COMMENTARY Jeff Bezos' Miami roots should have warned him to avoid the unmistakable impression that he let a major U.S. daily cave to the intimidation of an authoritarian bully like Donald Trump.
I’m a red-blooded capitalist, so I know full well that a newspaper is a private enterprise. But I’m a red-blooded American, too, so I know a newspaper is also something of a public trust.
It’s both corporate money-maker (or used to be) and community mooring. In American democracy, where journalism has always been and always should be the fourth estate, that’s part of the bargain of owning a gazette. Citizen Kane wouldn’t be such an absorbing movie if the New York Inquirer’s lord didn’t so grossly betray that commerce-cum-civics compact.
And if any American community should appreciate that ideal, it’s one where residents have fled authoritarian countries and regimes that bully independent newspapers into submission.
An American community like Miami.
The American community Jeff Bezos came from — and now calls home again.
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All of which is why I wish Bezos, the Amazon.com billionaire and Washington Post owner, would have done things much differently than he did last Friday, when he ordered his prestigious newspaper’s editorial board not to endorse a candidate in the Nov. 5 presidential election.
Bezos has since faced a firestorm of public indignation, not to mention a quarter million Post subscription cancellations. I don’t agree with the latter response, but I can understand the former in ways a South Florida son of an immigrant like Bezos ought to as well.
There is of course nothing wrong with a major daily opting not to endorse candidates. But the problem in this case isn’t the opting — it's the optics.
As my former Time Magazine colleague and Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty asked in the aftermath of Bezos’ decision, why did he wait “until just 11 days before the election to announce it?”
Newspaper owners should leave no doubt they're standing up in principle — but Bezos has sadly left too little doubt that he's standing down in panic.
For his part, Bezos claimed in his own Post editorial this week that he kiboshed his paper’s already drafted endorsement of the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, because polls show Americans feel the mainstream media are already too biased.
OK, we can have a healthy debate about that. Fine. But again, Bezos couldn’t have arrived at this conclusion 11 months before the election instead of 11 days?
Why did he only suddenly have this epiphany the same week the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, started threatening retribution against his enemies if he wins, wrath that may fall on corporate empires like Bezos’? And on the same day a top executive inside Bezos’ empire met with Trump?
Hindenburg optics
That’s not bad optics; that's Hindenburg optics. Bezos can insist as loudly as an Amazon Prime truck backing up that he wasn’t succumbing to fears about Trump going Game of Thrones on him and his businesses if the Post recommends Harris. But, sadly, that’s exactly what anyone with a third-grade education is assuming right now.
And, doubly sadly, they can assume it here in Miami — where, keep in mind, one of the big topics of discussion lately is the Cuban dictatorship’s ramped-up repression of the island’s independent journalists.
Speaking as the husband of a woman from Venezuela, whose regime likewise persecutes free-thinking media, I’m more than a little distressed to see Bezos, whose adoptive father fled Cuba in the 1960s, leave such an unmistakable impression that he allowed himself to be bullied by an authoritarian-minded ogre like Trump.
If anything, it wasn’t the best example to set for aspiring journalists at Bezos’ South Florida alma mater, Miami Palmetto Senior High School.
That’s especially true this week, after the vile hate fest targeting Latinos — who are Miami-Dade County’s majority demographic, by the way — that Trump presided over at Sunday’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York. You’d think that’s the last sort of element Bezos would want to look like he’s caving to.
Again, I have nothing against Bezos or any newspaper owner ditching endorsements to serve an anti-bias principle. I myself caught hell from liberals last week when I refused to literally label Trump a fascist because of another principle: I don’t want to risk insulting the victims of genuinely fascist dictators like Hitler and Pinochet (or genuinely communist tyrants like Castro and Stalin).
The difference is, I’m sure I left no doubt that I’m standing up in principle. Bezos unfortunately left too little doubt that he’s standing down in panic.
