How does a free press in this country die? Probably not the way Americans imagine. It’s unlikely—though not impossible—that heavily armed police are going to raid newspaper offices, confiscate computers, and haul editors and reporters off to jail. Media websites probably won’t go dark under government bans. Pro-regime militias with official backing won’t light a bonfire of anti-regime books and magazines on Pennsylvania Avenue. The demise of independent journalism in the United States will be less spectacular than the notorious examples of other times and places—as much voluntary as coerced, less like a murder than a death of despair.
The Washington Post is dying not in darkness but by the light of noon, and by its own hand. Over the past few months, the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has shed a large part of the paper’s workforce, asserted control over the management of its newsroom, spiked a presidential endorsement for the first time in the paper’s history, and driven out some of its best writers and editors. On Wednesday, Bezos announced that the Post’s opinion pages will exclude views that contradict his own libertarianism. “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” he wrote to his staff—missing the irony that he had just curtailed liberty of expression. “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Anyone wanting a different idea, Bezos added, could find it on the internet. For an argument in defense of anti-trust enforcement, stricter labor laws, tariffs on foreign goods, or higher taxes on billionaires, readers can take a dive into the online ocean and something will turn up.
Aside from the mind-numbing monotony, why does it matter that the Post’s opinion pages will no longer allow pieces from, say, a social-democratic or economic-nationalist point of view? One reason is that “viewpoint diversity”—the airing of various and conflicting ideas—prevents the onset of orthodoxy, creates an atmosphere of open inquiry, and thereby comes closer to the discovery of truth. This argument goes back to John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech in On Liberty: “Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.”
We are likelier to reach the truth and understand why it’s true if we constantly subject our ideas to criticism. I dislike the opinion pieces of the Post’s arch-conservative Marc Thiessen, but I don’t want them killed—not just for the sake of free expression and lively debate, but because they force me to see my own views in a negative light and, once in a while, revise them. Even “personal liberties and free markets” aren’t self-explanatory or self-justifying. To mean anything, these ideas need to be challenged. Otherwise, Bezos’s twin pillars will petrify into dogma and eventually crumble.
But there’s something more profoundly dispiriting about the Post making itself the predictable mouthpiece of a single viewpoint. We don’t expect publications such as First Things, The Nation, and the Daily Caller to host ideological battles—their purpose is to advance a distinct outlook. But a national newspaper like the Post should speak to a democratic public and represent public opinion, which means publishing the widest possible range of thoughtful views. When it ceases to do so, it becomes more like the narrow, partisan, mutually hostile, and uncomprehending media that create most of the noise in America today.
At times in recent years, under pressure from staff and subscribers, the Post and The New York Times have edged closer to this model (one name for it was “moral clarity”). Bezos’s edict takes the Post a large step in that direction, just as it would have done had he ordered that all opinion writing must reflect the value of social justice. Whether Bezos is wounding the Post in this way to ingratiate himself with the new president or for some other reason, he has made his property less resilient and more like the kind of paper that Trump knows how to break. Its opinion pages will continue to criticize the administration, but the views it airs will matter less. In a landscape of dead and sick newspapers, Bezos is making his own less free, less intelligent, less surprising, and more balkanized.
This is exactly the kind of press with which an authoritarian ruler like President Donald Trump is comfortable. Trump doesn’t believe in the free search for truth; in his mental world there is no truth, only friends and enemies, his side against the other side. The purpose of media isn’t to bring information and ideas to the public, but to win the war for power. When he says that the news is fake, he doesn’t just mean that the Times or CBS is running false stories. He is signaling that truth is irrelevant because everything is rigged. In this game, Trump and his enablers and sycophants are learning to control the information space.
The First Amendment makes it hard for any president, even an openly authoritarian one like Trump, to kill the press, but he can create incentives for its owners—whether corporate or plutocratic—to bend to him. In December, Disney settled a weak defamation suit brought by Trump against ABC News, encouraging him to bring economic and political pressure on other news organizations. This week Paramount, which owns CBS, is in talks with Trump’s lawyers about an even more dubious lawsuit directed at the editing of a 60 Minutes episode. The outcome of mediation might affect the administration’s willingness to allow Paramount’s sale to the tech mogul Larry Ellison. In other words, CBS might be forced into a settlement to advance the business interests of its parent company and those of a multibillionaire who is close to the president.
Trump’s attacks on the press, as on other institutions, show how much democratic freedom depends on custom and restraint. These are always breakable if a president has the will. If an administration decides to give access only to news organizations that provide favorable coverage, the White House Correspondents’ Association can do little more than complain. If a president wants to sue a news organization, assert full control of the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, and use them to coerce a media owner to hand over money, the law and Constitution can’t prevent him. The only obstacle is the media’s willingness to say no, which partly depends on the public’s desire for a free press to exist.
Some news organizations will fight, in an atmosphere of constant anxiety, with the prospect of growing irrelevance. Others will count the cost and give in to pressure. And others will feel the direction of the wind and submit on their own, under no pressure at all, like the circus animal that doesn’t need a trainer to tell it to jump.
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