Endorsement Derangement Syndrome

The Los Angeles Times declined to endorse a presidential candidate.

A big deal around here, but the Times does not even possess a shadow of the national influence it once did, so besides irking Hollywood and west side obsessive progressives, it really did not mean that much in the grand scheme of things.

By the way, if the reports of thousands of subscriptions being cancelled are true that’s news but not terribly important – it’s $16 bucks a month for digital and the paper loses a million a week, so a few thousand a month will not really matter.  Just throw it on the loss pile.

Now, Jeff Bezos is different and his pulling the plug on his Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris matters.

Like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the WaPo is one of the few newspapers in the country that people – whether they hold their nose or not – still have to pay attention to.

The WaPo – like the Sacramento Bee – is the voice of the state, the hometown industry cheerleader paper and that industry is government.  For it not to endorse Harris – who promises to make that industry even bigger and more powerful – still seems a bit unreal.

This cannot be under emphasized.  The WaPo not endorsing Harris is the southern California cultural equivalent of the LA Times coming out in favor of the New York Yankees to win the World Series, calling for the elimination of the Academy Awards, and the banning of In-N-Out, all in the same article.

As to the Times decision, owner Dr. Partick Soon-Shiong told his own paper that he has “no regrets whatsoever. In fact, I think it was exactly the right decision,” he said in an interview with The Times on Friday afternoon. “The process was [to decide]: how do we actually best inform our readers? And there could be nobody better than us who try to sift the facts from fiction” while leaving it to readers to make their own final decision.

Soon-Shiong’s daughter – Nika, the epitome of the very rich and very woke people currently ruling the world – seemed oddly fine with the non-endorsement decision. But knowing who pays her bills – daddy – should make the pretzel she turned herself in on Twitter/X a bit more understandable.

She claimed that the decision was good because it pushed back against the “Biden-Harris” administration’s support of Israel in its war in Gaza.   

The decision, she said, was about the war in Gaza which she has continually and couldn’t be more wrongly called a “genocide” against Palestine, something she feels very very very strongly about.  She has a Palestinian flag on her Twitter/X handle.

This “is not a vote for Donald Trump. This is a refusal to ENDORSE a candidate that is overseeing a war on children. I’m proud of the LA Times’ decision just as I am certain there is no such thing as children of darkness.”  Oh, and she mentioned – both gratuitously and in a desperate effort for sympathy – that Soon-Shiong was from South Africa and, you know, apartheid.

Her dad shot back at that rather quickly, saying Nika does not speak for the newspaper.

If Nika’s take on the matter is at all accurate, this is what would have happened: Harris-Biden support Israel so we won’t endorse and Trump will support Israel so we won’t endorse him so therefore feel free to pick from what you see as the lesser of two evils.”

That did not happen.

(By the way, why pick the lesser of two evils?  That was what the apparently successful campaign to get Cthulhu – H.P., Lovecraft’s ancient and ultimate demon monster –  elected University of Arizona class president asked decades ago – the story may be apocryphal but carries a certain amount of weight, doesn’t it?)

It must be emphasized that the decisions made by Bezos and  Soon-Shiong are in no way shape or form, as has been implied by those wailing and gnashing their teeth, inappropriate, journalistically unethical, or in any other way improper.  Even the Times admitted that in their story about the decision.

When it comes to newspapers, even in the current environment, the owner and/or publisher (if they are one and the same) makes the call when it comes to big endorsements.

Period.

It is their prerogative, it is their bailiwick, it is their right, and has been so since newspapers started.

In theory this is how a proper newspaper should work: Owner decides if they will be publisher as well.  If they hire someone for that job to take care of the day to day mechanics of the entire operations, that’s fine, but it does not even imply the relinquishment of the right of the owner  to endorse, or not, as they see fit.  It’s their business.

If the owner is the publisher, they hire someone to handle advertising, the business side, the physical production side, the digital side, the admin side, the news side (managing and/or executive editor,) and the opinion side (even these days those silos exist.)

Note “news” and “opinion” are, have been, and until recently, separate entities.  They are not supposed to coordinate and some newspapers in the long long ago didn’t even allow them to talk to one another until after an issue had been covered and opined upon.

Currently, the Wall Street Journal is one of the very few that still remain that distinct separation.  

Can a publisher/owner offer tips and guidance and suggestions to his top managers?  Yes, but within limits (if they are ethical.)

If Bezos asked the staff to look into a rumor he heard about monkeys around the world getting taller overnight, that’s okay.  If Bezos tells his staff he heard this great speech by someone and that maybe they should interview her, that’s okay.  

But if Bezos tells the news people to write that monkeys getting taller is a good thing and that it is happening because of an Amazon-exclusive vitamin and to brook no dissent, that’s a problem (see covid, actually.)

The same goes for spiking stories, aka killing them.  In my career as a newspaper reporter, I had exactly one story concept spiked by a publisher; most former reporters who worked for newspapers when they were real will tell you the same thing – lofty such and suches like publishers tend not to dirty themselves with the day-to-day news (unless their ex-wife’s new husband just went bankrupt – then it’s wall-to-wall coverage. They’re only human, after all.)

It can be assumed that the New York Times will endorse Harris, especially now.  If there was even a hint of a glimmer of a thought to not endorse, that is gone and one can expect the upcoming endorsement announcement to take pointed jabs about both Bezos and Soon-Shiong and remind readers who cancelled those subscriptions to sign up for the NY Times.

Here’s the argument for that:  “Hey, pay us a dollar a day and we will keep lying to you just like you want us to.”

So why the enormous fuss over the non-endorsements?  

First, both papers have demonized Donald Trump as the new Hitler and the left is apoplectic that they are not doing everything they can to stop the new Hitler.  It is akin to the time machine question – if you had one, would you go back and kill Hitler?  Everyone answers yes and the left now thinks Bezos – if and when his time machine is finished, rumor is that’s still a few months away– wouldn’t.

In fact, considering the vitriol, it seems much of the WaPo staff sees another time machine scenario as far more plausible:

“So Adolf, we’ve got this cloud storage service we thought you might want to take a look at – it’s really handy for, um, well, you know, privacy-guaranteed bookkeeping, record keeping, transport tracking, railway timetables, dissension aggregation, gas cost monitoring, or whatever.”

Considering Bezos’ dependence on government largess for his spacecraft thingy and his cloud services department and the fact that Soon-Shiong may be trying to finagle his way into a Trump administration job (he reportedly tried in 2016,) such motivations are not completely implausible.

All of this is political, of course, and in a very oddly revealing way.

The non-endorsements are acknowledgements that maybe just maybe the past nine years have been an enormously wasteful media boondoggle and that those involved may just share some of the blame.

And the rending of garments response should not actually come as a surprise.  

For nine years, the monolithic national media establishment have made an unassailable fetish of Evil Trump.  These cracks in the monolith shake them to the core.  If not necessarily to actual introspection, but at least to anger, both externally towards Bezos and Soon-Shiong, and, sub-consciously, towards themselves.

They are telling themselves that this cannot be happening.

But the truth is that, even if unintentionally, they have just been handed 10 pounds of reality in a 5 pound bag and are being forced to eat it.

And that does not taste very good.