Bezos lifts the veil

People who weren’t sure the press in in the tank are learning, fast

© 2005 James Duncan Davidson used under a Creative Commons license

I see that Jeff Bezos’ ham-handed block on the Washington Post’s presidential endorsement has led to cancellations by a tenth of its subscribers. That’s a quarter of a million subs — not, in the grand scheme of things, a huge number, especially compared to the millions of voters whose preferences are at issue in the  upcoming election.

But revolutions, and some changes just shy of that, don’t start with huge numbers — in fact, history shows that while they may reflect the grievances of a lot of people, they usually get launched by a small and relatively privileged slice of the population, such as Post subscribers and the slightly larger group of us who have, for some time, been smelling a rat.

The Bezos incident is interesting because it represents a watershed in a growing perception of the American press as prejudiced against liberal interests.

We are all aware of the decades-long campaign by conservatives to poison the reputation of the media by screaming “liberal bias” every time someone says something bad about them, whether or not the negative coverage was earned. Some people like Eric Alterman, author of What Liberal Media?, and Paul Waldman have pushed back on that for years — noting, for example, how slavishly the “liberal” press, cowed by the coordinated conservative bullying of weak-willed editors known as “working the refs,” follows rightwing talking points.

But the consensus has been so much with the shit-stirrers that people like Alterman and Waldman couldn’t get traction. Meanwhile conservative media tropes persist and are repeated until, like degraded xerox copies, they get even stupider and less coherent over time.

Take the one about how American cities are hellholes of crime committed by not-quite-American minorities who, abetted by Democrats, also threaten the safety of the white suburbs and rural areas. Over time the big cities have gotten safer than even the gulches and hollers of conservative imagining, but that city-bad-ooga-booga never goes away — in fact, one can say it has metastasized into the absurdly false claim (central to the Trump campaign) that immigrants are doing most of the violent crime in the United States, and that a murder committed by an immigrant is categorically different from a murder committed by a native-born American.

Evil cities, evil immigrants — it all comes from the “counter-narratives” created by rightwing propagandists who claim that contrary statistics cited by the press are “liberal bias” and the real truth is whatever they can prod the amygdalas of their suckers into believing.

(This also applies to the conservative claim that young women are more at risk from malign transsexuals — who are presumed to have only gone trans so they can get into ladies’ toilets and commit rape — than from overtly binary male predators. It makes no logical sense, but to say so is Liberal Bias.)

Well, you know I’ve been beating this drum for decades. But in recent years I have been pleased to find that my general premise that the “liberal bias” analysis of journalism’s problems is, at it were, an op has been adopted by more journalists with wider audiences, especially as the efforts of the Prestige Press to carry Trump over the finish line have become more ludicrously obvious.

Liberal columnists, mostly young ones, are more likely to notice big media outlets covering for Trump by describing his blatantly fascist ravings as if he were just reading Brookings Institution position papers out loud — you know,  as with this from the Wall Street Journal yesterday:

Literally, I’ve got a million of them.

I describe Bezos screwing his own editorial board — then further embarrassing himself with a (allegedly) self-penned editorial in which he claims he was only trying to, what else, restore (implicitly rightwing) trust in the media — as a watershed for this reason: I am sure all the little daily examples of supposedly liberal papers sanewashing Trump have reached many people who suspected this was the case, and these people may now be more confirmed in that opinion, but yet believe it’s kind of a radical, out-there view, one they’d be embarrassed to express to their friends.

Well, the spectacle of a famous billionaire — the very definition of a plutocrat! — squelching a major anti-Trump editorial is just too blatant to ignore. It’s like when those of us who suspected American conservatives of being comfortable (at least) with fascism — but were wary of making such a claim because it seemed kind of extreme —  got a load of Trump and realized, son of a gun, he’s just spitting straight fascism and the Republicans are supporting it! That “extreme” view was right all along!

I’m not sure what ultimately comes of this, but I’m guessing that a lot of people who were suspecting but not saying out loud that the press — and, more to the point, the moneymen who own it — are in the tank for Trump and a dark anti-American creed that it’s no longer de trop to call fascism are going to be comfortable saying so now. And that, I think, is a big deal.