Two Billionaire Media Owners Provide a Lesson about American Press 'Freedom'

An objective news media in the US has always been a fraud and a carefully curated illusion

“Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.”

— A.J. Liebling, New Yorker columnist and press critic

Word that two major US daily newspapers, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post would not be endorsing a presidential candidate this year because their multi-billionaire owners — Peter Soon-Shiong and Jeff Bezos — both blocked publication of editorial endorsements of Kamala Harris already prepared by their papers’ editorial boards. Their almost simultaneous and equally imperious decisions to over-ride their own hand-picked editorial staffs provoked outrage from readers and staff and has led to some resignations of columnists and senior editors at both publications.

But while editorial political endorsements dismissed as minor factors in influencing voter decisions, what the two tycoons did provide is a useful lesson to the American public and to younger and less cynical journalists about the real-world limits to the oft-touted alleged “freedom of the press” we in the United States supposedly cherish.

The First Amendment to the US Constitution, routinely touted by US politicians, US diplomats and American propagandists, actually says:

Congress shall make no law …abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

But these first words in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights don’t prevent other branches of the government from engaging in other ways intimidate or limit that “freedom.” And American history is littered, especially in recent decades, with quite successful examples of government repression of actual press freedom. Truth to tell, while the article’s wording is very clear, Presidents with their Department of Justice and an increasingly right-wing Supreme Court as well as even the Congress itself over the course of decades and centuries have chipped away too at freedom of speech and the freedom of assembly.

But let’s look at America’s so-called Freedom of the Press.

While Freedom of Speech and Freedom to Assemble are rights clearly belonging to individuals and groups of people, Press Freedom is not, except in the case of an individual (like me for instance), who can establish a print or online news site like this one, with no need for permission or a license, and can supposedly write and publish whatever she or he may want. But the American people do not have a constitutional right to obtain honest, uncensored news and information that is free from.government influence and propaganda. What information they might wish to obtain — whether about the US, their government, and about the rest of the world and what the US is doing in the rest of the world — can be restricted or censored without their knowledge, as for example, the US role in subverting the democratic governments of Australia, Chile, Italy and France, which was long hidden (and is still buried by the establishment media).

Most Americans, if asked, assume that what the First Amendment offers is their freedom to have such information at their disposal. Or if they are more aware and thoughtful about the First Amendment to the Constitution, they assume it at least grants freedom to journalists to speak or write truth to power.

It does not do that, however, as the far too many journalists who have been sentenced to jail for contempt of court when they’ve refused to name a source of a story the government seeks to identify and punish for leaking can attest. Just ask Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, who spent years in a British jail or trapped in a tiny Ecuadoran Embassy in London as three successive US Presidents — Obama, Trump and Biden — all tried to have him extradited from Britain to be prosecuted in the US for espionage. His “crime”? Practicing journalism by documenting and reporting to the world about US military atrocities and other war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yours truly can attest to this. When in December 20I8 I published a cover story about decades of epic Pentagon budget fraud in the Nation magazine, just over three months later I found myself placed on the FBI’s Terrorist Watchlist. It took a British airline security officer and an airport boarding pass-issuer to alert me, and a couple of years of having myself taken aside for special searches of my carry-on luggage and my physical person before being allowed to board a plane, to get removed from it.

Outright censorship is one example of how the First Amendment is ignored, particularly in “wartime” (a loose concept in post-WWII America where there has not been a single declared war but where there has been US military conflict or Cold War conditions almost continuously) . The Espionage Act, passed by Congress in 1917 during World War I, was used to prosecute and even jail over 2000 people including a significant third-party presidential candidate, Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs, most for simply speaking against the draft, as was Debs’ “crime.” The Act was also used to prosecute Daniel Ellsberg for copying and disclosing the classified Pentagon Papers about the origins and motives for the Vietnam War. (that case never went to trial because a judge tossed it out after learning that President Nixon had dispatched some of his secret “plumbers” squad to raid Ellsberg’s psychologist’s office and rifle through his personal medical history). Later, in 1984, Samuel Loring Morison, a civilian Navy employee, was prosecuted, convicted and sentenced under the Act for providing classified US intelligence photos of a new advanced Soviet aircraft carrier which was published in a Janes Defense Weekly, a British magazine (he was later pardoned by President Clinton).

But President Obama (who ironically ran for office touting his legal expertise as a “Constitutional Law” expert), opened the floodgates for such prosecutions by having his Justice Department revivify and routinize application of the hoary Espionage Act to prosecute eight government journalistic sources of classified information. A number of the government or military sources of those leaks were ultimately sentenced to prison terms, some of them quite lengthy.

Obama’s lead was followed by President Donald Trump who had his AG use the Espionage Act to prosecute three leakers and opened investigations into dozens more— many of them leakers not of “national security” information but of politically embarrassing information about the president.

While journalists were not specifically charged in most of these cases, they were threatened with jail on contempt of court charges by judged, and even sent to jail for refusal to reveal their sources some were confined to cells for the duration of a trial.

The latest news about two billionaire owners of major newspapers grossly interfering with the content of their own publications comes just as it is starting to look likely that former President Trump may well win another four years as president — this time in full fascist mode. If re-elected elected this time, he has vowed to use his Presidential powers (recently declared immune from prosecution by the Supreme Court) to wreak “retribution” and to “open the gates of Hell” on his perceived “enemies” — which has said includes Democratic opponents in Congress, journalists, leakers in his past and future administration. He has also said he will use the National Guard and even the active duty military to crush protest in the US.

When I lived and worked as a correspondent in Hong Kong during 1992-1997 during the five years before Britain’s Hong Kong colony was handed over to China, I saw how in almost every walk of life and in every institution, from the police and churches to the universities and the leading Hong Kong businesses tycoons as well as the foreign businesses operating there, leading people began to hedge their bets by kowtowing to Beijing.

Hong Kong’s free-wheeling and highly competitive media began dropping any critical coverage of China — even certain daily comics mocking China’s rulers. Some universities with international faculties recruited from around the world and where English was the language used in classrooms began holding faculty meetings in Cantonese, thus freezing out many faculty members. All this began happening long before the Chinese government had any control or presence in the city.

The leaders of all these institutions and leaders, I could see, were anticipating what China would likely want them to do, and were trying to curry favor with their future overlords by implementing the changes years before China took over recovered sovereignty of the city and its seven million people, often introducing repressive steps that Beijing itself might not have put in place itself.

This seems to be what Bezos and Soon-Shiong are doing in cancelling planned editorial board endorsements of Harris in their publications. A recent article noted that business leaders like JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who are known to have favor Democrats, are suddenly keeping silent about who they support for President. (Elon Musk of Tesla, Space-X and the influential Social medium X, is an extreme almost pathetic example of not just a billionaire but the world’s richest man sucking up to potential president Trump.)

Already coverage of the election in the corporate media is suffering from an editorial even handedness that is almost laughable when one candidate, Harris, is pretty normal and rational, and the other is known to be lying almost constantly on the campaign trail, whether it’s claiming that Haitian immigrant workers with refugee status are “eating people’s pets” or that Democrats are letting millions of immigrants illegally cross the southern border “so they can vote for them,” he is reported on as a normal candidate.

It’s a bad sign for the future should Trump win this election. The mainstream US newsmedia have long since lost their way and ceased to see themselves as a crucial Fourth Estate working to keep the government in check. With this display of corporate cowardice at the Washington Post and L.A. Times leading the way, the supposedly free press won’t need a First Amendment because it won’t be challenging authority at all.

Those who think that with the proliferation of feisty smaller online alternative news sources, the collapse of the traditional mainstream news organizations, and their surrender to political pressure to become more docile stenographers to government power, won’t matter, are mistaken. The government ultimately controls the internet, and to think that smaller news organizations like the Intercept, Huff Post, TruthOut, Jacobin and even the feisty Counterpunch with their shoestring budgets could take on the federal government in lengthy lawsuits seeking to shut them down is a pipe-dream.