CSotD: Damage Control

Jack Ohman (Tribune) had this cartoon up before Jeff Bezos broke a pair of rules:

1. Never miss a good chance to shut up.
2. If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

Bezos has written a too-long piece for his newspaper explaining why he decided not to publish a presidential endorsement but not explaining why they earlier published congressional endorsements or why he waited until eleven days before the election to make the decision.

He didn’t say anything that undercuts Ohman’s cartoon.

I toured the old Post building in the early 90s, and in a conference room, they had a wall filled with various quotes about the Post.

I said to myself, “I’ll bet they don’t have the one I’m thinking of” but, by golly, they did:

“Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published.” — John Mitchell

Nobody else ever referred to her as “Katie” as far as I know, but she was justifiably proud of standing up to an attorney general who betrayed the public’s confidence and who subsequently went to prison for his criminal activities, and her staff was proud of her for allowing them to cover the Watergate scandal and publish the Pentagon Papers.

Bezos, however, writes that nobody trusts the press anymore and so something something something.

I ran out of caring before he ran out of words, because I remember when people did trust the press, and I remember that in those days, it was John Mitchell and the rest of the Nixon crooks who kept saying nobody trusts the press.

There were rightwingers who turned Gordon Liddy into a hero for his role in attempting to pervert the 1972 elections, and Oliver North for his part in Reagan’s Iran-Contra arms deal.

But that wasn’t the fault of the Washington Post or Katherine Graham.

It’s not just Bezos or LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. My last decade working was a remote gig editing a weekly kid-written section for the Denver Post.

This is a photo of their staff after the paper was sold to Alden Global Capital, with blanks where five years earlier there had been reporters, editors and photographers. It was shot in the lobby of their office downtown, but by the time I retired, that building had been sold and the reduced news staff was working at the print plant on the edge of the city.

The photo ran with an editorial pleading for Alden not to make further cuts, but, as Sal Tessio told Tom Hagen, “It was only business.” More cuts followed and I was happy to leave the sinking ship when my boss and I retired.

Earlier, I’d worked for a paper that was sold to Lee Enterprises, another vulture capitalist, and the publisher there resigned rather than make the cuts the new owners demanded. So they slotted in someone who would, and I began shopping my resume around.

A few months after I escaped, they fired my boss, who was more relieved than dismayed to be gone.

Here’s the odd thing about working for newspapers: It’s not at all rude, when you run into an old colleague, to ask “So, are you still working?” It’s a pretty sure way, however, to hear some horror stories.

The latest wrinkle in the Washington Post saga is that 200,000 people — about eight percent of the paper’s subscribers — have canceled because of Bezos’s decision.

Meanwhile, out at the Denver Post, a group of their laid-off journalists banded together and formed an on-line paper, the Colorado Sun, which has won awards for its service to the Denver region.

There can be life after layoffs.

Mike Luckovich accuses Trump and Vance of creating the darkness in which democracy will die, and it seems apparent that the oligarchs fear the revenge of Trump’s administration should he regain power.

But I find it hard to blame Trump for the results of a system in which he was able to gain power in the first place. My hometown iron mine was closed down by a vulture capitalist in 1978, when Donald Trump was just getting his hands into real estate development and well before he became a media star.

He didn’t create the system; the system created him.

If the oligarchs are afraid of Donald Trump, maybe they should do something, but they’d have to step outside the system to do that and I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

Bill Bramhall depicts Kamala Harris attempting to slam the door on Trump and the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party, and we can hope the horrors of the Madison Square Garden rally have motivated voters to join the effort.

As Matt Wuerker (Politico) puts it, that bizarre white supremacy rally should have removed the masks from Trump and the hatemongers who proclaimed their toxic views of women and minorities.

It should have shocked people into turning out for the vote.

Then again, Joel Pett (Tribune) insists, there are plenty of people defending what they heard and saw, determined to keep faith with the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party and confident that the leopards will not eat their faces.

And it’s important to note that, back when Gordon Liddy was becoming a hero and when people were saying Nixon should have destroyed the tapes and that Watergate was simply “a third-rate burglary,” there was no major network spreading those stories and denying what had happened.

Nor are Fox and its knock-off imitators working alone. Peter Schrank suggests that Putin is hoping to have a cooperative stooge in the White House but not sure, despite his floods of misinformation on social networks, that Americans will be convinced to put Trump back in power.

And while True Believers reject the findings of Russian involvement in 2016’s election, there have been revelations about the current efforts, for anyone willing to listen.

Is anyone willing to listen?

Dave Whamond hopes the echoes of Nazi Germany will awaken those who took up arms in those days, but how many of them are left? My father, a WWII veteran, died 35 years ago. My mother, who was nine years old when Hitler came to power, just turned 100.

Their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to have to step up.

It’s their time. It’s their country.