First Amendment:
"Congress shall make no law. . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. . . "
It doesn't say anything about forbidding a president from intimidating the media into doing his will.
Big institutions are not a bulwark against tyranny. Big means vulnerable.
Let's look at recent milestones.
*** Trump sued ABC for defamation, demanding $16 million because ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos used the word "rape" to describe Trump's sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll.
*** The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, whose fortune comes from Amazon, learned that Trump threatened to interfere with postal delivery of Amazon's packages in retaliation for unfavorable stories about Trump. The Post rescinded a planned presidential endorsement of Harris and announced editorial changes saying that henceforth all editorials would be about personal liberties and free markets.
*** Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, now X, made a $250 million contribution to the Trump campaign, while simultaneously turning the content feed of X in a highly Trump-positive direction. Musk is rewarded with the job of reorganizing the federal workforce.
*** Prior to the 2024 election the Des Moines Register published a poll from a well-established Iowa pollster reporting that Kamala Harris had gone into the lead in Iowa. The poll turned out to be inaccurate. Trump sued the newspaper and pollster, calling the poll and its publication an act of election interference and fraud.
*** The TV news show 60 Minutes broadcast an interview with Kamala Harris. Trump complained about the editing and sued. The corporate parent, Paramount Global, has a merger pending. It settled the lawsuit by offering a $16 million gift to the Trump presidential library.
*** TV host Steven Colbert, a Trump critic, called this a "bribe" on air. CBS announced the show was cancelled. Trump claimed credit. Trump announced that CBS has now sweetened the deal with another $20 million in free advertising for him.
*** Trump is suing the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion for publishing a letter Trump allegedly wrote to Jeffrey Epstein.
I had misunderstood something. I had thought that very wealthy media patrons like Jeff Bezos or the Redstone family, or large media companies owned by public companies, would have the financial and legal ability to stand up to political pressure. I had it backwards. Giant wealth protects itself. Put most generously to them, the leaders of those companies have a fiduciary duty to shareholders. They must protect their financial interests, not amorphous values such as truth, integrity, or democracy. So they settle lawsuits and bend to meet the demands of a tyrant. Today they bend to Trump, but in the future perhaps some leftist socialist tyrant as dangerous as Trump, a Stalin perhaps, will do the same based on the Trump precedent. (Republicans should be careful what they wish for.)
It turns out that the people who can afford to tell the truth as they see it are people who are independent, like myself, or people with nothing to lose. It isn't a perfect solution. Independent voices on YouTube, TikTok, Reels, X, Substack, Blogspot and the like can be idiots, trollers, and fakes. They can lie, be misinformed, and be blinded by bias. But they cannot be easily intimidated by a president because they are small, usually, and their real motivation is audience and influence. Some don't stay small and grow to have an audience of millions. This free-for-all has its own perverse set of incentives -- outrage gets clicks -- but they are different ones from those of corporate conglomerates.
The situation isn't ideal, yet somehow, in that environment 250 years ago, we formed a country that worked out pretty well, all things considered. We may not be so lucky now.
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2 comments:
I guess empires generally lasting 250 year’s isn’t true as some last longer, some less. I’ll take hope from that, maybe we will survive Trump, but AI may have other ideas.
Colbert was a political satirist on The Daily Show and the success of his spin off...remember "truthiness"?... got him the late show, but for me he never quite fit the talk show format. I think there's a good possibility he deliberately put the show...losing money, late night decline, etc...out of its misery and raised his stature in the process...but I digress.
Epstein: It's also occurred to me that it would be ironic if MAGA conspiracists brought down the Presidency, which at this points looks quite possible. The MAGA coalition does have this convoluted Victorian morality that can be utterly misogynistic and revile sexual predation at the same time. This, coupled with Deep State paranoia may just be the right combination to ferret out the truth.
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