Press freedom in the United States showed the world its Achilles heel this week – a soft spot that reveals just where the greatest weakness lies. Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, and Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the LA Times, both cancelled editorial board decisions to endorse Kamala Harris for president; in the case of the Washington Post, an editorial was already reportedly written and approved. Soon-Shiong also blocked a series of stories about Donald Trump. A few hours after ownership canceled the Post’s editorial, executives from Bezos’ Blue Origin company met with Trump to discuss other business interests in his sprawling conglomerate, although Bezos denied any quid pro quo.
Research suggests that the electoral consequences of the endorsements were likely to be, frankly, unimportant to the election outcome. While local newspapers play a crucial role in endorsing and providing information about relatively unknown local candidates, these major media endorsements of presidential candidates are unlikely to provide new knowledge or change anyone’s mind. In 2016, Trump received endorsements from just the Enquirer and five small newspapers – including one owned by his son-in-law Jared Kushner – and the lack of support from the Republican and mainstream intelligentsia appeared to matter not a whit to his voting base. Standing on this argument, Bezos has argued that ending endorsements will reduce polarization and build trust in the media. And there’s something to be said for that – if it were done in coordination with the editorial team after deep reflection on a principled basis long before this point in an election season.
But back in the world of what really happened, the democratic consequences of these newspaper decisions are hard to overstate. Trump showed that he could make the owners of major media in the United States cave to his will and give up long-standing norms of independence – without even holding office. Timothy Snyder, among the most preeminent scholars of authoritarianism, wrote a set of simple lessons for people wishing to avoid that fate for their countries. The first: “Do not obey in advance.” In the top five were: “Defend institutions” and “Remember professional ethics.”
The pre-willingness of America’s billionaire class to grovel before a strongman, even before they are forced to comply, shows just how quickly freedom of the press in America is likely to fold when confronted with any significant pressure. And it shows the point of greatest weakness: not the editors, journalists, or libel laws, which Trump has signaled he wishes to break and which Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas have shown an interest in revisiting – but the owners.
Readers may cry foul: the United States has so many press outlets; the cravenness of a few hardly destroys access to information for the many. But that is not how things have worked in other faltering democracies. Hungary and India both once had freewheeling, raucous media traditions. But as they fell from full democracies to only “partly free” in Freedom House rankings – the media became cowed.
In declining democracies like India, the media is not completely censored as it is under totalitarian rule in places like China. Independent websites and elite publications continue to operate. There are rare moments of censorship: as when India banned a BBC documentary investigating the Prime Minister’s role in a bloody pogrom against Muslims while he was governor of Gujarat state. But on the whole, compliance is not coerced with the mass threat of arrests, but induced by making examples out of a handful of unfortunate reporters or publications. The rest get the message and curb themselves.
Hungary started the same way. But as its slide from democracy to one-party rule has continued, it has become more repressive. At first, many Hungarian media outlets were regulated out of profitability and then pressured into selling to government-friendly leaders. Eventually, 467 media properties were given of free will to a single foundation run by a party loyalist. While 90 percent of the media landscape was controlled by the government, elites could still get their news from what was left. Hungarians who wanted to could get around blocked websites, and could continue to read real news. The main problem was that these sites had little reach. The media that the majority of the population actually imbibes kowtows to what is known to be acceptable to the leader. But in Hungary, the vise has tightened over time – focused, as here, on owners. Those willing to hold the last few independent sites have found threats against them moving from tax investigations to fears of jail time.
In the United States, there are many editorial boards and even more journalists, and many have fierce pride for professional ethics and editorial independence. But the ownership class is small. Decades of media consolidation mean that the vast majority of television and radio media in the United States is owned by a handful of conglomerates. Most other key media properties, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, are owned or co-owned by just over a dozen billionaires with many other business interests. In many cases, the news business actually loses them money.
In the face of a leader willing to retaliate against business, Americans are reliant on the individual strength of character of such media owners to maintain independence. But these owners are not steeped in the journalistic ethics of their editors, stand to gain little monetarily from maintaining such norms, and have much to lose in other aspects of their business. What at first glance appears to be a robust, proud, and varied media landscape shows itself to be an industry with a very small number of wizards behind the curtain, far weaker than anyone would expect from the United States of America.
Aristotle wrote that a government by, for, and of the people could not survive great concentrations of wealth. Rule by the many required a strong middle class, he felt: a small and immensely wealthy elite would refuse to follow the rules made for others, and could not be relied on to maintain democracy. The very wealthy, he argued, create a state consisting of slaves and masters, not of free men.” In Federalist Paper Ten, America’s founders also showed their concern for how unequal distribution of property undermines democracy. Plutocracy, in both conceptions, leads to tyranny.
In other countries whose democracies have been sacrificed to a small elite, such as Hungary and Guatemala, the business sector divides in two. A small group of oligarchs works hand-in-glove with government leaders to make their money through regulatory hijinks and government contracts. Meanwhile, a large number of main street businesses try to function on an uneven playing field. Whenever one of the well-connected starts to play in their arena, the real businesspeople face ruin. In Hungary, the oligarchs are known as “friends of Fidesz,” the party run by Viktor Orbán; in Guatemala, “the Pact of the Corrupt.” In the United States, they were known as the robber-barons of the Gilded Age.
In each case, the group most hurt by plutocracy is small and medium businesses, entrepreneurs, and businesses that want to focus on their business, not on gaming the government. Those mainstays of the middle class require fair rules and an even playing field. They need government to provide workable infrastructure: electricity, garbage collection, and other goods at a fair price and without reference to who someone voted for.
That’s why small and medium businesses formed the core of the movement to dismantle the last plutocratic period in America. During the Gilded Age, the Carnegies, Rockefellers, and other astronomically wealthy were using their power to corrupt government and favor themselves. Members of Congress, governors, and state legislatures were in on “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” deals with the Gilded Age titans. The result was retaliatory enforcement of laws and government-protected monopolies that squelched innovation. Meanwhile, main street businesses faced all sorts of problems that come from corrupt governments that favor friends and punish enemies: from broken infrastructure to a weak rule of law.
Small businesses and other middle class interests led good government groups and funded factions within both major parties to end the economic, as well as democratic, rot of the Gilded Age. It eventually worked. America gained a strong middle class for a century, making huge economic and democratic leaps that turned it into the 20th century beacon it became.
Now, the pendulum has swung back to the plutocrats. But this time, American business is more confused regarding its interests. Very few corporate leaders support Trump. They understand where retaliation and government control of corporations can lead. But main street businesses have no background in considering what might hit them. Having been taught for decades to fear regulation from the left, they have no reference point for the ways populist leaders harm the economy.
Meanwhile, the small group of would-be oligarchs are willing to back the man they think could help them, or at least kiss the ring in the hopes of not getting on Trump’s wrong side. A two-level, oligarchic economy is in the making. Most businesses will find themselves on the losing end.
Like the warrior Achilles, U.S. democracy appears so strong as to be unbreakable. But the billionaire class is its weakest point: small, concentrated, and all too often uninterested in following the rules that apply to others, as Aristotle prophesied. They are the heel at which the poison arrow is pointed.
Readers may also be interested in Rebecca Hamilton’s On Dictatorship and Self-Censorship: Lessons the Owner of a Sudanese Newspaper Could Give Jeff Bezos