Postmortems continue for who lost Kamala Harris the US election, and these will be consequential for the left in the UK. However many times the US flags that the “special relationship” is really not a thing for them any more, their politics bears down on ours, whether it’s rightwing narratives travelling from the Heritage Foundation to the thinktanks at Tufton Street, via [checks notes], oh yes, money, or the centre left here praying they can sail past the Democrats’ shipwrecks.
If consensus is reached that the problem was “go woke; go broke” – that Harris was too inclusive, too pro-trans, too pro-diversity, generally speaking, not horrible enough – that would be multiple kinds of erroneous, the greatest of which is moral. It lacks backbone to diagnose the problem as “too strong on the values of humanity and universalism”, and solve it by abandoning those values. Amusingly, the message Labour has taken, so far, isn’t even that the Dems were too woke – rather, that they were just too hopeful, a reading which is a little like avoiding the shipwreck by drowning yourself.
Yet in the “heritage” media, where left-on-left recriminations are also rife, the UK and the US do still have a special relationship. “Heritage” is what you call print titles when you can’t quite bring yourself to describe them as “liberal” just because they still deal in facts. The New York Times is considered by many to have absolutely pummelled Joe Biden for his age and infirmity, while dealing with Donald Trump’s “weave” – the long, rambling speeches, the non sequiturs, the manifest confusion – as more of a quirk than a failing.
Greater censure, though, is reserved for the Washington Post, along with the LA Times, and their decision not to endorse a candidate. Both papers have billionaire proprietors, one of whom’s daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, said the decision not to endorse Kamala was based on Gaza. “Genocide is a line in the sand,” she said. Her father, Patrick, later said she had no role in the LA Times’ call.
The Washington Post’s rationale was clearer, because it at least came from someone with a job at the paper, the publisher Will Lewis. Lewis’s explanation – that the paper was returning to its “roots” in not endorsing – was almost immediately discredited by WaPo editorial staff, some of whom resigned in protest. Why Lewis would claim 1960, when WaPo didn’t choose between Nixon and JFK, as the true spirit of the title, rather than any flanking elections (1952, 1972) in which they did endorse, is for the birds. The journalists knew, and swiftly said, that there was a Kamala Harris endorsement ready to go, which was pulled on the command of Jeff Bezos.
Lewis was, of course, exporting a British tradition, in which tycoon newspaper proprietors bought the title in the first place for political influence, and then masked that ugly transaction with an editor who was prepared to insist upon his or her independence with a straight face.
There’s a long history in British print media of bias; both straightforward, editorial partisanship, and newspaper proprietors, going back to Beaverbrook, getting into the guts of the political system. From there they can exert an influence which, had it been bought, would have caused outrage. The ownership of certain newspapers can be almost a laundering process, though not a cheap one. It’s quite openly admitted that a figure like Evgeny Lebedev would buy a newspaper for a “seat at the table”, and that this would be legitimate. He’d then have an editorial henchperson who might be overtly political themselves (former chancellor George Osborne, for example), but traditionally there was always a Chinese wall, and the editor would have fierce views of their own that couldn’t be bought.
That, historically, was the gentleman’s agreement: the editor was a firebrand, and could never be brought to heel by the proprietor. But then Rupert Murdoch arrived.
Lewis went to News International in 2010. Any role in the great phone-hacking cover-up is still hotly contested, so let’s leave it very neutral; he was merely group general manager at that time. This was the subject of his first controversy as publisher of WaPo: that he tried to bury the story of having been named in court documents related to hacking. The US public broadcaster NPR covered that, and the fallout.
There was an interesting interview, also with NPR, about the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of Donald Trump. Editor-in-chief Emma Tucker, previously of the Sunday Times, answered the charge that her paper hadn’t been critical enough in its reporting of Trump’s statements with: “We don’t want to just be … truth nannies that factcheck every single thing on either side, because that becomes very tedious.”
This caused a brief ruckus at the time. In the US, factchecking is very much seen as part of the job of a print journalist. And it was interesting to see how that drawling, quite class-coded British sensibility (you can really imagine this as a Scoop-parody, “oh darling, don’t make me tell you the truth, you’re so boring when you’re like this”) played across the pond – quite badly, as it turned out, but they didn’t have time to dwell. They had a fight against fascism to lose.
Arguably, the high tolerance in the UK for billionaire owners and their spokespeople has always been toxic to our print media. But you see it afresh when it’s an invasive non-native species in an ecosystem with more transparent values, that prides itself on rigour and impartiality. And, darling, it’s a tiny bit bracing.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian journalist
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