Is Bezos' Veto Of WaPo's Harris Endorsement 'Anticipatory Obedience'?

In a first since 1988, legacy media newspaper The Washington Post has refused to endorse any Presidential candidate—the Democrat Kamala Harris or the Republican Donald Trump—for the November 5 elections in the United States. Last week, the paper’s chief executive and publisher Will Lewis announced that the newspaper would endorse neither candidate for the upcoming or future elections. The decision was reportedly taken by the owner, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, despite the editorial board’s call to endorse Harris. In fact, as per a reports in American media, the board had already drafted the endorsement when the decision was reversed.

A similar decision was taken by another legacy newspaper, the Los Angeles (LA) Times, which had made no endorsements from 1976 to 2004, only to resume doing so from 2008 onwards when the paper backed Democrat Barack Obama. The decision this year was taken by LA Times owner and biotech moghul Patrick Soon-Shiong, who reportedly overruled the editorial decision to endorse Harris.

Ahead of the elections, the move has led to a debate on media democracy and the role of media in polls and American politics. Amazon founder Bezos, whose Nash Holdings has owned the Washington Post newspaper since 2013, said that the move was for safeguarding and bolstering independent journalism. “Our job as the newspaper of the capital city of the most important country in the world is to be independent. And that is what we are, and will be,” Bezos said in a statement.

The controversial move came amid reports of media bias and alleged favourable coverage of Harris and her campaign by mainstream media. In August, conservative think tank Media Research Center (MRC) published a new study indicating that Vice President Harris has received mostly positive coverage from major news networks as opposed to Trump. As per the study, nearly 84 percent of Harris's coverage was positive while 89 percent of former President Trump was negative.

Harris's media outreach and campaign activities have been well covered and her enthusiastic support base has been active on social media as well. Harris has also received endorsements from celebrities like Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and Padma Laxmi, among others.

On the allegations of bias, Rohit Chopra, associate professor of communication at Santa Clara University, California, said that the mainstream media has done a “fairly accurate job” of reporting on the campaign. “If anything, there has been some criticism, in fact, of how they have soft-pedalled some of Trump's more extreme views or 'both-sided' issues, possibly not to alienate their conservative base of readers,” Chopra states.

The professor believes that positive coverage of Harris reflects the media organisations’ assessment of her policies. “Trump, to say the least, has expressed extreme anti-democratic sentiments, threatened to punish those he sees as enemies, overturn the rule of law, mass deport immigrants or put them in camps. It's not hard to see why media organizations would think Harris is the better choice,” Chopra adds.

Endorsing Presidents

The tradition of endorsing Presidents by US media goes back to 1860 when the Chicago Tribune had supported Abraham Lincoln publicly for President. Since then, some media organizations have maintained the tradition of endorsing candidates while others have a tradition of refraining from doing so. The decision by The Washington Post and LA Times to refrain from their tradition of endorsement has, however, led to questions about press freedom and the implications of private ownership on democratic electoral politics, since the decisions came not from the editorial staff but from the two papers’ billionaire owners.

Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron took to X and alleged that the paper had given in to Republican intimidation. “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” Baron tweeted. The paper’s cartoon page editors also published an image of a streak of dark paint titled “Democracy dies in darkness”, the newspaper’s slogan featured below its masthead.

Chopra feels that the move reflects what has been described as capitalist-owned organisations' "anticipatory obedience" to Trump for fear of how he would retaliate if they endorse Harris and he wins the elections.

Legacy print publications like NYTimes and Washington Post have strong symbolic and cultural power, Chopra explains. “They are read by elites and are read globally as well, so politicians and their supporters are sensitive to how they are covered in these publications. Local newspapers and local media have taken a beating in the last decade in terms of dwindling in numbers, with the impact of the internet, shrinking ad revenue, and media conglomeration,” the professor notes.

University of Virginia Media Studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan writes in The Guardian that the move to refrain from endorsements by tycoons like Bezos does not reflect cowardice but a sly head for business. "Let’s assume that Donald Trump wins the elections, he will prevail over a bacchanal of greed and corruption, potentially opening federal contracts to all sorts of favored players and – more importantly – stifling investigations and prosecutions into firms and people Trump might favor,” he writes. The former President had made no bones about his dislike for Bezos in the past. If Harris wins, the Democrat administration is likely to continue its “aggressive and much-needed investigations into the ways internet companies like Amazon have restrained trade, concentrated wealth and solidified power by leveraging networks and scale”.

Incidentally, at the time of the Post’s announcement to refrain, reports emerged about a meeting between Trump and staff of the Bezos-owned space and rocket tech venture Blue Origin, which has several contracts with the government.

Similarly, the South African-American industrialist, medical researcher and investor Soon-Shiong who owns LA Times has been hoping to push several new drugs in the US that would require approval from the Food And Drug Administration (FDA) of the US.

What impact does media coverage have on US Elections?

The US media plays a very important role in forming a positive public perception and opinion about American policies and politics both domestically and internationally. As far as international coverage goes, mainstream US media is often “biased, ethnocentric, plain ignorant and reflects US national interest and the interest of its allies,” Chopra notes. “Their support for the war on terror and invasion of Iraq in 2003 based on the non-existent weapons of mass destruction and more recently for Israel in the recent ongoing conflict are cases in point,” he adds.

Polls by media channels, for instance, are known to go a long way in shaping or swaying public opinion. This year, the polls show a neck to neck contest between Harris and Trump. According to a CNN poll, conducted by SSRS, in Arizona, for example, Harris has 48 per cent support among likely voters, while Trump has 47 per cent. In Nevada, Trump leads slightly with 48 per cent, compared to 47 per cent for Harris, CNN reported. Such polls dominate the mainstream news cycle as Election Day approaches. Critics, however, feel that such polls often fail to highlight the electoral issues at hand. How to Win an Information War, the Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler author Peter Pomerantsev feels that such polls reduce electoral battles and political nuances to a personality contest between candidates, who become cultish figures with their personal follower base.

These polls also have a propensity for inaccuracy. In 2016, for instance, opinion polls had overestimated the support Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton was getting.

In terms of domestic coverage, American media is generally seen as an independent and free press. Across the political spectrum, there is, for the most part, a high standard of reporting, fact checking, and rigor for stories. However, amid debates about media neutrality, both Harris and Trump are now staying away from legacy media platforms, instead turning to social media, podcasts and influencer interviews to increase their campaigns’ reach.

Legacy to New Media

Social media has now emerged as a key source of information, disinformation and misinformation. With Elon Musk, who is known to be a Trump supporter, being the "chief source of misinformation on X (formerly Twitter), as its owner," as Chopra puts it, the platform clearly has the power to shape opinion. Meanwhile, Facebook has long been a source of conspiracies and a prime target for foreign interference to spread fake news.

That said, social media use also tends to be polarised with people self-selecting into cohorts that are already likely to believe the information they get. Whether there is a critical mass that gets influenced online in numbers enough to sway an election is a complex question and will require empirical analysis.

Among legacy media, CNN, Fox, and other channels still do have power and reach especially among older voters though many older voters also get news increasingly from Facebook today. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, is the most popular channel in terms of reach and known to be the most polarizing channel with a strong audience base of conservative voters. “During his Presidency, Trump was obsessed with how Fox covered him. Its influence should not be underestimated,” Chopra asserts.