It broke my heart this week to cancel my subscription to The Washington Post. I watch All The President’s Men every year. Once, while an NYU grad student in the 80s, I approached Carl Bernstein in an East Village pharmacy and asked if I could take him to lunch. (Very kindly, he suggested I call his agent.) Today, there are opinion writers at The Post whom I find it hard to imagine not communing with every day: Catherine Rampell, Ruth Marcus, Eugene Robinson, George F. Will, Dr. Leana Wen.
So why’d I do it? Because of a Jeff Bezos missive announcing a major change in direction in the paper’s opinion pages. “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” he announced. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others … I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention and prosperity.”
Like Bezos, I am of America and for America. So let’s make no mistake: This message does more than flirt with anti-American values. If I have a core religion, it’s the Enlightenment, and somewhere Immanuel Kant and other great thinkers who introduced us to democratic values like free and robust speech, scientific inquiry, dissent, and the marketplace of ideas, are gyrating in their graves.
“If I had to choose between a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” — Thomas Jefferson
Bezos would be right to bemoan liberal bias in the press and to seek ideological give and take. (Although David Shipley, the opinion page editor who promptly resigned in response to Bezos’ mandate, has done a good job of that, prominently including the perspectives of smart conservatives like Will and Marc A. Thiessen.) But that’s not what he’s done. He’s limited discourse when democracy is messier than it’s been in more than a century, which requires more argument, not less.
Seems like Bezos has actually thrown in the towel on core American values — kowtowing instead to Trump’s autocratic instinct to wage war on anything that doesn’t align with Dear Leader’s imagined reality. You’ve seen it in bits and pieces, right? The bullying of the AP for declining to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, now okayed by a federal judge (My vote: Drop the pretense and highlight the absurdity by referring to it as the Gulf of Trump); the FCC investigating NPR for bias; the BS charge that Politico was on Biden’s payroll. There’s a coordinated campaign going on, and there are a whole lot of media outlets cowering right now, like ABC News and 60 Minutes. Just read this harrowing New York magazine piece inside the war being waged by Trump’s minions on the free press, and you tell me we’re not in crisis.
Enlightenment values know no party
To be clear, this is not a left or right issue. Here at The Citizen, we’re intensely nonpartisan and hyperlocal, as we’ll continue to be. But attacks on Enlightenment values know no borders, and our national affairs are currently shrouded by the fog of culture war. So join me in (regrettably) saying no to Bezos’ complicity, and then let’s talk about how we can get a little clarity these days.
First, here’s how to cancel your Post digital subscription, as I did. (If you purchased your subscription through iTunes, go here, or for Amazon follow this link.) In place of The Post, in addition to becoming a member of The Citizen, I recommend you subscribe to The Philadelphia Inquirer or become a WHYY member. At times, I’ve been critical of both, often for their respective liberal biases. (How in the world The Inquirer endorsed all Democrats last November — forsaking moderate Republicans like Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, the most bipartisan member of Congress, is beyond me.) But at least there are no apparent dictates coming from on high to, in effect, only push certain political values without rebuttal — even if they’re popular.
But let’s go further. The age of the editorial gatekeeper is over. You are your own editor these days. So each week from now on we’re going to provide you the must-read or must-see picks, without regard to ideology, that we think are worthy of your attention in an effort to get a handle on just what’s really happening in national affairs. And we’ll link you to sites like NewsGuard’s Reality Check newsletter or Tangle News that can help you make sense of all the information and disinformation coming your way.
Meantime, here are my recommendations, today:
- Over at Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, check out Ruy Texeira’s piece on the folly of Trump and Musk’s “move fast and break things” approach, headlined Is This What America Voted For? The Early Polling Suggests Trump is Going Too Far, Too Fast.
- At City Journal, there is a frightful account of how an elementary school teacher in Olympia, Washington, conspired with a 10-year-old student’s gender transition — keeping it a secret from the student’s parents. That was in keeping with the District’s explicit secrecy policy — one of 1,000 in school districts nationwide. Read “We Thought She Was a Great Teacher”: How a Washington public school’s transgender secrecy policies drove an immigrant family out of the country here.
- Over at our old friend The Washington Post, Marc A. Thiessen has a unique take on Trump’s minerals deal with Zelensky: Trump Just Dealt Russia a Devastating Blow: A deal for Ukraine’s minerals could effectively end the war.
- Finally, here’s The Atlantic’s Katherine Wu’s devastating report on how Trump officials are perilously gutting the National Institutes of Health: Inside the Collapse at the NIH: Administration officials pressured the NIH to avoid clear advice from the agency’s own lawyers to restart grant funding now.
One closing reminder. About 249 years ago, a 33-year-old with a penchant for powdered wigs and all sorts of human foibles toiled away in a basement at 7th and Market Street and came up with a draft that would become the Declaration of Independence. It’s worth remembering what Thomas Jefferson used to say, like “If I had to choose between a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Or, my favorite: “There are rights which it is useless to surrender to the government, and which yet, governments have always been fond to invade. These are the rights of thinking and publishing our thoughts by speaking or writing.”
Here’s to keeping that Jeffersonian lesson alive in the birthplace of American democracy.
