Journalism in an Autocratic Age
How to build and protect media institutions robust enough to stand against fascism.
Sarah will be talking with Dan Pfeiffer tomorrow night at 9 p.m. eastern about what to expect in the final week of the campaign. If you miss it, it’ll be up the next day at the homepage. Head over to TheBulwark.com/events for more details.
1. Cancel Culture
I am not here to tell anyone what to do with their money. If you want to cancel your subscription to the Washington Post, that’s between you and your God.
I’ll just tell you that I didn’t cancel my subscription. And I’d like to explain why.
The problem isn’t the Washington Post. It’s the owner of the Post.
And realistically, there is no way to send Jeff Bezos a message about your disagreement with his choices for the simple fact that the WaPo is not a revenue stream for him.
The Post’s operating losses/profits exist on a small scale: In 2023 the paper lost $77m. That same year Amazon’s net profits were $30b. With a “b.” Bezos himself is worth $205b. If the Post simply stopped charging anyone for subscriptions, Bezos might not even notice it on his balance sheets.
What’s more: I suspect Bezos doesn’t want to own the Post anymore. It has proved to be more trouble for him than he expected. I suspect that if he could unload it tomorrow, he would.
The problem is that there’s no one to sell it to.
Bezos bought the Post in 2013 for $250m. He didn’t pay that money because the Post was a thriving business. It was a rescue mission and $250m was a token payment—a sign of respect for the Graham family. The real purchase price was that Bezos committed to take on the Post’s liabilities and absorb its future losses.
Who in their right mind would take on such responsibilities today in the era of Trumpism? Anyone with enough money to float the Post will be either (1) a Trump crony or (2) vulnerable to pressure from Trump. As Timothy Snyder said over the weekend, “A problem with the very wealthy is that, alas, the least vulnerable have a tendency to think of themselves as the most vulnerable.”
2. The Business of Media
In an autocratic age, journalism takes on heightened importance. But journalistic institutions cannot rely on billionaire benefactors, because, as Snyder says, those benefactors view themselves as vulnerable.
Which means that the only way to protect journalistic institutions is for them to be profitable.
The catch is that it also matters how they achieve profitability. If revenues are dependent on advertising, then publications are driven not by ideas but an existential need for popularity.
No, the only way to build a media institution robust enough to stand against authoritarianism is for it to be a profitable business supported primarily by its readers.
That’s it. That’s the ball game.
A publication which is solvent and supported by a distributed network of readers—each contributing a relatively small amount of money—is the only way for a media institution to stand against the onslaught.1
You may have noticed that this is how we built The Bulwark. It wasn’t an accident.
I have a number of thoughts about the intersection of journalism, business, and liberal democracy. One of them is that any institution which is not explicitly anti-authoritarian will eventually be coopted or conquered by authoritarians.
Another is that scale matters. The larger the scale of a media organization, the harder it is to maintain an anti-authoritarian ethos.
But those are for another time. Suffice it to say that if you look closely at the business of the The Bulwark you will notice that we are designed—from tip to tail—to resist authoritarian pressure.
Again: This did not happen by chance. We built this place in the shadow of the first Trump administration and we knew what we were doing.
What I want to hammer home for you is something I believe in my bones:
Community is the only way to resist fascism.
This maxim means different things in different contexts. In the context of media it means:
In an autocratic age, it is not enough to be a consumer of media. You must be a stakeholder in it.
You must support the institutions you want to exist in the world. You must help build those institutions. And then you must participate in their defense.
All of which is why we started The Bulwark.
It’s also why I subscribe to a few dozen publications—from the Atlantic, to the New Yorker, to Plough. From Heather Cox Richardson, to Judd Legum, to the UnPopulist.
And it’s why I still subscribe to the Washington Post. I want the Post to be as financially strong as possible so that some day—hopefully soon—it won’t have to rely on Jeff Bezos. Your mileage may vary. But to my mind, making the Post more reliant on its billionaire underwriter only deepens the problem.
Obviously, not everyone has the time or money to support dozens of publications. I work in this space, which is how I justify it to myself. We all have to prioritize as best we can.
So if you decided to cancel your WaPo subscription so that you could support, say, Arc Digital, I understand that.
But my larger point remains: We no longer have the luxury to be passive consumers of media. We have to support the media institutions that we want to exist in the world.
In an autocratic age, everyday acts of civic responsibility—like reading the newspaper or voting—take on outsized importance and require commitment, intentionality, and courage.
And the best way to foster those virtues is in community with others who remain committed to the liberal project.
If you want to join us here at The Bulwark, I hope you do. We only exist because of the support of our members.
But also: No true community should be gated only for those with the ability to pay. If you want to be part of The Bulwark but can’t swing it financially, just hit reply to this email and we’ll work something out. Everyone who wants to belong to this community, can. (And a big thanks to our founding members for making this policy possible.)
3. Popular Interest
also understands that having oligarchs own important media outlets as a hobby is problematic:The Washington Post, unlike Amazon and Blue Origin, has been a money loser for Bezos, reportedly running a deficit of $100 million last year. More importantly, Bezos believes that former President Trump’s hostility toward the Washington Post, which produced critical coverage of Trump’s presidency, cost his companies billions in government contracts. In 2019, Amazon sued the federal government for awarding a $10 billion cloud-computing contract to Microsoft, alleging that Amazon lost out on the contract based on Bezos’ ownership of the Washington Post. . . .
In a few months, it is possible that Trump will be president again. This time, Bezos faces an even more acute threat to his business interests. Elon Musk, who owns Blue Origin’s chief rival SpaceX, has aligned himself closely with Trump, spending tens of millions in support of Trump’s campaign and making appearances in swing states on Trump’s behalf. . . .
Robert Kagan, who worked at the Washington Post for two decades and resigned immediately following Lewis’ announcement, said the meeting was evidence of a quid pro quo. “Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do, and then met with the Blue Origin people,” Kagan told The Daily Beast. “Which tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo.”
According to CNN, “Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also recently reached out to check in” with Trump.
The apparent capitulation to Trump illustrates the danger of billionaires scooping up major media organizations as a side hustle. For nearly everyone, the price Bezos paid for the Washington Post is an unfathomable amount of money. For Bezos, it’s less than half the $575 million he paid for his new 417-foot superyacht, Koru, and its 246-foot support yacht, Abeona, which has a helipad, accommodations for staff, and storage for smaller boats and jet skis.
Bezos did not get to the point where he could afford such yachts through his dedication to journalistic integrity. He became the second-wealthiest person in the world by prioritizing the bottom line. And it appears that continues to be his priority. . . .
Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the LA Times, also abruptly demanded his publication stay neutral in the presidential election. Soon-Shiong bought the paper for $500 million in 2018.
Soon-Shiong is a healthcare and biotech entrepreneur whose companies rely on the federal government. His companies regularly seek FDA approval for new drugs, vaccines and therapies and federal funding for research.
The editorial board had planned to endorse Kamala Harris and publish a series of columns tentatively titled “The Case Against Trump.” But in a post on X, Soon-Shiong said he offered the LA Times editorial board “the opportunity to draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation.” Soon-Shiong said that “[i]nstead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.”
Soon-Shiong did not explain why he did not demand a similar approach for U.S. House and Senate races, state ballot initiatives, and many other contests facing California voters. Beginning in September, the LA Times has endorsed in dozens of races up and down the ballot.
Read the whole thing. Like the LA Times, the Washington Post hasn’t sworn off endorsements entirely: They’ve made three since late September in Senate and House races.
There’s danger in relying solely on your subscribers, too. The risk is that a publication can be captured by its audience and forced to never tell readers things they don’t want to hear.
I worry about that for The Bulwark, too. This is why you will occasionally see me in the comments suggesting to a subscriber that they cancel their subscriptions if it appears that the person only wants to hear cheerleading or happy talk.
The best way to avoid audience capture is to actively (and frequently) level-set expectations.
JVL’s rant at the end of YouTube stream yesterday was epic. He boils all the chum in our media ecosystem down to the most basic components.
1. If Trump wins it won’t be because “the people” didn’t know what they were voting for but because they did know and wanted it.
2. The system to choose the president is now, blatantly, anti-majoritarian now. It isn’t just once in a 100 year phenomenon but it is now a “feature” (bug) of the system.
3. We aren’t on the verge of authoritarianism, we were walking down the ramp to more authoritarianism.
4. Here is the most important point for center right people like me (also to center left): the Biden presidency was an absolute failure. It isn’t a failure because of Biden but because of us, the voters. I don’t want to argue about the actual facts of the Biden presidency (in my mind he has been the best president of my lifetime), but the THEORY of his presidency. I thought and I think the Biden admin thought, that if they went back to “normal” and Biden stayed out of the culture wars he could bring back sanity. By being the opposite of Trump he could show the voters that you can have a government that “mostly” worked. He, and I were wrong.
5. The system is going to need radical change. This is what is going to be tough for people like me who want to resist it but it is needed and it was needed yesterday.
So, my hope was that today you'd talk about the Klan rally yesterday, and why our journalists predictably failed to cover it appropriately in many cases (looking at you, USA today). And more to the point, the fact that it's probably going to be the reason that Harris wins by a comfortable margin. There's a lot of chatter in spaces that there wasn't before that I'm picking up. And I also think that we need to stop talking about 'fascism' and 'nazism' not because it's wrong but because A. for better or worse, nazis to Americans feel like distant and foreign concepts and B. it doesn't really fit what that rally was. American style fascism is something we've had for a while: the Klan.
I wrote about this in my own newsletter after watching, but I'll put the tldr here: Nazis were in many ways uniquely German. You'd have never seen Hulk Hogan and Dr. Phil and standup comics at a nazi rally, because they were all about presenting themselves as a well shined boot. The Klan are equal parts absurd and terrifying; they both burn crosses and wear costumes and also call themselves 'grand wizards' while being openly hateful. But it's very American; bombast and absurdity and near parody.
I've driven through the south and seen Klan rallies. That was a Klan rally, all it was missing was it also being a barbecue cookout. And Americans have a long history with the Klan; from the government passing a law against them to Superman fighting them. Trump gets a pass because he's absurdist; when he said 'they're eating the cats' the chatter was mostly amusement, not seriousness. Boy, I've seen so much talk about the 'Puerto Rico is a trash dump' and 'black people carve watermelons' in circles that two days ago were 'undecided' about which was worse.
That's community. That's information sharing. And that's important to resist American style fascism, you're right. So let's talk about the WaPo.
Let's begin with this: no institution has a right to exist indefinitely. The WaPo is not some church or pillar of humanity like the Pyramids of Giza that must be protected at all costs. When you believe that 'we need institutional journalism like this' you give authoritarians power. Why? Because it means that you're still giving them money that they will then use to keep being authoritarians.
The other, more practical argument is this: we talk about the marketplace of ideas. For that to be true, people must be willing to make value judgements about where they spend their money. Many would not say 'sure Chik-Fil-A's owners are bigots, but you HAVE to support them because of the poor workers!' Similarly, 'we have to support the WaPo because the poor journalists' is wrong. It's bleeds into the 'can I be a good liberal, I work at Lockheed Martin' argument.
If we suppose that the WaPo has a 'duty' to provide value to its readers, then what it has revealed is that A. it is not fulfilling this duty and thus B. the reporters working for them are not fulfilling this duty, so C. they should not be given money.
The second that Bezos quashed the endorsement, the situation changed. Now we must ask 'what other stories would he quash, or has quashed?' And if you work for that company, you have to ask, 'am I comfortable supporting and working for an institution whose journalistic integrity is secondary to what the owner desires?' You might do good work, you might be a good person, but if you say 'I am willing to work here and support this even though I know I will be edited...'
Well, a few days ago you talked about how we have to ask whether the editor at Pravda has any culpability or responsibility for being the editor there and what it stands for. The answer is yes. You might not personally support fascism or oligarchy, but if you work for them, you are in fact culpable in proping them up.
Institutions that cannot fail, that are seen as 'too big to fail' become a danger to everyone. That's as true for journalism as it is for banks.
If people believe 'I cannot trust the WaPo' then they should not give money to the WaPo. The journalists there are no more deserving or entitled to our money than Newsmax journalists are. We are not required to give money to National Review to save conservative journalism. That's just enabling the bad behavior.
At some point, one of three things will happen: either A. they will change course or B. they will collapse or C. They will become National Review/Fox News. But regardless, they are not entitled to money when they provide bad reporting and they do not satisfy their customers.
And, indeed, if for example the editors at the Bulwark crushed a story because it made one of them look bad, I would indeed cancel my subscription. Because the question is about journalistic integrity; a reader should know that a supposed news org is actually being honest, especially if they're so haughty that they print 'democracy dies in darkness' on their front page.
No, Democracy dies in full view while Bezos overrules his employees so he can get contracts with Trump. He caved, so if the WaPo dies, it dies. Others can and should overtake it. We should not be propping up a zombie institution on the basis that it used to be good anymore than we should throw money at McDonalds because people might not want to eat their burgers due to the disease outbreak.
We burn more coal to keep coal miners employed. We shouldn't be rewarding Bezos' behavior. The journalists who do not resign, I'll consider suspect, simply because it means that Bezos acting isn't a dealbreaker for them, and that they would accept him doing this for their stories. Either way, it can't be trusted any more than we'd trust Fox News, because now the WaPo is no different than Fox, in that Murdoch can and does decide what they run.
The reason why there is such blowback is that legacy journalism takes this haughty attitude that they can do anything and that they can't be replaced, or shouldn't be. They're the 'fourth estate.' No, you're a business. If you can't prove you're not catering to a billionaire who caters to a fascist, why should we take your words about democracy seriously? And if you keep working for them, why should we assume you're not willing to bend your own morals and standards?
Again, you might be an okay person who works for Lockheed Martin or Marlboro. But that also means that their reputations aren't enough to dissuade you from taking their money. That should have consequences.
No institution should be too important or too big to fail, period.