When I married in 1973, my wife and I put everything we owned into our car and drove to Boston to attend graduate school. Even before we found a place to live, we spent every moment we could watching the Senate Watergate hearings. It was mesmerizing. However, it was the Washington Post that captured my imagination. The example set in the paper has stayed with me my whole life.
I was inspired by the courage of reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Still, I understood even then that the whole paper stood firm against President Richard Nixon’s threats as the story slowly developed. As a young political scientist, I could see the threat that Nixon posed. Watergate was just the tip of the iceberg.
And he knew the independent press threatened all he wished to accomplish. The Post stood in his way with its straightforward, honest reporting and tough editorials. It would not surrender.
I am (much) older now, retired from years of teaching political science. I have always held the story of the Post close to my heart. And when Donald Trump made it clear during his 2024 campaign that his political ambitions depended on an all-out assault on facts, that he planned to replace facts with personal fantasies to undermine the Constitution and the rule of law, I was grateful to have the Post by my side.
And so I was devastated when I learned that Jeff Bezos had made a last-minute decision to forbid the paper’s editorial page from endorsing Kamala Harris. I never thought highly of Harris, and I had deep disagreements with many of her policy positions. However, Bezos’ decision to back down just before the election was clearly designed to avoid the wrath of Trump, despite Bezos’ protestations to the contrary.
It was cowardly. Bullies like Trump are always emboldened by cowardice. From Bezos’ decision, Trump will have learned only one lesson: the independent press can be cowed. And this puts all newspapers at risk.
Many writers and editors at the paper felt betrayed. One called it a “stab in the back.” Others said it was a sign that democracy was dying. Some resigned. And many subscribers canceled their subscriptions. They, like me, felt betrayed.
Like many others, I thought of canceling my subscription. If I were to contribute to the demise of the Washington Post, what would come next? Newspapers nationwide are dying or being replaced with bland shadows of what newspapers should be. I hope it will find its way through this disaster and return from the brink. But this is not really about the Washington Post. It is about the survival of an independent press itself.
My heart is broken. More than that, I am frightened of what Bezos’ decision could mean for other papers. Trump has already made it clear that the independent press is his enemy. He calls it the enemy of the people, but he really means that his success depends upon the delegitimization of facts and objective reality.
And his success in pressuring newspapers, journalists and columnists to stand down will encourage him to go further. As dangerous as our times are, this has made them more dangerous.
Nixon threatened the republic, but he was not as radical as Trump. Nixon was not bold enough to dismiss facts, so he defended himself by trying to hide the facts and keep the tapes he had made of conversations in the Oval Office from being released. He resigned when the truth came out, knowing that facts also mattered to Congress.
Those days seem quaint today. Trump has spent years preparing for his second term of office and demanding that all who follow him embrace his radical rejection of facts. The litmus test for Republicans today is denying the results of the 2020 election and denying that the January 6th assault on the Capitol was an illegal attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Everything else flows from that.
So the independent press, with its flaws (and there are many), matters more than ever before. We need to speak out and challenge the press when we feel it has fallen short of doing its job. It often does. We must read critically and never depend upon just one source for our facts. However, if we lose the independent press, the country’s soul will be lost with it.