The Real Scandal of Our Media Tycoons
They’re rich, powerful, and increasingly antagonistic to the journalism they fund.
Quote of the year so far, from Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago yesterday: “In the first term, everyone was fighting me. This time, everybody wants to be my friend.”
Amazing how many friends you can make with just a few well-chosen threats of vengeance against your remaining enemies! In related news, we’re announcing today that we’re giving Morning Shots a bit of a rebrand. Let us know what you think of our new logo:
Happy Tuesday.
It’s the Silent Surrenders That Should Scare You
by Andrew Egger
It’s no surprise media owners are rushing to make good with Donald Trump; they know he’s eager to hit them where it hurts. Trump hasn’t just vowed to punish media orgs that displease him1, he’s also made it clear that owning such institutions is enough to earn a mogul his economic and political enmity.
If you’re a newspaper owner or a corporation with a cable channel in your portfolio, the cost of subsidizing media that tells the truth about Trump has been jacked up tremendously. Say goodbye to that tariff waiver; good luck with that attempted merger.
Before Trump, owning a media outlet was often considered a luxury piece for the mega-rich. You made your money in tech or healthcare or finance—the major newspaper or TV network was the gaudy bauble you picked up on the side, a conspicuous way to be seen as “giving back.” Now, though, you’re realizing the president-elect is going to make your real job way harder because your bauble really pisses him off. It’s a lot more than you bargained for when you bought it.
Some owners are currying favor more blunderously than others. Over at the Los Angeles Times, owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s meddling with the paper’s editorial coverage is getting more overbearing by the day. As Oliver Darcy of Status News reports, Times opinion staffers are now accusing Soon-Shiong of prohibiting editorials criticizing Trump on any issue unless they are paired with another piece representing the “opposing view.” He is also reportedly requiring the text of every editorial to be emailed to him in advance.
This sort of thing sucks—especially for the good people who work at the LA Times—but it’s not apocalyptic. Today’s opinion journalism is a broadly distributed property; if nothing else, humble little Substack properties like ours [Editor’s note: SUBSCRIBE, YOU FOOLS], to say nothing of America’s federated legions of bloggers and posters, will keep to the gritted-teeth task of talking through the actual costs and consequences of Donald Trump’s actions.
The more worrisome costs of media-mogul quiescence to Trump aren’t the messy public fights that spill out between owners and the takesters they employ. They’re the quiet decisions of owners who sit down to look at the future of their paper and think: Is it really in my interest to beef up my news teams right now? Why chase scoops about the new administration when they might put a target on my back?
Think back, for a second, to this moment in 2016, when there was an immense sense of mission and purpose in the news industry. Accountability for an incoming Trump administration was not just a moral imperative, it was a business opportunity. News outlets saw an influx of readers and media moguls envisioned great ROIs on buffing up their operations.
None of that is happening now. We’re sputtering out 2024 at the end of the grisliest two-year run for media layoffs in a decade. Owners are skittish about drawing Trump’s eye. While not everyone is taking aggressive steps à la Soon-Shiong, virtually all of them seem uninterested in investing their prodigious wealth into expanding their journalistic footprint.
Instead, they seem inclined to cut, slash, and let their unprofitable newsrooms continue to wither into inoffensive obscurity. The civic purpose that they claimed to possess when they purchased their outlets has seemingly vanished.
This, more than handcuffed editorial boards, is what should really alarm us. Your favorite substacker can turn an argument as well as a credentialed editorializer. But when it comes to holding power to account and shining the disinfectant of sunlight around, nothing beats the newsgathering power of a big newsroom. The danger isn’t that this or that paper won’t react with sufficient scandal to the latest Trump outrage. It’s that there won’t be anybody around to discover the outrage happened at all.
Trump Sues Selzer
by William Kristol
When Donald Trump said yesterday at his Mar-a-Lago press conference that he was planning to sue pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register for their poll the weekend before the election showing Kamala Harris winning Iowa, I didn’t take him seriously. Yes, ABC’s decision to capitulate and settle a $15 million defamation suit with Trump had opened the floodgates—but surely this was a bridge too far. Surely this would be another case of Trump threatening or promising to do something but ultimately not carrying through on it.
I assumed this was just a way for Trump to revel in his legal victory over ABC, to revel in his election victory yet again, to revel in his ability to bully and threaten critics, to revel in his willingness to push the boundaries of the law and of common sense. This is just the way Trump revels, I figured. For others, the revels of Christmas involve singing carols. For him, it is the good cheer of threatening lawsuits.
So I didn’t believe Trump would actually file this ridiculous lawsuit. Even for him, this was a bridge too far.
I was wrong.
Last night, Trump’s lawyers filed suit in Polk County, Iowa, under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Ac. They did so against Selzer, the Des Moines Register, and the parent company of the Register, Gannett. The suit seeks “accountability for brazen election interference,” alleging that “contrary to reality and defying credulity,” Selzer’s report of a three-point lead for Harris in “deep-red Iowa was not reality, it was election-interfering fiction.” The poll “was no ‘miss’ but rather an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election” by helping Democrats create “a narrative of inevitability.”
(I’ll spare you much additional verbiage in the filing, e.g., that “The November 5 election was a monumental victory for President Trump in both the Electoral College and the Popular Vote, an overwhelming mandate for his America First principles, and the consignment of the radical socialist agenda to the dustbin of history.”)
Per Trump’s theory, publishing a poll that turned out to be a bad forecast of the vote was a violation of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act because the “unfair act or practice” of publishing the poll “caused substantial, unavoidable injury to consumers” and to Trump. So Trump is demanding actual damages (compensation for the alleged extra money his campaign spent in Iowa in the final three days of the race), statutory damages three times the actual damages, an order enjoining defendants’ “ongoing deceptive and misleading acts and practices” and the like.
It’s far-fetched, to say the least.
But isn’t that the point? For one thing, Viktor Orbán filed civil lawsuits in Hungary against political opponents that were far beyond the norms at the time. They eventually had their effect.
More fundamentally, bending the law—and doing so visibly and publicly, so citizens learn to have contempt for the rule of law—is very much part of the authoritarian playbook. Authoritarians need to undermine the idea of predictable law. They need to show they don’t need to abide by practices and norms that have previously held in politics or society.
Trump is of the buffoonish species of the genus authoritarian, so one’s often inclined not to take the extent of his authoritarian ambitions seriously. And it’s true that he may not have fully worked out what he’s doing. He seems to have more the cunning instinct of the bully than the planned calculation of the despot.
But you could say this about Trump and authoritarianism: He gets it. He gets the importance of intimidation. He gets the need to push political behavior ever further beyond what was thought acceptable. He gets the need to send the message that if you get in his way—even if you publish an unfavorable poll—he’lI come after you. He gets the importance of shameless lying and of undermining the very idea of objective truth.
I assume Trump will lose his lawsuit in Iowa. I wish we could be as confident he’ll lose his war against America.
HIGHLY REASSURING: You’d rather live in times when incoming presidents weren’t obliged to note that, unlike the guy they’re deputizing to run the nation’s public health, they’re a “big believer” in the polio vaccine. “I saw what happened with polio,” Donald Trump said at his freewheeling press conference yesterday, noting that some of his friends are “still not in such good shape because of it.”
But Trump also flirted with the debunked theory that childhood vaccines are causing a bump in autism diagnoses, saying that “right now you have some very brilliant people looking at it.” In fact, very brilliant people have looked at it. And looked at it. And looked at it. And looked at it. And . . . you get the point. The vaccines are safe.
Trump went on to suggest he’s against school vaccine requirements, which currently require at least some vaccines in every state. Good times.
ANOTHER SCHOOL SHOOTING: Three people are dead and six wounded after a teenage student carried out a school shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin yesterday. Police responded to a 911 call placed by a 2nd grader—yes, a 2nd grader—and arrived within minutes. The shooter, a 15-year-old girl, later died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. Two students are still in critical condition, police said.
President Joe Biden called the shooting “shocking and unconscionable” in a statement, saying that “it is unacceptable that we are unable to protect our children from this scourge of gun violence.”
Cheap Shots
See, for instance, his truly insane announcement yesterday that he’s suing pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register—about which more below.
Given Trump's theory of fraud in Iowa, maybe Springfield, Ohio should sue him for fraudulently claiming Haitians in the town were eating pets, to the detriment of the city's economy. Maybe each and every one of us should sue him for claiming that he had nothing to do with Project 25.
Hey, we might be slowly destroying all the guardrails that help protect democracy and enabling delusional conspiracy theorists, but at least those two trans prisoners per year won’t be getting gender affirming care! Really dodged a bullet on that one!