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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2171 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 27, 2024

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The non endorsements from the newspaper - is it only fear from Trump retaliation or something is changing and people are realizing that they should be less political?

I don’t think they fear Trump. I don’t see him deciding that LA Times needs to be burned down because they ran an editorial. I think it might well be that they want to be less political. The pressure on everyone in media to get in lockstep is very strong, and I think the owners are trying to ratchet things down a bit.

I couldn't believe the audacity of employees wanting to use their employer's profit making organisation for their own political ends. But I guess entryism has been around for a while now so I shouldn't be surprised.

Seriously though, you're trying to use your boss's business to promote politics against his interests? What did you think was going to happen?

I couldn't believe the audacity of employees wanting to use their employer's profit making organisation for their own political ends

Very few of the employees would have seen it like that. The thought process is roughly as follows:

A lot of the time in vocational jobs like newspapers, publishing, research etc., the boss feels like just another irritating stakeholder that you have to satisfy. At worst, a wrecker that you have to sabotage. I imagine that goes double for a legacy, non-founder company.

To put it another way, the LA Times isn’t their employer’s business. He’s just paying for it, often with other people’s money. The employees are the ones who build it and sustain it, so by rights it belongs to them. The owner is really just a sponsor.

That doesn’t mean you can get away with anything you like - the law and the board have the whip hand - but the idea that you owe fealty to whichever bozo bought the paper wouldn’t compute at all.

Maybe they realized there's a real chance of Harris losing, and being on the losing side is not super fun. "We are neutral objective observers and we criticize Trump because he's bad" is a stronger position than "we were on the losing side and now we're sore so we'll dump on Trump no matter what", and that's the position they are looking to occupy.

USA today joins the festivities: https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-usa-today-declines-to-endorse-kamala-for-president-after-backing-biden-in-2020

The USA endorsed Biden in 2020, but other than that has generally had a policy of no endorsements.

Kamala’s tax plan is just uniquely threatening to the sorts of people who own newspapers, possibly.

It's very, very unlikely that this is motivated by a desire to influence the outcome of the election, because it's so obviously and wildly implausible that it would actually do so. Nobody who reads the Washington Post or LA Times editorial page is going to change his vote based on an explicit endorsement or lack thereof from one of these papers. They've been implicitly endorsing Harris since Biden dropped out, and implicitly endorsing anyone-but-Trump for eight years. Anyone who's receptive to the message already got it.

An official endorsement from either of these papers would be purely symbolic.

Fear of Trump retaliation.

In Jeff Bezos' case, he doesn't want his most provocative asset, The Washington Post, making public endorsements that could prevent his more important venture, Blue Origin, from obtaining lucrative government contracts if Trump is elected. Bezos and Blue Origins are still up a creek without a paddle because Trump values loyalty, and Musk, who has big plans for SpaceX, has proven to be a worthy subject.

Maybe the newspapers are trying to cause some of their staff to quit because the newspaper wants to reduce staffing and/or get rid of disagreeable staff.

It would be similar to how some companies use return to office policies to get a portion of their employees to quit. When an employee quits they don't get severance or unemployment. Causing an employee to quit, instead of firing them, saves the company money.

Endorsements from newspapers are probably also increasingly irrelevant to persuadable voters so the choices are weighted differently.

If it was worth a two percentage point bump towards Kamala on the Nate Silver model, but if Trump wins there's a strong chance of retaliation and/or it causes a loss of conservative subscribers, that's one thing and I think the papers would have endorsed under those circumstances.

In reality, virtually no one is persuaded by a newspaper endorsement. The readers are mostly all liberals already, and any conservatives left won't be persuaded by the editorial board, but they might finally be driven away by it. If anything, the strategic move would be to not openly endorse, to try to keep as many conservatives inside the audience as possible, where they'll be exposed to liberal (or to the true believers in the newspaper "truthful") reporting. There's no or negative actual value in the endorsement.

Trump retaliation? Respectfully, that doesn't sound realistic. He didn't retaliate in 2017.

And it's probably not for business reasons either. Regardless of who the papers endorse or don't endorse they will continue their slide into irrelevancy. If all they wanted was money, it's a better business model to be explicitly left wing and then solicit donations like the Guardian.

The simplest explanation is that the owners want Trump to win. Getting the left-wing staff to endorse Trump is a bridge too far so they go with no endorsement.

He didn't retaliate in 2017.

He has more influence now than in 2017.

More influence how? If he wins, the swamp will kick into #resistance mode the next day after his win is announced. What exactly will he be able to do more than he was able to do in 2017 and why?

I agree. A lot of rich and powerful people realize that Trump is actually good for business because he can be easily persuaded by charismatic, successful, smart people who know how to flatter his ego and who treat him either as an equal or as a superior.

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