• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, October 31, 2024

I am not proud of how some of those in the tech industry are handling this election. So many of them are blowing with the wind (and their wallets) in how they, their platforms and their networks are treating the presidential candidates. Fortunately, folks like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Andreessen are not people to whom I look to for moral clarity.

To be clear, it’s not about politics. It’s about character.

I know politics. I grew up in it. My father was a twice-elected district attorney of Clearfield County, a small, rural county in the mountains of western Pennsylvania. He ran statewide for an appellate court seat twice, winning in the Republican primary each time, but losing in the general election, an amazing experience for him and the entire family. I managed the second campaign and set the strategy for the first, so a big chunk of those losses are on me.

I am used to people who disagree on politics. My paternal grandmother was a Presbyterian Republican while my paternal grandfather was an Irish Catholic New Deal Democrat. Neither of them ever missed voting in an election, since they saw part of their purpose in life to cancel out the vote of the other.

It is no accident that seven of the ten most valuable companies in the world by market capitalization are American tech companies: 1. Apple; 2. NVIDIA; 3. Microsoft; 4. Alphabet (Google); 5. Amazon; 7. Meta; and 10. Broadcom.

There is no country in the world that comes close to providing the key elements of entrepreneurial success as the U.S. does: free and open society, world-leading research universities, plentiful capital, fluid capital markets, light government regulation, low tax rates, super strong rule of law, low trade barriers, infectious entrepreneurial culture and massive, scaled markets.

Which brings me to Jeff Bezos, the founder and controlling shareholder of Amazon and Blue Origin and the owner of The Washington Post, who decided less than two weeks before the election to end the newspaper’s long practice of endorsing a candidate. After, of course, the editorial staff had already met, had written an endorsement of Kamala Harris and were about to publish it. Also, it was the day after the CEO of space launch company (and benefactor of government contracts) Blue Origin met with Donald Trump.

As they say, if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. It’s clear that Jeff Bezos can’t take the heat that being a newspaper publisher brings.

It’s not easy being a newspaper publisher. I spent a number of years in the business as a newspaper media lawyer, dealing with issues like pre-publication libel reviews, wiretaps, advertising laws, you name it. The owner of the paper is always hated by some parts of her readership, many of the politicians they cover, and lots and lots of the businesses in their circulation territory.

We may not look to tech oligarchs for moral clarity, but we do look to institutions like The Washington Post for it.

Newspaper ownership is not for the faint of heart. Bezos’s failure to endorse a candidate normalizes Trump and his actions and undermines the newspaper’s stories on them. Watergate legends Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote a few days ago that the decision ignored “The Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.” Broadcast legend Dan Rather said simply, "Jeff Bezos is wrong."

I am one of the 250,000 who canceled their Washington Post subscription over these past few days. Unfortunately, the subscriber loss will hurt the publication’s ability to support its amazing reporting, which only hurts its ability to be an effective member of the Fourth Estate and hold our politicians accountable

What is the answer? To me, it is clear: Jeff Bezos, you are not the right owner of The Washington Post. Please sell it now.