When two American billionaires blocked the newspapers they own from endorsing Kamala Harris this month, they tried to frame the decision as an act of civic responsibility.
“I think my fear is, if we chose either one, that it would just add to the division,” Patrick Soon-Shiong, the biotech billionaire who owns the Los Angeles Times, said. He emphasised that though some might assume his family is “ultra-progressive”, he is a registered “independent”.
At the Washington Post, which reported that its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, was behind the decision, publisher William Lewis described the retreat from making presidential endorsements as “a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds”.
Veteran journalists and media critics are using a very different phrase to describe Soon-Shiong’s and Bezos’s choice: they’re saying the two billionaires, among the richest men on the entire globe, are performing “anticipatory obedience” to Donald Trump.
Yes, “cowardice” has also been a popular way to describe the choice by the billionaire owners of two of the country’s major newspapers to not to risk angering Trump by allowing their papers to endorse his opponent.
But “anticipatory obedience” is more specific. The term comes from On Tyranny, the bestselling guide to authoritarianism by Timothy Snyder, a historian of eastern and central Europe. The phrase describes, in Snyder’s words, “the major lesson of the Nazi takeover, and what was supposed to be one of the major lessons of the twentieth century: don’t hand over the power you have before you have to. Don’t protect yourself too early.” It’s a way of describing what Europeans did wrong as totalitarians came to power: by “mentally and physically conceding, you’re already giving over your power to the aspiring authoritarian”, Snyder explains.
Journalists attempting to earn a living and do good work are too often in the unenviable position of working for people who don’t always have the public interest in mind. We rarely speak honestly about this professional clash of values and goals.
— Patricia Isabel Escárcega (@piescarcega) October 26, 2024
Activists Ian Bassin and Maxmillian Potter warned earlier this month, in an opinion piece that now looks prescient, that the US media companies were already headed down the road of “anticipatory obedience”. If elected, they wrote, Trump would probably mimic Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and use the power of the state to “neutralize the media” through a “barrage of audits, investigations, and regulatory harassment”. Even before the election, the activists wrote, there were plenty of signs that Trump’s campaign to muzzle the press was already working, including with the selection of Lewis, a controversial veteran of Rupert Murdoch-owned conservative media outlets, as Bezos’s new publisher of the Washington Post.
Media reporters like CNN’s Brian Stelter and Sewell Chan, the editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, turned to the concept of “anticipatory obedience” this week as a way of understanding the current motivations of America’s newspaper billionaires.
In a phone interview on Friday, Snyder himself, a history professor at Yale University, said that the media reporters were right: “It is indeed anticipatory obedience.”
The arguments by Soon-Shiong, and Bezos’s publisher, that refusing to endorse a presidential candidate would make the newspapers appear more “independent’ was nonsense, Snyder said.
“Oligarchs, the very wealthy people, want to tell us that they’re just ‘staying out of politics’. But of course, when you stay out of politics in a way that harms democracy, what you are really doing is saying, we, the really wealthy people, are going to be fine in the new post-democratic order,” he said.
“What they are saying is: after democracy dies in darkness, they’ll be the ones who will be moving happily about in the shadows.”
The fact that this “anticipatory obedience” to Trump was being demonstrated by newspaper publishers was particularly alarming, Snyder said. When it comes to opposing authoritarianism, “it’s definitely the case that journalists have very often been the people who have held on the longest, and have set the best example. So a signal from wealthy publishers that journalists should not do that is a very negative phenomenon.”
Snyder said he also saw the billionaire newspaper owners’ actions not only as a sign of early obedience to Trump, but also as a very clear message to their own employees.
“This pose of neutrality is in fact a signal to the actual investigative journalists that they are not supposed to be doing their jobs,” Snyder said. “It’s not neutral to say, ‘We’re going to ignore the evidence of nearly a decade as to what the election of Donald Trump would mean for freedom of speech, the profession of journalism, and the American republic generally.”
“To profess neutrality in such a moment is to say that the work and value of the honest journalist means nothing.”
‘Media capture’ comes to the US
So far, the response from journalists at the papers owned by Bezos and Soon-Shiong has been resistance, some of it coming at a personal cost. Three members of the Los Angeles Times’ editorials board, including the section’s editor and a recent Pulitzer prize winner, have resigned in protest since the news was made public. At least one editor at the Washington Post has also resigned, according to Semafor.
At the Los Angeles Times, the news that the paper’s owner had refused to let the editorial board publish a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris was only made public when the opinion page editor, Mariel Garza, spoke publicly about her resignation and why she thought the decision had undermined the paper’s integrity: ““I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up.”
Unions representing journalists who work at both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post have made public statements about their members’ concern over the decisions, while also pleading with readers not to cancel their subscriptions to already economically struggling newspapers over the behaviour of their billionaire owners.
It's so disheartening to see people cancelling their LA Times and Washington Post subscriptions due to decisions made by billionaires. These cancellations hurt the reporters, editors, photographers, and designers doing the real work, not the owners.
— Bradford Pearson (@BradfordPearson) October 25, 2024
The Los Angeles Times journalists raised an additional concern in an open letter on Friday: they put a spotlight on the fact that their own paper, unlike the Washington Post, had not yet run a news story on the non-endorsement controversy as of Friday morning.
“We all expect The Times to be transparent with readers. We also expect that our journalists be permitted to thoroughly cover the news of this city – including when it occurs at this newspaper – and do their jobs without fear of being blamed for their employer’s decisions,” the journalists wrote.
Sheila Coronel, an investigative journalist from the Philippines who is now a professor at the Columbia Journalism School, said the experience of “media capture”, in which media outlets are constrained by pressures from the state and corporations or other special interests, is a familiar one for many reporters around the world
After the end of the Marcos regime in the Philippines, she said, there was an explosion of new newspapers, many of them established by people who had business or political interests to advance. “I remember one newspaper editor told me: ‘A newspaper, to them, is like a gun in the holster. You use it when you have to.’”
There was a time, she said, when journalists in the Philippines would look to the US, and its first amendment, as a place where journalists had an easier time and more protections.
But now, Coronel said, “The US is becoming increasingly like the rest of the world, right? It’s like a regression to the mean.”
“The way journalists are delegitimized, the way they are insulted, the way they are being relentlessly harassed online, and, to some extent, physically.”
That “American notion of press freedom” was rooted in the fact that newspapers and televisions were, for a time, “vibrant businesses” that actually made enough money to support themselves, Coronel said. Profitability guaranteed a degree of independence. That equation changes, she said, “when the media is no longer a viable business”, and when it must depend on owners who make their money in other industries, and who have other financial interests to support.
“Trump hasn’t even won,” Bassin, the activist who raised concerns about anticipatory obedience, wrote in response to Fridya’s Washington Post’s non-endorsement decision. “Terrifying trajectory for press freedom and independence if he actually returns to power.”
• This article was amended on 27 October 2024 to correct a reference to “anticipatory obedience” from “participatory obedience”.
