Democracy Dies in Cowardice

After reading that the Washington Post will not endorse a presidential candidate this year, and then publisher Will Lewis’s laughable, slimy rationale, I sent this note to the editor:

“Allow me to join what I hope is a flood of cancellations in the face of one of the most egregious violations of journalistic ethics in my lifetime.  The Post, which has been a beacon of excellence for decades, has decided to participate in the destruction of what is left of the once proud tradition of refusing to be intimidated or bullied by corrupt and craven politicians.  Poor Katharine Graham.  While I know it is extremely difficult to be out of work, I cannot understand why there has not been an equal flood of resignations from what was once the Washington Post.”

Although he has yet to deign to address the action publicly, the Post’s owner and noted bastion of integrity, Jeff Bezos, was responsible for the move and Lewis was merely the stooge charged with making it sound palatable…at which he failed.  Lewis would probably write how well Amazon warehouse workers are treated if Bezos demanded it.

At this writing, Robert Kagan did resign while Ruth Marcus and Karen Tumulty contented themselves with writing op-eds condemning the non-endorsement while also opting to continue to accept Bezos’s money.  Will Lewis, as far as anyone can tell, is still hiding under his desk.  (At the Los Angeles Times, editorials editor Mariel Garza resigned after its billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, forced a similar non-endorsement on its editorial board.)

Bezos’s muscling of that portion of the Post’s staff most needed to be independent is both tragic and morally criminal—although Bezos, similar to his new pal Donald Trump, enjoys immunity from official acts while in office.  With the nation facing an unprecedented crisis, one in which a free press and honest reporting are vital, Bezos has chosen to abdicate his responsibilities as an American citizen and drag his newspaper toy along with him.

The Post’s perfidy has evoked much nostalgia for the “good old days,” when responsible, even-handed journalism was the rule rather than the exception.  Alas, responsible, even-handed journalism has always been the exception.  Long before cable news, or even television and radio, newspapers, on which almost every American relied, were generally highly partisan, often scurrilous, and, when it suited their readers, had only a passing relationship with the truth. 

One example was in the weeks and months following what has become known as the Colfax Massacre.

On April 13, 1873, Easter Sunday, upwards of 250 armed white men, most on horseback, some dragging a six-pound cannon, converged on the courthouse of Colfax, Louisiana.  In and around the courthouse were approximately 150 Black members of the state militia, also armed but with antiquated weapons, awaiting the invasion behind hastily constructed redoubts in front of which they had dug a ditch. 

The white men, many members of white supremacist groups, attacked and brutally murdered more than one hundred of the defenders.  They later claimed to have acted in self-defense after one of their number had been shot, but his death was later confirmed to have been from friendly fire. 

The killing went on throughout the day and into the night. The slaughter would later be viewed as the worst incident of mass murder during the entire Reconstruction Era.

You would not have known it if you read most newspapers.  Those in the South could be expected to find an excuse for the mass murder of Blacks by whites…and they did.  The New Orleans Picayune asserted that the conflagration had been precipitated because, “the negroes of Grant Parish had their minds poisoned against the white people by the industrious inculcations of a few scalawags and carpet-baggers, malignant and bad men.”

But newspapers in the North were perhaps worse. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, for example, in a lengthy editorial, acknowledged that many blacks had been shot, but insisted virtually all the killing had occurred during the battle.  They added, “No community worthily peopled by representatives of the Saxon race relish an incursion of one hundred colored men armed with shot guns,” neglecting to note that the incursion had been by the whites and the defenders were members of the duly recognized state militia.

That editorial was published across America, including in major newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune.  The horrific incident cried out for a prestigious northern news organization to refuse to pander to public sentiment or bow to political pressure and tell the whole terrible, sordid tale exactly as it happened.  Fortunately, there was one.

The New York Times, fresh from running a series of articles that resulted in Boss Tweed being sentenced to prison, sent a reporter to find out what really happened.  In a special dispatch, he wrote, “It now appears that not a single colored man was killed until all of them had surrendered to the whites who were fighting with them, when over 100 of the unfortunate negroes were brutally shot down in cold blood.  It is understood that another lot of negroes was burned to death in the Court-house when it was set on fire.”  He added, “The details of the massacre are positively appalling in their atrocity, and would appear to be more like the work of fiends than that of civilized men in a Christian country.”

In a nation where racism was nearly universal, including among its own readers, the Times report might not have been popular, but it was honest. 

We desperately need that honesty now.  Instead, from the Washington Post we got cowardice.

It is not just writers such as Marcus and Tumulty for whom a paycheck is more important than integrity.  There is plenty to go around.  It begins with Bezos, knuckling under to Trump’s threats to go after Amazon if he is elected.  It extends to the younger members of the staff for whom a job at the Post was a dream turned nightmare.  And, of course, there is Will Lewis, who tried to feed a line of treacly hogwash to a readership sophisticated enough to see it for what it was.

In response to Trump’s election in 2016, the Post, with great fanfare and self-satisfaction—and Bezos’s endorsement—adopted the official slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

It is they who have now dimmed the lights.