voice offered an embarrassing column, headlined Im
Persuaded.
The Post played a major role in manufacturing consent for the deadliest war
since Vietnam, publishing 27 editorials in support of an invasion. As with
PropOrNot, it backtracked long after the dust had settled, apologizing for
its role in amping the public up to accept that war. Yet to this day it
continues to push for others.
Surveillance state champion
Despite telling its readers that Democracy Dies in Darkness, The
Washington Post certainly has a negative opinion about those individuals who
work to shine a light on illegal government activities. In 2016, its
editorial board demanded no pardon for Edward Snowden, condemning his
backers like filmmaker Oliver Stone and expressing outrage that Snowden had
revealed that the U.S. was spying on Russia and carrying out cyberattacks
against China. In its long denunciation, it insisted that the NSAs massive
surveillance operation against the American public resulted in no specific
harm, actual or attempted. As such, the editorial board made history by
becoming the first newspaper ever to call for the imprisonment of its own
source, on whose back and information it won a Pulitzer Prize.
If Snowden was not worthy of defending, then it is no surprise that the
Posts editorial team expressed their delight when Julian Assange was
dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, declaring it a victory for
the rule of law. Julian Assange is not a free-press hero. And he is long
overdue for personal accountability, they wrote, spreading baseless
conspiracy theories that the Australian publisher worked with Russia to hack
American democracy.
WaPo Snowden
After relying on him as a source, the Post went after Snowden and any who
dared to back him
The Ecuadorian government of Rafael Correa, which offered asylum to the
Western dissidents, also came under fire. In 2013, the Post (falsely)
labeled Correa an autocrat and the hemispheres preeminent anti-U.S.
demagogue. They also directly threatened him, writing that, If Mr. Correa
welcomes Mr. Snowden, there will be an easy way to demonstrate that
Yanqui-baiting has its price.
Of course, the Post is now intimately linked with the national security
state after Amazon signed a number of deals to provide intelligence and
computing services to several three-letter agencies. In 2020, the
Bezos-owned Amazon Web Services signed a new deal with the CIA worth tens of
billions of dollars.
The editorial board has also gone up to bat for Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) multiple times, insisting that it is the wrong target for
outrage, presenting the agency as key in the battle against art theft and
nuclear proliferation. Abolishing ICE is not a serious policy proposal,
the board wrote in 2018, despite the fact that the U.S. survived without the
agency perfectly well until its creation in 2003.
Attacking any pro-people policy
The Washington Post has aggressively attempted to beat back any new
political movements challenging the establishment. Chief among them has been
the one around Bernie Sanders, for whom the newspaper has reserved a special
ire. In 2016, it famously ran 16 negative stories on Sanders in the space of
16 hours and has used its fact-checking page to relentlessly undermine him,
sometimes to bizarre effect.
Bernie Sanders keeps saying his average donation is $27, but his own
numbers contradict that, read the headline of one article, which detailed
how his average donation was actually $27.89, not $27. It also gave his
statement that six men (one of whom is Bezos) hold as much wealth as the
bottom half of the worlds population three Pinocchios the designation
just below the most egregious lie. This was because, they argued,
billionaires wealth is tied up in stocks, not money itself, and most people
own essentially nothing. Why this disproved his assertion they did not
explain. Going undisclosed is that both Bezos and the Posts chief
fact-checker Glen Kessler, who is the scion of a fossil fuel baron, would
stand to lose a fortune if Sanders were elected.
Likewise, the Posts editorial board did all it could to ensure Sanders was
not elected in 2016, publishing editorials such as Bernie Sanderss
fiction-filled campaign, which defended big banks from Sanderss attacks;
Mr. Sanderss shocking ignorance on his core issue, which presented
Hillary Clinton as a more credible Wall Street reformer; and Mr. Sanders
peddles fiction on free trade, which championed the long-discredited North
American Free Trade Agreement as a jobs creator. Unsurprisingly, the
editorial board was also a vociferous supporter of the Trans Pacific
Partnership.
In 2020, the Post was no less hostile to Sanders, publishing an editorial
headlined We should pay more attention to the Democrats who pay attention
to reality, which stated that Mr. Sanders promises unlimited free stuff to
everyone; other candidates propose smarter, more targeted approaches.
The Posts higher-ups have been careful to oppose virtually every piece of
progressive or pro-people policy proposals. Chief among them has been
healthcare. The United States is alone in the developed world in not
offering some kind of universal healthcare to its population. Its privatized
system is multiple times more expensive than that of comparable countries
and has the worst outcomes in the West. Yet the board has consistently
scare-mongered its readers, claiming Single-payer health care would have an
astonishingly high price tag, and attacking Medicare-For-All proponents
running for office. Why go to the trouble of running for president to
promote ideas that cant work? it asked rhetorically, before going on to
insist that moving towards a healthcare system like that of Canada, Japan or
Western Europe does not meet a baseline degree of factual plausibility.
On education, it has been just as regressive. There are consequences to
making college free, it warned readers. Chief among these would be that
private universities would make less money, which, apparently should be a
major concern. Forgiving student loans the wrong way will only worsen
inequality, ran the headline of another editorial, in which the board
pretended to be ultra-left elite-hating radicals, arguing that we should not
make college free because Ivy League graduates would benefit the most
(around one-third of the Posts editorial team attended an Ivy League
school). It also feigned a far-left position on charter schools, pretending
that essentially privatizing schools and handing them over to businesses to
run would solve racial inequality in America, and that anyone who opposed
them (like teachers unions) was no progressive.
Perhaps the most blatant conflict of interest the Post has displayed is in
their committed opposition to a wealth tax. Elizabeth Warren wants a
wealth tax. It might backfire, they wrote, making a series of bizarre and
illogical arguments against the plan, such as immigrants will stop wanting
to come to the U.S. if such a tax is imposed (the threshold for paying a
wealth tax is $50 million). Five months later, the board reaffirmed their
position: A wealth tax isnt the best way to tax the rich, they wrote,
claiming that rich people can afford the best accountants and lawyers, and
so taxing them is presumably impossible.
Of course, the Posts owner, Jeff Bezos, has every reason to go all out to
prevent a wealth tax gaining traction. A CNBC study calculated that Bezos
would be forced to pay $5.7 billion annually if Warrens tax plans came to
fruition.
The Post has also taken a firm stand against serious regulation of
monopolies, decrying a supposed antitrust onslaught against Google,
spearheaded by simplistic break-them-up rhetoric from dishonest actors. In
2016, it also lambasted Sanders for his oversimplified, crowd-pleasing
demagoguery on Wall Street regulation, insisting that there has actually
been widespread reform of the financial sector since 2008, making another
crash unlikely.
Unsurprisingly for an outlet owned by a poverty-wage employer, the Post has
also consistently opposed a national $15 minimum wage. In March, it
categorically stated that [a] $15 minimum wage wont happen and Democrats
should stop trying to make it happen. Instead, they advised, they should
practice the art of the possible. This, the board explained, meant falling
in line behind Arkansas arch-Republican Senator Tom Cotton to support his
proposals for a creeping state-by-state rise to $10.
On the climate, too, the Post has pushed extremely regressive positions,
opposing a Green New Deal outright and suggesting the atmosphere be turned
into a giant free market where polluters can trade credits and speculate.
The lefts opposition to a carbon tax shows theres something deeply wrong
with the left, they wrote. They also endorsed the highly controversial
process of fracking. Seeing as the Posts editorial board is littered with
former employees of the notorious climate-change denying Wall Street
Journal, its stance is perhaps not surprising.
On COVID, the Post has consistently opposed teachers unions calls to keep
schools closed, as well as standing against $2,000 checks. A universal
payout is a bad idea they stated, but one whose time has come because of
politics, not economics. So committed was the editorial teams opposition
to the idea of helping the poor that it presented Republican Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell as a voice of sanity in Washington.
This does not mean that the Post was against direct payments to all people.
In fact, all Post employees received a $2,021 bonus from management in
January as a gesture of appreciation for their work during the pandemic. Two
grand for me, not for thee.
Junk-food news
The point of a fourth estate is that it is supposed to shine a light on the
powerful and hold them to account. But when corporate media are largely
owned and sponsored by the super wealthy themselves, the claim that this is
what they do is increasingly hard to maintain. In the Soviet Union,
everybody was aware that the media was controlled by the state. But in a
corporate state like the U.S., a veneer of independence is still maintained,
although trust in the media has been plummeting for years.
While The Washington Post presents itself as an adversarial publication
standing up to power, the fact that its senior staff constantly comes to
such a hardline neoliberal elitist consensus on so many issues shows how
little ideological diversity there is among its staff. Democracy dies at The
Washington Post editorial board.