Hold the Press
Last week the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post refused to endorse a candidate from either party because the editorial boards wanted to endorse the candidate of the Democrats and the tech billionaire owners said, no. There was a bit of an uproar, but I didn’t really see any grounds to complain because the owners of a media outlet can do as they choose because it’s their outlet. They own it. People sometimes have a hard time understanding this, crying censorship when a media outlet deigns to enforce community standards as to what they publish. The constitution, however, only protects speech from interference by the government.
And it’s always been that way. William Randolph Hearst did what he wanted with his papers including getting the US into the Spanish American War. And Joseph Pulitzer was his competition. They invented yellow journalism, the 19th century version of the internet, where the papers pushed sex, crime, and graphic horrors. Sound familiar? And they were partisan politicians. Welcome to today with Elon Musk now running Twitter or X because he didn’t like the previous owner, and he likes the Republican candidate. And people who don’t like what he’s done with Twitter are leaving and that’s their right and no one expects the government to do anything. He can go broke on his own.
But back to newspapers. They’ve lost a lot of their punch these days because news is a 24-hour a day business and no one waits for the morning paper anymore. They doomscroll their phones with their morning coffee, and do Wordle, my only contact with the New York Times. Objectivity, once a selling point for print media, has passed it’s best used by date. And the internet is a borderless world, with computers simulating people, having conversations with real people, who hear what they want to hear. And surprise, surprise everyone now knows who the LA Times and Washington Post wanted to endorse, the Democrat, because their tech owners forgot about the internet they helped invent. In quashing news, they made news. Just another lesson, I guess, that you can get rich without being smart.