Why Canceling Subscriptions to Punish Billionaire Newspaper Owners Is a Bad Idea–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Oct. 28, 2024

Indy Digest: Oct. 28, 2024

Donald Trump held a big rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City yesterday. Here’s how Time magazine explained the event, in a piece headlined “Trump Rally at Madison Square Garden Marked by Racist and Lewd Jokes.”

Donald Trump was the headliner at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. But the more than two dozen warm-up acts showed the country a lot about the party he’s built around him.

Speaking from a podium on the arena floor that read “Trump will fix it,” comedian Tony Hinchcliffe compared Puerto Rico to an “island of garbage,” and made lewd sexual jokes about Latinos. When a Black man stood to cheer him on, Hinchcliffe said the two of them had been at a Halloween party the night before, adding “We carved watermelons together.” (On Monday, the Trump campaign distanced itself from Hinchcliffe’s set, providing a statement attributed to senior adviser Danielle Alvarez: “These jokes do not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”)

Tucker Carlson said it’s going to be hard for Trump supporters like him to believe the election results if Kamala Harris wins. He also mocked Harris—whose mother was from India and father from Jamaica—for her biracial identity, saying she would be “the first Samoan Malaysian low IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected President.”

Two longtime Trump allies—Rudy Giuliani and Stephen Miller—floated false conspiracies that Democrats were behind the two recent assassination attempts against Trump. New York Republican David Rem, who has been described as a childhood friend of Trump, held up a crucifix and called Kamala Harris the “anti-Christ.” When Rem finished speaking, the crowd of Trump supporters cheered and chanted “USA, USA, USA.”

It appears the Trump campaign has dropped all pretense, and is now promoting unfiltered hate and racism.

This New York rally—which drew more than a few comparisons to a 1939 Nazi rally at the same venue—makes last week’s decisions by the owners of the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post to overrule their editorial boards and decline to endorse Kamala Harris even more pathetic.

Robert Greene writes for The Atlantic:

In this extremely tight presidential race, the big surprise of the fall campaign has turned out to be the failure of two major newspapers to deliver expected endorsements of Kamala Harris and against Donald Trump. With voting well under way in many states, the Los Angeles Times’ owner and The Washington Post’s publisher made inexcusably late announcements that they had become suddenly disenchanted with the entire notion of endorsing presidential candidates.

Withholding support for Harris after everything that both newspapers have reported about Trump’s manifest unfitness for office looks to me like plain cowardice. Although I served on the Los Angeles Times’ editorial board for 18 years, I believe one can reasonably question the value of endorsements. Still, the timing here invites speculation that these papers are preparing for a possible Trump victory by signaling a willingness to accommodate the coming administration rather than resist it.

At each paper, the editorial board had readied a draft or outline of a Harris endorsement and was waiting (and waiting and waiting) for final approval. On Wednesday, the L.A. Times editorials editor, Mariel Garza, told her team, including me, that the owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, would not permit any endorsement to run. She then resigned in protest.

The Coachella Valley Independent never endorses candidates; it’s just not something we’ve ever done. But it is something that the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post have done for decades. In particular, the decision at The Washington Post led the nation’s two most famous journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, to issue a statement slamming the Post, their alma mater..

“Under Jeff Bezos’ ownership, the Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy and that makes this decision even more surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process,” the journalists wrote.

These decisions by the owners of these two newspapers led upset readers to cancel their subscriptions—in droves. NPR reported today: “More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.”

I fully and completely understand the impulse to cancel subscriptions … but I humbly ask everyone who has cancelled, or is considering cancelling: Do you think your cancellation will harm or move Patrick Soon-Shiong (with a net worth of $7.5 billion) Jeff Bezos (with a net worth north of $206 billion) at all?

It won’t. But it may very well harm the hard-working reporters at those newspapers.

Caroline Kitchener, who covers abortion issues for The Washington Post, wrote eloquently on Twitter/X:

I feel lucky to work at a place that doesn’t blink when I say I need to fly to Texas to meet a woman whose life has been changed by an abortion ban. To document the impacts of Dobbs up close. I can only do that if we have subscribers who support us.

Reporters in the Post newsroom will continue to do our jobs. We will report fearlessly on whoever becomes president, and so many other things that really matter, because we are independent and care deeply about holding the powerful to account.

I completely understand if you’ve lost faith in our owner, but please, don’t lose faith in us.

We have so much work to do.

Yes, we journalists all have so much work to do—now more than ever—and we can’t do that work without reader support.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• Folks, brace yourselves for weeks and even months of horrifying news about election malfeasance. The Associated Press reports, in a piece headlined: “Police say fires set at ballot boxes in Oregon and Washington are connected; ‘suspect vehicle’ ID’d“: “Police said Monday that a ‘suspect vehicle’ has been identified in connection with incendiary devices that set fires to ballot drop boxes in Oregon and Washington state. Surveillance images captured a Volvo stopping at a drop box in Portland, Oregon, just before security personnel nearby discovered a fire inside the box on Monday, Portland Police Bureau spokesman Mike Benner told a news conference. That fire damaged three ballots inside, while officials say a fire at a drop box in nearby Vancouver, Washington, early Monday destroyed hundreds of ballots. The devices were attached to the outside of the boxes, police said. Authorities said at a news conference in Portland that enough material from the incendiary devices was recovered to show that the two fires Monday were connected—and that they were also connected to an Oct. 8 incident, when an incendiary device was placed at a different ballot drop box in Vancouver (Wash.).”

• ProPublica reports the details on a key Trump adviser’s ideas to do some pretty scary things—ideas which Trump has been mentioning on the campaign trail: “A key ally to former President Donald Trump detailed plans to deploy the military in response to domestic unrest, defund the Environmental Protection Agency and put career civil servants ‘in trauma’ in a series of previously unreported speeches that provide a sweeping vision for a second Trump term. In private speeches delivered in 2023 and 2024, Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, described his work crafting legal justifications so that military leaders or government lawyers would not stop Trump’s executive actions. He said the plans are a response to a ‘Marxist takeover’ of the country; likened the moment to 1776 and 1860, when the country was at war or on the brink of it; and said the timing of Trump’s candidacy was a ‘gift of God.’”

• Today’s recall news involves … Costco salmon! CNN reports: “Costco is recalling smoked salmon products over possible listeria contamination. … Costco said certain packages of its Kirkland Signature Smoked Salmon purchased between October 9 and October 13 are affected by the recall, according to an October 22 letter to customers. Packages with the lot number 8512801270 – located in the top right of the front packaging—should not be consumed. Customers can return packages to Costco for a full refund. Costco is the latest retailer to recall items over listeria concerns. The store’s smoked salmon supplier, Acme Smoked Fish Corp., issued a voluntary recall over listeria.”

• The Wired headline: “Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity Are Promoting Scientific Racism in Search Results.” Yikes. The story says: “AI-infused search engines from Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity have been surfacing deeply racist and widely debunked research promoting race science and the idea that white people are genetically superior to nonwhite people. Patrik Hermansson, a researcher with UK-based anti-racism group Hope Not Hate, was in the middle of a months-long investigation into the resurgent race science movement when he needed to find out more information about a debunked dataset that claims IQ scores can be used to prove the superiority of the white race. … Hermansson logged in to Google and began looking up results for the IQs of different nations. When he typed in ‘Pakistan IQ,’ rather than getting a typical list of links, Hermansson was presented with Google’s AI-powered Overviews tool, which, confusingly to him, was on by default. It gave him a definitive answer of 80. … A WIRED investigation confirmed Hermanssons’ findings and discovered that other AI-infused search engines—Microsoft’s Copilot and Perplexity—are also referencing (a debunked dataset published Richard Lynn) when queried about IQ scores in various countries. While Lynn’s flawed research has long been used by far-right extremists, white supremacists, and proponents of eugenics as evidence that the white race is superior genetically and intellectually from nonwhite races, experts now worry that its promotion through AI could help radicalize others.”

• Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing a large funding increase for the state’s film and TV tax credit, in an effort to bolster a struggling Hollywood. The Los Angeles Times says: “Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled a proposal Sunday to more than double the annual amount of money allocated to California’s film and TV tax credit program as Hollywood struggles to compete with other production hubs dangling lofty incentives. The governor declared his intent to expand the annual tax credit to $750 million, up from its current total of $330 million, which would make California the top state for capped film incentive programs, surpassing even New York. If approved by the Legislature, the increase could take effect as early as July 2025 and span five years. … Newsom said the state ‘needed to make a statement and to do something that was meaningful. We’re in a position where we can afford this, and we need to do this,’ he said during the news conference. ‘It’s about recognizing the world we invented is now competing against us.’”

• And finally … the LGBTQ+ portion of the population is fairly small—but a researcher, writing for The Conversation, said the LGBTQ+ vote could indeed make a difference in the presidential election: “Taken together, past polling data indicates that the LGBTQ+ community will likely back Harris over Trump by strong margins in four of the most likely ‘tipping-point’ states—that is, the swing states with enough electoral votes to tip the entire election for one candidate. Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania all have populations of LGBTQ+ adults that are significantly larger than the margin of victory by which the winning candidate took the state in 2020. For instance, Biden won Georgia and its 15 electoral votes by 11,779 votes in 2020, and there are over 400,000 LGBTQ+ adults in the state. Trump’s apparent current lead in Georgia is within the margin of error, and even a slight increase in Democratic-leaning LGBTQ+ voters, compared with 2020, could hand Harris the state.”

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