The Resistance Demands Respect, Too
They outnumber MAGA, but political elites and civil society leaders—including mainstream journalists and their benefactors—bend over backward to appease Trump.
A family member of mine contacted me this weekend, after Jeff Bezos intervened to prohibit Washington Post editors from endorsing Kamala Harris, to seek my input on whether she should cancel her Post subscription. Had Bezos fatally compromised his newspaper, or would boycotting the Post simply hurt reporters without accomplishing much on the civic side of the equation?
Here’s how I responded: “It’s really a question for you to answer based on your own calculus as a patron. If you feel you get a lot out of the news pages, I think there’s a pretty strong case for keeping your subscription. If you feel like you’ve been paying WaPo to ‘support journalism’ but find the political coverage to be bad, then it’s probably a good time to cut bait.”
I note this up front only to establish my agnosticism on the boycott question. My feelings about the rush to cancel subscriptions are pretty mixed, and they’d be mixed even if I didn’t have friends who work there.
But the idea that the backlash against Bezos and the Post has no value is clearly wrong. It can and should be a wake-up call to people with money and reputations on the line that the country’s anti-Trump majority is still a force to be reckoned with. The minoritarian rules of U.S. democracy may allow Trump to become president again despite his broad unpopularity. The resistance may not be geographically well-distributed enough to win the presidency in 2024. But that doesn’t mean liberal Americans will shrug it off when elites or corporate bigwigs or civil society leaders accommodate threats and inducements from corrupt fascists.
COMPLIMENTS TO THE JEFF
After Trump won in 2016, American liberals rushed to shore up any institution that might provide a check against authoritarian power. Many of those institutions, including the Post, marketed themselves to these liberals to secure a cut of the bounty. That’s what Democracy Dies In Darkness was all about. And for a time at least it was a lucrative symbiosis.
This desperate-but-public-spirited spending spree is why newsrooms remember the Trump years as boom times for journalism. It wasn’t the spectacle per se that drew eyeballs and subscription revenue, it was hundreds of thousands or millions of regular Americans hoping and expecting that their insistence on truth and accountability would limit the damage to American society, or even hasten Trump’s political demise.
These Americans are now rising to say their side of the deal was not negotiable. With Trump a coin flip from the presidency, it’s a timely reminder.
I strongly suspect most of the boycotters had valid, pre-existing complaints about the nature of mainstream political news coverage in the Trump era, if not with the Post’s political reporting per se. They are not misdirecting their outrage, they are saying with their dollars that the Post’s appeasement of (or deal-making with) Trump world was the final straw. From their perspective, many political journalists stopped treating authoritarianism as a live threat once Trump left office in 2021. They reverted instead to the indefensible standards and professional habits that helped propel Trump to victory in 2016, facilitating his return from political disgrace.
That’s quite obviously not what pro-democracy Americans signed up for. By-and-large they did not view their subscription dollars as quid for the quo of turning mainstream news outlets into Fox News for liberals. But they did think (and I believe they were right about this) that the accountability journalism of 2017-2021, while imperfect, was a better expression of the craft of journalism than the word-mincing, pox-on-both-houses style that predominated before and since.
If I’m right about that, then it implies two things about the continued viability of mainstream media: