A friend sent me this story from The Daily Beast. It’s about the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post refusing to publish a cartoon on its editorial page depicting multi-billionaires like Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, as well as others, kneeling at the altar of Trump and offering up bags of money. 

But don’t take my word for it.  

Here’s the cartoon:

It is well known both men, as well as many others in the M-Billionaire class, have donated $1 million apiece to the president elect’s inaugural fund and jetted down to Mar-A-Lago to spend time with him doing…stuff. 

As for the cartoon, it was drawn by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who’s been employed at The Post since 2008.

But not anymore.  

She quit in protest because in all her time there never once had the paper refused to publish one of her drawings.  Tweaks, yes.  Out and out refusal?  Never.  Here’s a link to her Substack with a more specific explanation:

One nixed cartoon is not necessarily concerning.  But this is part of a clear trend.  Just a few months ago Mr. Bezos overruled his own editorial board and refused to allow The Post to publish its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris.  In His own piece on His opinion page, he stated, seemingly out of nowhere, that the centuries old tradition of newspaper editorial endorsements “create a perception of bias” and “non-independence.”  

Two editorial board members who resigned, as well as a slew of other reporters who also left or spoke out against his new policy, disagreed.  As did, well, about 200,000 readers who cancelled their subscriptions.

But this was not limited to The Post.  

L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, another M-Billionaire who was also pictured in Ms. Telnaes’ cartoon, similarly blocked that paper’s endorsement of Harris weeks before the 2024 election.  Predictably, several members of his board, as well as two of its Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writers, resigned.   

Not that it any of this ruffled the feathers of the aforementioned M-Bs, or as I now think of them – the new AOCs.  

That would be – Aspiring Oligarch Class.

To whit:

Since P S-S’s announcement at the Times, he fired his entire editorial board, noting he plans to replace it with a new team of “more conservative voices ” that will make the publication he’s owned since 2018 a more “fair and balanced newspaper.”  

To that end, he announced in December he’d be injecting an AI-powered BIAS METER into its coverage.

Because what could go wrong with that?

On one level, all of this is hilariously unfunny.  On another, the Chair (Note: I defer to the third person when my blood begins to boil), who went to grad school in journalism at Northwestern in the post-Watergate era, has to marvel at the chutzpah.

For the one or two of you out there who don’t speak Yiddish or never went to the house of a Jewish friend or met one of their older relatives, chutzpah means extreme self-confidence or audacity.

The coincidental timing of both major newspapers suddenly deciding not to endorse, the large money contributions, and the total lack of concern of what the trained journalists they have working for them and, in many cases have long employed, have to say, IS a THING.  It’s what they teach us in journalism school to sniff out (Note: That’s the technical term).  In court, it’s called evidence.  And when there are enough examples of it in enough places and at enough places, it’s called a trend.  And if you google any of this subject matter, or even political contributions among billionaires, you will come upon numerous stories from REPUTABLE news sources (Note: Not “fake.”  And not from a random podcast or on TikTok) with much more evidence.

Now of course, there is going to be blow back.  Like David Shipley, editor of the WaPo’s opinion page, who stated re: the cartoon nixing that “not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force” and that HIS decision (Note: Bezos’ name was cleverly not mentioned) was made because a previous column had covered the subject and another satirical column was scheduled.

But is a cartoon a column?  And what is the limit on covering a subject like a coterie of potential U.S. oligarchs being lined up among the billionaire class all across the country for the first time in history?

Imagine if Watergate had been covered that way?  Or the existence of concentration camps during World War II?  On second thought….

I often ask friends this rhetorical question re: money and power and the wealthy who wield them as a way to expand both with no real regard for the preservation of democracy, personal freedoms or even the mere existence of a habitable planet – 

When is it enough?  

The answer is also rhetorical but I’ll state it anyway.  There aren’t enough billions in the world to make a scared individual secure, or an insatiable person filled up, or a person who is bottom line obsessed with their own self-interest suddenly become someone who will put you or anyone else in the word before themselves.  

Money doesn’t do that.  Nor does extreme, outsized power.

It takes a village of relentless truth sayers to hold them accountable.  

Loudly and unrelentingly.  

The biggest note of hope in all of this is that The Daily Beast story linked above was written by an intern named Liam Archaki.  He’s a rising senior at Amherst College with a double major in English and philosophy.  Not even a journalism major.  Also, he interns at The Christian Science Monitor – not one of those fake news, left wing rags the MAGA movement uses to describe credible – meaning vetted – sources of actual news.  

See, like other credible online sites, The Daily Beast picks up stories from other reputable bureaus and syndicates.  This is even something The Washington Post does.  At least at this writing.  Who knows what Bezos and some of the other guys have in store for us over the next four years.  We could very likely see sources like the One America News morning show hosted by  Matt Gaetz in an effort to cover “both sides.”

Sanewashing the most outrageous statements by publishing them in the name of a balanced agenda.

Travie McCoy ft Bruno Mars – “Billionaire”