The great newspapers of the world just lost a couple of members

Opinion

As US election day approaches, the actions of four billionaires have shown that integrity in the media no longer matters and personal interests rise above all else.

In 1968, a splendid book about the newspaper industry was published by the journalism school at the University of Missouri. It was called The Elite Press: Great Newspapers of the World.

Now, of course, it seems like an artefact from a different age and, err, more than a little elitist, as it paid tribute to papers that represented “a mighty force ever working to infuse dignity and civility into international communication”.

From the UK, the elite was represented by The Times and The Guardian, but there were also profiles of The Yorkshire Post and The Scotsman.

In the US, the main emphasis was on the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, although there were also plenty of references of The Washington Post, despite the fact that its Watergate lustre lay four years further into the future.

Illogical reasoning

Two of those three US titles are in danger of losing at least part of their elite status — and certainly are markedly less elite than they were last month.

First up, the LA Times, which was preparing a series of articles on the case against Donald Trump to run each day of the week to culminate in an endorsement of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.

Unlike many daily newspapers across the US, including The New York Times and The Boston Globe, there will now be no endorsement by the LA Times, the leading newspaper in the overwhelmingly Democratic state of California.

The endorsement, and the articles arguing against a second Trump presidency, were killed by the family of the newspaper’s billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who made his money in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology.

His daughter Nika claimed that the decision had been made because of Harris’ support for Israel’s war in Gaza. If true, this would seem like an illogical reason, given that Trump is even more pro-Israel than Harris.

The more likely reason is that Soon-Shiong did not want to upset Trump for business reasons.

He will have potentially lucrative drugs that will need approval by the Food and Drug Administration and Trump has vowed to take revenge on those who have opposed him by using the institutions of the government.

Either way, a billionaire owner has decided to ride roughshod over the editorial decision-making of the paper he owns for personal interests, thereby undermining both trust and reputation. There have been editorial resignations and cancelled subscriptions.

Officially sitting on the fence

Over on the east coast, there was another row about a blocked Harris endorsement — possibly an even more bitter one, because of the involvement of British journalist Sir William Lewis.

The Washington Post, which had planned to endorse Harris, reported that it had been stopped from doing so by multibillionaire owner Jeff Bezos. It will be the first time in 36 years that the paper of Watergate has failed to endorse a presidential candidate.

In the past months, the paper has been rigorous in investigating the danger and potential damage that could be caused by Trump in a second term, but it will now officially be sitting on its hands on election day.

The decision has caused shock and outrage, not least from Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

They told CNN: “We respect the traditional independence of the editorial page, but this decision 11 days out from the 2024 presidential election ignores The Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.”

As publisher and CEO of the famous paper, Lewis, who got his knighthood for being an informal advisor to former prime minister Boris Johnson, tried to spin the decision as a return to the paper’s former stance of not endorsing presidential candidates.

The truth seems to be much more sordid than that — the Amazon founder, estimated to be the world’s second-richest person with a fortune of more than $200bn, was worried that some of his business interests could be hit if Trump won.

Like Soon-Shiong, Bezos has demonstrated that he does not understand what it is to be the responsible owner of such a historic publication — and Lewis has hardly enhanced his reputation either.

The Washington Post’s former executive editor Marty Baron said of the decision: “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.” Editor-at-large Robert Kagan was among the resignations and there was a flood of cancelled subscriptions.

In the summer, the paper reported that it has signed up 4,000 new digital subscribers. In the days since the endorsement decision, more than 200,000 readers have cancelled their subscriptions.

And what of Murdoch and Musk?

Do endorsements matter? Are they not purely symbolic and, anyway, most of the readers of the LA Times and The Washington Post are probably Harris voters already?

Such decisions overturn editorial independence and undermine trust in the main thing a newspaper has to sell: its integrity.

Two media billionaires down — two to go.

It may not exactly be part of the old newspaper media elite, but the position of the New York Post is interesting all the same.

Two years ago, the Rupert Murdoch-owned paper announced that Trump was “unworthy to be this country’s chief executive again”, because of his behaviour during the Capitol riots on 6 January. This week, it endorsed Trump and claimed the choice was clear “to put the nation on the right path”.

That’s despite the fact that no fewer than 23 Nobel laureates in economics have said that Harris’ economic proposals were far superior to that of Trump.

And then there is the fourth media billionaire, who is said to be worth more than $250bn (at least for now) — the owner of X, Elon Musk.

Not for Musk the relative subtleties of a missing endorsement or even full-throated endorsement. Musk was up there on stage with Trump at Madison Square Garden last weekend, at the same time as fears that pro-Harris material on X might fail to get the prominence it deserves.

Four billionaires with much in common — a desire not to upset Trump in case he wins and a taste for the kind of tax cuts for the mega-rich that Trump is promising.

All four are poor media owners at best and, rather like Trump, integrity does not appear to be a primary driver. Not so elite either.

Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.