Columns, Free Speech, Media, Politics

The Media Musk? Why the Cancel Campaign Targeting Jeff Bezos Could Backfire

Below is my column on Fox.com on the expanding boycott of the Washington Post by Democratic politicians, pundits, and members of the press. The reason? Because owner Jeff Bezos wants to stay politically neutral and leave the matter to the public. In an age of advocacy journalism, the return to neutrality is intolerable. The reaction is itself revealing. In a heated meeting this week at the Post, writers were apoplectic with attacks on Bezos and alarm over the very notion of remaining neutral in an election.  One declared to the group: “One thing that can’t happen in this country is for Trump to get another four years.”  The immediate and reflexive call of the left for boycotts and canceling campaigns is all too familiar to many of us.  The question is whether the targeting of Bezos could backfire in creating a major ally for the restoration of American journalism.

Here is the slightly altered column:

It is not every day that you go from being Obi-Wan Kenobi to Sheev Palpatine in twenty-four hours. However, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos now has the distinction of having Luke (Mark Hamill) lead a boycott of his “democracy dies in darkness” newspaper as the daily of the darkside.

Figures like former Rep. Liz Cheney announced she was canceling her subscription as a boycott movement led a reported 200,000 people to give up their Post subscriptions. Some like George Conway even seemed to target Bezos’ company Amazon. It is a familiar pattern for many of us (on a smaller scale) who used to be associated with the left and faced cancel campaigns for questioning the orthodoxy in the media or academia.

Then something fascinating happened. Bezos stood his ground.

The left has made an art form of flash-mob politics, crushing opposition with the threat of economic or professional ruin. Most cave to the pressure, including business leaders like Meta’s Mark  Zuckerburg. That record came to a screeching halt when the unstoppable force of the left met the immovable object of Elon Musk. The left continues to oppose his government contracts and pressure his advertisers over his refusal to restore the prior censorship system at X, formerly Twitter.

Now, the left may be creating another defiant billionaire.  This week, Bezos penned an op-ed that doubled down on his decision not to endorse a presidential candidate now or in the future. Some of us have argued for newpapers to stop all political endorsements for decades.

The encouraging aspect of Bezos’s column was that he not only recognized the corrosive effect of endorsements on maintaining neutrality as a media organization, but he also recognized that the Post is facing plummeting revenues and readership due to its perceived bias and activism.

I used to write regularly for the Post, and I wrote in my new book about the decline of the newspaper as part of the “advocacy journalism” movement. As Bezos wrote, “Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.”

Bezos previously brought in a publisher to save the Post from itself.

Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis promptly delivered a truth bomb in the middle of the newsroom by telling the staff, “Let’s not sugarcoat it…We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right? I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”

The response was that the entire staff seemed to go into vapors, and many called for Lewis to be canned. Bezos stood with Lewis.

Now, resignations and recriminations are coming from reporters and columnists alike. In a public statement, Post columnists blasted the decision and said that while maybe endorsements should be ended, not now because everyone has to oppose Trump to save democracy and journalism. The statement produced some chuckles, given the signatories, including Phillip Bump and Jen Rubin, who have been repeatedly accused of pushing false stories and reckless rhetoric. (Rubin later denounced Bezos for his “Bulls**t explanation” and said that he was merely “bending a knee” to Trump.).

Bezos could do for the media what Musk did for free speech. He could create a bulwark against advocacy journalism in one of the premier newspapers in the world. Students in “J Schools” today are being told to abandon neutrality and objectivity since, as former New York Times writer (and now Howard University journalism professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones has explained, “all journalism is activism.”

After a series of interviews with over 75 media leaders,  Leonard Downie Jr., former Washington Post executive editor, and Andrew Heyward, former CBS News president, reaffirmed this shift. As Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle, stated: “Objectivity has got to go.”

Few can stand up to this movement other than a Bezos or a Musk. However, the left has long created their own monsters by demanding absolute fealty or unleashing absolute cancel campaigns. Simply because Bezos wants his newspaper to restore neutrality, the left is calling for a boycott of not just the Post but all of his companies. That is precisely what they did with Musk.

A Bezos/Musk alliance would be truly a thing to behold. They could give the push for the restoration of free speech and the free press a real chance to create a beachhead to regain the ground that we have lost in the last two decades.

The left will accept nothing short of total capitulation and Bezos does not appear willing to pay that price. Instead, he could not just save the Post but American journalism from itself.

If so, all I can say is: Welcome to the fight, Mr. Bezos.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

114 thoughts on “The Media Musk? Why the Cancel Campaign Targeting Jeff Bezos Could Backfire”

  1. I think newspapers should drop all political reporting. They print some truths and some lies but at the same time alienate both halves of the population that doesn’t care that there is a difference.
    All most people want is local news, youth and national sports scores and recaps, and the funnies.

  3. They’re just whiny losers. Jeff Bezos, love him or hate him, is a winner. Again, you can love Amazon or hate it but it is a huge and amazing and unprecedented thing that he built with tenacity and vision and hard work. Then some low grade bottom feeders come along and want to hitch themselves to his star to amplify their childish, anger addicted political opinions with maximum snark and outlandishness and no regard for the basic principles of how a company (or any person or thing) succeeds. They’ve pirated his soapbox to sell their shit-smelling soap. No self made man with any pride could tolerate this for long. I’ve actually been expecting this awakening by Bezos for some time now and I’m not surprised by it in the least. That said it’s his struggle to put the genie unwillingly back in the bottle at WaPo, and he brought that upon himself. But I think it will serve as a solidifying exercise for him to determine if this is who he really is and how much more if it he can take. Because he’s not some mollycoddled mental child scorching the earth out of crippling TDS, oblivious to all other reality. I hope this signals the end of all that for him. Sometimes the biggest step is just admitting you have a problem.

  4. I have never objected to newspaper or other endorsement of candidates, even when they disagreed with my considered opinion. I must confess, however, that such disagreement has almost always degraded my opinion of the source.

    My strongest objection to newspaper or other endorsement of candidates, however, is when that “endorsement” finds its way to news reporting that is clearly biased.

  5. Globalism has brought us the Age of Billionaires, leaving many of us feeling diminished. Sure, I would like for my billionaire to beat up your billionaire, but I would prefer to return to a more level playing field. I don’t have a problem with the wealth that is produced by genius and hard work. I do have a problem with the institutions, such as media and the universities, that have co-opted the wealth of others to empower people who are obsessed with their own ideology. Objectivity suggests working through facts to solutions. So yes, freer speech and at least the pretense of journalistic objectivity.

  6. Turley says that Bezos pulled the Harris endorsement because Bezos wants to “stay neutral”. Uh, No, Turley–you know better. It’s because Bezos is afraid that Trump will, once again, find a way to cheat his way into power and then mercilessly mess with him and his businesses. Trump has threatened revenge against his perceived enemies, including direct threats against ABC for daring to fact-check him and against CBS for allegedly editing the Kamala Harris interview to make her look better–which is not true, BTY, and besides it released the entire transcript of the interview, something that Turley’s employer does not do when it routinely edits Trump interviews to make him look better, to edit out incoherent ramblings or other things that make him look bad. Trump has threatened to use the power of the FCC that licenses broadcast entities to go after ABC and CBS, and the Federalist Society SCOTUS said this is just fine.

    On another note, Trump just can’t stop lying. Last night, he told a crowd that little bleached Tiffany graduated first in her law school class at Georgetown Law. First of all, Georgetown Law does not rank its students. Secondly, little bleached Tiffany didn’t receive ANY academic honors at all–not even a “cum laude”, much less a “magna cum laude” or “summa cum laude.” Georgetown DOES post these academic honors, and Tiffany received none of them. The list is publicly available. It’s not clear whether she ever even took the bar exam, much less whether she passed, or if she ever has held any law-related actual job, all of which means she took a seat away from someone who would have used a legal education from a prestigious law school to help clients.

    2. “little bleached Tiffany?” Wow, gotta love those leftists – pro-women, the lot of them.

      You always sound like a disgusting pig, but now I’m pretty certain you are also a physical as well as mental disaster.

      1. Yes, women on the left typically are hags and hate other women (and men and everyone else).

        1. “women on the left”–you mean like Julia Roberts, Beyonce, Jennifer Lopez, and Taylor Swift, all of whom campaigned for Harris, who is herself quite beautiful, just to name a few? Are they “hags”, or do you have Kamala Derangement Syndrome? I don’t “hate” anyone–but phony blondies with the fake yellow hair like Tiffany and Ivanka, and who have accomplished nothing in life besides spending money someone else earned, annoy me.

          1. Do you think that Tiffany was first in a class that she took in law school? I’d have to look at what he said, gigs. Can you provide a direct quote?

    3. ‘Gigi’ <3's DJT and Mr. Turley
      they 'do wrong'/are 'bad boys'
      and she's obsessed by them.

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