Coop Scoop Updated and Corrected Special Election Bulletin #3.5: The Press Begins Its Capitulation to a Trump Admin

Lots of important changes so take another read

Oct 27, 2024

By Marc Cooper

Allow me a clarification and an apology. First, even if you read this a day or so ago, re-read it as there is a lot more new info in the UPDATES that are bold-faced and italicized. More info on the non endorsements by the LATimes and more resignations and more about motivation of the WaPo non-endorsement and added material about the published manifesto by interns at The Nation. There are also a number of new embedded and important links.

I also APOLOGIZE to the readers for the earlier version of this edition that was pock-marked with an outbreak of typos. I could offer a lot of explanations ranging from fat fingers, to carpal tunnel, to writing in bed with the flu at midnight, to Apple’s Very Artificial Intelligence when it comes to dictation and also just my chronic plain sloppiness which in any case shows disrespect and even comes as an insult to you the followers. On top of that, I sent out an earlier draft by error that, in fact, I had barely checked as it was a draft!. These are simpering explanations and in no way a justification for so many typos. I am unwilling to promise absolute perfection going forward, I am too old, but I do make a vow to send you much cleaner copy. Maybe even close to perfect. Or at least not insulting!

Thank you for your understanding and forbearance to date. I do sincerely apologize.

Now back to business.

Major American institutions are already in the process of capitulating to a new Trump administration even before or if it is elected.  These are some big time cowards and despicable corporate leaders.  Some of the tech bros were among the first to pledge loyalty to Trump some moths ago,

A few days ago it was the LATimes that began the expected capitulation of major media institutions to Donald Trump who they apparently are betting will win (though we should really give first place to Russian asset Elon Musk who has turned Twitter into the primary media arm of Trump disinfo along with an army of Kremlin bots.  Really no reason to refer to Twitter as media, it is now a partisan political operation with Russian help).

The billionaire owner of The Los Angeles Times killed what would have been an endorsement of Harris by his own editorial board --- which in a rare case reports to him not to the Editor-in-Chief.  The paper issued no endorsement. The owner posted an unwittingly hilarious “clarification” on Twitter, carefully written in a CYA passive voice that the fool didn’t even realize was admitting HE was the guilty party.  That should be self- evident when you read it.

The owner, billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong has no background in journalism but is worth $10 billion dollars.   The non endorsement was hard to immediately understand until a few more facts leaked out.  Like PSS is butt buddies with Minister of Propaganda Elon Musk and has been reported to be “in conversations” with Trump about becoming a Senior Health Policy [sic] advisor to a re-elected bag of fetid gas.  

The dying LATimes has no outstanding record on covering Trump in any unique critical way and PSS clearly wants to stay off his media hit list.  OK, Patrick. Just don’t expect anybody to come rescue you when Trump eventually turns on you. A wave of cancelled subs are washing into the Times from its very Democratic reader base.  Updated language: Here is the carefully written but failure-to-clarify Tweet that proves nothing except this was HIS decision and trying to fob it off on the edit board is reprehensible and a Big Lie.

Notice this is written in the passive voice. The tweet implies the edit board just punted. But if you read it properly where the word “provided” appears it means PSS ordered them. And he ordered them to write a non-partisan side by side comparison of the candidates. Since when is an endorsement “non-partisan?” The edit board properly decided to not compromise its integrity and its punt was a fuck you to the blockhead owner who very clearly knows jack about journalism.

Update: I believe that PSS has become bff’s with Elon Musk who is seeking an advisory position in a Trump White House and would be delighted by the promised tax cuts and de regulation promised by Trump. There are reports that the Harris endorsement was already written and the board pulled it when it was clear the boss was not going to allow it. There’s also an alternate theory out there being peddled by the owner’s 29 year old daughter Nika. She is a firm supporter of the Palestinians and she claims now that not only did she help stop the endorsement but that the non- endorsement played a key role in Israel limiting its strikes this weekend against Iraq. This is wacko. If anything, the limited nature of the Israeli bombing was coming directly from the EU, Tony Blinken and an increasingly uncomfortable Biden admin. Or it is part of Israel’s own strategy. Personally, I don’t think BiBi was particularly impressed or even noticed the missing endorsement from the shriveling LATimes, even though it is not impossible that Daddy stopped the endorsement because of his daughter. Makes no difference, folks, the owner/publisher let alone a family member have no moral or ethical authority in the world of journalism to tinker with or make editorial decision Nika, GTFO. Politico has some detailed stuff about Nika’s “woke” role inside the newsroom. Read it. Lots of great background.

Then read this open letter from the union of the LATimes editorial staff where they clearly call out PSS for his bullshit version of what happened. I believe these are foreshocks of a bigger upheaval sooner rather than later,

The resignation of Mariel Garza, top opinion editor, the only woman Latina editor in a city that speaks as much SPANISH as English is one more indicator of the gap between the paper and its city.

Update: Two members of the LATimes edit board itself have also now resigned which means that in a few days the sordid truth will come out and PSS will be a laughing stock. Kudos to my long time pal Robert Greene, one of the most ethical journos I ever met, and the esteemed Karin Klein. If these folks can make the sacrifice for first principles it should stem the conversation that unsubscribing from the staff will hurt the workers. That might be a better argument for not boycotting Amazon who employs around a million poor people, many who live in RV’s and migrate from one Bezos sweatshop to another while sleeping in parking lots. LATimes reporters are an elite among American workers. They are paid 5 times what Amazon workers make, they are educated, college-educated, worldly and blessed with manifold skills. I am not worried about them finding work. Indeed some of them need no employer and would double their income if they moved to substack where Nika can’t intimidate them. Defense of principles often brings sacrifices. If Liz Cheney who had a bright Republican future was willing to make that sacrifice, hopefully some liberal LATimes folks can match her courage. And let’s be real. With very few exceptions every fine journalist I know has had 5, 6 or 7 jobs via firing or layoffs. I’ve lost cont of mine over 50 years.

Worse news came today because it came from a much better paper, The Washington Post.  Billionaire owner  Jeff Bezos refused to publish his own staff endorsement of Harris or of anybody else.  The PR flacks mumbled something about the Post returning to its roots and will no longer endorse in the future either…if it has one. This is the first time in decades that the Post abstains and it came with some PR mumbo jumbo that explains nothing and Bezos isn’t saying much.

Update: Bezos has in fact issued no statements as of Saturday night. Members of the edit board said the process of endorsement began in late September and several drafts were produced and the final one was simply spiked by the owner of one of the biggest yachts in the world and of Amazon among other lucrative assets. Trump has had a contentious relationship with the Post whose excellent staff have broken a ton of stories exposing Trump’s many foibles and crimes.  And the WaPost is very high on Trump’s hit list.

I might be wrong and I have no facts or sources, just a hunch. This is another pre-capitulation to Trump by a weakling Bezos in the hope that if Trump is elected he might spare them a frontal attack.  New slogan for the Post:

DEMOCACY DIES IN COWARDICE

UPDATE: Turns out that Bezos’ empire has about $4 billion in current US government contracts. He fears that if Trump is elected and if the billionaire has not been sufficiently supine to him, a second Trump term could cancel those contracts. There are also significant tax issues involved and Bezos is willing to kiss the ring (and not the one on the finger) to get the big cuts Trump is promising to the ultra rich and what every fat cat has wet dream about — de regulation. As you know, there is never enough. Not even $200b.

There were also two articles in the Post written about the capitulation, to its minor credit.  But reports says cancellations are in the thousands along with angry letters from readers. Semafor reports 2500 cancellations in the first 24 hrs. And a letter of condemnation from almost all the WaPo columnists. And so? What are they going to do about it?

The Guardian has the most complete story on Bezos' capitulation. Read it.

Woodward and Bernstein voiced a throaty condemnation. as did the former prized and now retired executive editor Marty Baron. Good for them.

Some comic relief. The self-styled leading pub of the American Left, The Nation, published a manifesto a couple of days ago signed by its intern staff (!) condemning the endorsement the mag made of Harris and making a call to not vote for Harris. They are not billionaires, they are young interns from mostly elite colleges. They, of course, demanded there should by be no voting for those responsible for the “genocide” in Gaza. They make clear they want no votes for Tump but the best way to beat him is to vote for Kamala. Or is Jill Stein the dark horse winner? I guess there isn’t enough self-virtue in such a pragmatic vote for a sane but centrist Democrat to keep an unhinged fascist from taking over?

When I was their age I did similar dumb things along with SDS like boycotting the 1968 election over Vietnam and we wound up with Dick Nixon. These young people have a right to their opinion and a right to make it public. But without sounding too much like a grumpy snob, these interns who have no public profile or record and in the end what credibility to they bring to this?

Update: Re-reading the manifesto, it is clear they don’t want anybody voting for the Democrats even in swing states. When I was a young radical anti-war protester in the 60’s, my jacket had the flag of the Viet Cong on it, meaning that I was supporting the enemy and of course I believed the myth that the North Vietnamese would never use torture. Perhaps these interns should consider putting a Trump patch on their jackets because objectively and despite their arguments to the contrary, in our current system, you are voting for Trump if you deny a vote for Harris. Don’t give me the crap that the Democrats think they own the vote of these young protesters, even if many think they do. Wrong. Everybody owns their own vote and if you think Harris is going to be a bad president and Trump would be a worse one and you abstain or vote for a micro-party you are throwing away your own vote and creating one vote less against a fascist. I don’t think your vote should be in moral terms. Only pragmatic ones. But if you believe as the interns do that this is a moral issue, what exactly is the morality of relatively privileged university interns ignoring the fate of the bottom 2/3 of the American population dependent on federal aid programs from foods stamps to college loans (!) and medical care if Republicans take the election? The mass killing in Gaza funded by the US is an atrocity and a pressing humanitarian issue. But it is not and should not be the number one and only issue in this election. One issue voters are always morally motivated and they are usually blind to the consequences.

Within the wider Nation universe there are a couple of six packs of distinguished and highly experienced writers and academics spanning an ideological universe of the Middle East. Sorry, I would rather hear from them then from an ad hoc group of young people I don’t know and who have no public record of credibility and who have not thought out what they are doing.

They are kids, from my 73 year old perspective, and I give them wide berth having been one of them more than 50 years ago. But the editors and the publishes are not kids. They are a different set of cowards. And having written for the Nation from 1995 to 2010 I know what I am talking about, The Nation is basically a liberal/social democratic publication (Think Bernie in Print) but it remains infected with the decades-old disease of “no enemies to the left.” Get out your electron microscope to find any serious Nation criticism of ANY aspect of anything that calls itself the left and that’s why this intern letter was published — not even with a sidebar counter column from an experienced expert on the region.

No publication I can think of would allow a signed editorial from its intern staff to appear in its own publications to criticize its own official staff decision. It simply means a further degradation of editorial standards, an insult to the staff, while the mag is simultaneously publishing much lower quality writers and no longer has any superstar analysts. With a few notable exceptions ( Elie Mystal and Chris Lehmann and Sasha Abramsky who is the only real reporter aboard) there aint much there. If I were running the Nation I would call in the interns and tell them if they think the magazine is immoral in endorsing Killer Kamala maybe they should just quit and go back to their dorms. If the Nation is complicit in genocide by endorsing Harris, as the manifesto claimed, and the interns there really do help with editorial production (as they do) are they not also complicit, by their own twisted standards?

Im going to repeat this one idea because you might have missed it. The interns have an absolute right to their opinion— a good part I sort of agree with. They have a right to publish it and make it public. But the magazine has no obligation to publish it in its own mag and certainly not ten days from a referendum on fascism. Publish it somewhere else, interns. We don't know you, trust you or care vey much what you have to say because we have been hearing this same argument in near identical terms for a year now. Tough words, I know. But true.

Update: I want to point out that there are many different ways The Nation could have handled this. Certainly, the interns are smart folks and they know that the Nation mgmt (which is also its editorial mgmt) would not have the courage to say sorry, but no. They knew that if that happened this would have ballooned into a story about “free speech” which it is not and the Left in general, without thinking about it, would support them. However, the mgmt could have asked them to compress the manifesto into a 700 word editorial signed by the author/s, put through the normal editorial process and would have appeared in the magazine like any other vetted and edited piece. I honestly don’t know but I suspect there was NO editing except maybe copy editing and that privilege of not letting editors intervene at all is or was reserved for long time well known columnists who have earned sufficient credibility to be mostly unaccountable. If it was properly edited — not censored— I certainly did not detect much. It also could have been a letter to the editor which WAS a long tradition of dissent in the magazine. The polemics often between Cockburn and Hitchens in the letters section was often the best reading in the mag.

The Nation has tolerated internal dissent to a somewhat limited degree over the years. I know because I had been one of the staff dissenters. In 2000 after the Nation endorsed Clinton, a former editor and yours truly wrote not an open letter of dissent, but a finely crafted and humbly a well argued case for voting Nader in BLUE STATES. It wasn’t the easiest process, but it was published in the front editorial section of the mag. A few of us dissenters a year before also wrote a signed editorial departing from the absurd Nation position that Big Bill was a victim of “sexual McCarthyism” and we argued he was more of a male chauvinist predator with a long record of such ( you very well know that if this scandal had occurred in the last 10 years The Nation would be firmly on the other side). Along with the few co-signers we were all well known Nation writers. We even called for Clinton to resign as he had compromised the tens of millions who voted for him and opened the door to the moralizing Republicans. I think that’s the same door George W, Bush used to enter the oval office by campaigning he would “bring decency back to the White House.” Again, there was no drama with our counter-editorial and the piece appeared along with others taking different positions but we did not write it as an indignant manifesto blasting our employers and presenting them with an implicit ultimatum that if it didn’t get published we would be howling about censorship. Just to make that point sharper, shortly there after I co-wrote a signed editorial with a non-Nation writer but a then famed Democratic consultant. We clearly said the Republicans had no case to impeach him but we then really tore into Clinton and the hypocritical Democrats who held a prayer vigil for Clinton on the Capitol steps the same say he was bombing Iraq. It was a very tough slam on Big Bill. We placed it in the op-ed page of the conservative WSJ who had their own reasons to publish it. Our editor then was Max Boot, a former conservative who is now a zealous Harris supporter.

The morning our piece appeared I got a phone call from my very mediocre Nation editor at the time who is no longer there and she said literally: “How could you do that? You didn’t even offer it to us.” I asked, oh sorry, I thought you would not publish it, right?” Of course we wouldn’t she answered. But still…. still what? We did not offer it to The Nation because we knew it would be futile and I had no desire for some psychodrama over a simple editorial. Punch line: that editor had previously worked for the WSJ and when I brought that up, she countered she worked for the biz section and abhorred the editorial page. My co-author and I also did. But her hypocrisy was jaw-dropping. And the cold truth is we had to find a conservative outlet for the piece because every liberal pub and editor were claiming Clinton was a hapless victim and some kind of a victim rather than the victimizer he was. Frankly, I thought about this in 2016 when it came to vote. I intensely disliked her but wanted heer to beat Trump, obviously. I did not turn into a Clinronite by any means because I pragmatically voted for her.

The interns thing is a minor issue but portends poorly for a Trump future if that is in the cards. If the leading left publication makes such feckless decisions as this one, what kind of mature and serious opposition will it offer when really needed? I won’t know because I let my subscription lapse last week and its obsolete web site after ten tries last nite failed to take a password for a new sub. LOL.

Ten days away from an election between a centrist Democrat and an indicted, convicted criminal who is clearly mentally unfit to be a dog catcher and who aspires to dictatorship, the beacon of the left unleashes its interns to urge readers to not vote against the fascist? Sad. Pathetic and tragi-comic.

The US in 2024 is not Germany in 1932. Lots of differences. There might be a few less after November 5. But it took only weeks for every official German institution to quietly capitulate to Nazi power. Within months the German army pledge was changed from pledging loyalty to the nation and instead to the person of Adolph Hitler. Ring any bells?

Here’s a thought experiment: If Trump is elected and sets up authoritarian rule short of hard dictatorship and retains a thin patina of “democracy,” what can we expect from the media? Will any but the small alternatives like The Nation step up to be an authentic opposition paper openly defending democracy and condemning openly the slide to fascism? Or will their bosses and editors be clinking cocktail glasses with the White House Trumpies and in print continue to treat him as a sort of normal “ultra-conservative Republican”. We know the answer already .

And that obedience will make no impression on Trump if he moves to full dictatorship, seizes the Washington Post and names Elon Musk as publisher if not overseer of the entire White Christian National press? Then again, we might be able to count on The Nation interns to lead the battle against fascism because that would be really virtuous +

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