Statusupdate: hoever is Trump met het draaiboek van Orban?
Het inbreken van de oligarch Bezos in de WAPO-redactie om de toorn van een toekomstig dictator te onkomen is de actualiteit, maar zal overstemd worden door de republikeinse kermis.
In dit stuk
On anticipatory obedience and the media wordt de interessante vraag op tafel gelegd in hoeverre het Orban-draaiboek al gevorderd is onder team Trump.
(de vetjes zijn van mij, Post = WaPo = Washington Post)
...beware that the newly elected American president might copy Orbán’s autocratic technique of using the regulatory state to punish media outlets whose coverage he dislikes.
Prime Minister Orbán did this to great effect. The barrage of audits, investigations, and regulatory harassment he directed at his media critics, coupled with orders that his government agencies direct public advertising dollars only to media sufficiently loyal to him, drove independent media from the field. Orbán didn’t neutralize the media overnight. It happened gradually and in plain sight.
We have examined Trump’s public statements, and put them together with the actions of the government and of media outlets over the past eight years, and we fear that, despite the conventional wisdom that American media independence survived the tests of Trump’s first term unscathed, developments in the years since he left office tell a different story. That story is that, like Orbán’s, Trump’s campaign against the media has taken time to have its intended effect, but have an effect it has, and the trajectory discernible now, in hindsight, doesn’t bode well for the media should Trump return to power.
Scheppele had ample reason to warn us as she did. During his 2016 presidential campaign Trump talked openly about using the Orbán playbook.
As CNN and the Post continued to report on Trump in ways he did not like, he openly threatened that, if elected, he would seek revenge against them. At a rally in early 2016, he called out Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, owner of the Post, and said: “If I become president, oh do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems.”
Trump told campaign crowds that as president he would block a proposed merger between Time Warner, CNN’s parent company, and AT&T. At a rally in Pennsylvania on October 22, 2016, he said CNN was part of the media “power structure” trying to suppress his votes. “AT&T is buying Time Warner and thus CNN,” Trump said, “a deal we will not approve in my administration.”
In November 2017, the Department of Justice sued to block the AT&T–Time Warner merger. The then-head of the Antitrust Division denied that Trump had directed the DOJ to intervene. (A judge ruled against the DOJ, and the deal closed in June 2018.) As far as Bezos and the Post, in the spring of 2018, President Trump pushed the US postmaster general to raise Postal Service charges on Amazon. At the same time, the president tweeted false statements about Amazon and his threats to raise its postal shipping rates. Amazon’s market value briefly plunged $60 billion.
CNN begint het kniebuigen al:
In November 2022, the New York Times published a meticulously reported feature on the AT&T–Time Warner deal. James Stewart spoke with more than two dozen sources, including on-the-record interviews with executives from both AT&T and Time Warner. Jeff Bewkes, then Time Warner’s chief executive, told Stewart, referring to AT&T executives: “Of course they weren’t so stupid as to say, ‘Trump wants this, and if you do it he’ll do what we want,’” Bewkes recalled. What AT&T wanted at the time was for the administration to approve the merger. “But [AT&T chief executive] Randall [Stephenson] was always probing me. ‘What do you think of our coverage?’ ‘Were our reporters being too hard on the White House and Trump?’ ‘Should [CNN chief executive] Jeff Zucker be replaced?’ It was nothing explicit, but I got the drift.”
In February 2022, as Trump seemed to rise from the political dead to become a viable potential candidate for returning to the White House, CNN dismissed Zucker and replaced him with Chris Licht. There were other reasons that contributed to Zucker’s dismissal, but nevertheless, the man Trump wanted out was out, and a broader change was underway. According to David Zaslav, CNN’s executive boss, Licht was to make the network’s coverage “more neutral.” Licht fired several CNN reporters whose coverage was critical of Trump, and Licht staged a CNN town hall that seemed like a rally to launch Trump’s reelection campaign. If anything, CNN’s shift to be more accommodating to Trump was too aggressive: Licht was let go after his mismanagement of such a rapid U-turn led to a staff revolt.
Voor de mensen die zich afvragen of dat echt zomaar kan:
What’s changed since Licht? Only last month, when Oliver Darcy asked former CNN anchor Don Lemon for his “thoughts on how this election is being covered” and if he thought journalists were “being blunt enough in calling out Donald Trump’s appalling behavior,” Lemon responded: “‘The system,’ in many ways, doesn’t allow them to. The corporation doesn’t allow them to.”
Wat blijkt, Bezos maakte al eerder een knieval: in 2023 heeft hij een voormalige bestuurder uit het Murdoch moeras gevist en hem aan de top gezet van de WaPo
Along with the changes at CNN, over at the Post another change at the top was in the works. In early November 2023, Bezos announced that he was installing a new publisher: Will Lewis, a former Rupert Murdoch executive who has spent most of his career in right-wing media. Lewis’s ascent to the top of the Post masthead, as with most of his career, has been dogged by scandal and allegations of unethical conduct. But it’s one allegation (denied by Lewis) that is perhaps most relevant here: that as an informal adviser to the UK’s Trumpian alter ego, Boris Johnson, Lewis advised Johnson and his staff to destroy evidence in order to protect Johnson from the burgeoning “partygate” scandal.
Les voor ons allemaal
This, it seems to us, is what Timothy Snyder, the Levin Professor of History at Yale University, calls “anticipatory obedience.” In his book On Tyranny, Snyder, who is also an adviser to our organization, writes: “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
Een andere gluuroligarch, Zuckerberg, valt ook op zijn gezicht voor de gebruinde Sneakerkoning en biedt zich aan:
Trump seems to have learned the lesson that his approach is working and has expanded his targets from old media to new. Attuned to both the key role that social media platforms would play as loci of information during the election and the fact that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg provided hundreds of millions of dollars to local election offices in 2020 to help make up for governmental shortfalls necessary to administer an election successfully during a pandemic, on July 9 of this year, Trump threatened Zuckerberg with prison if he did any such thing again. Receiving the message loud and clear, three days later Meta announced it was removing a set of restrictions on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts that had been placed there after Trump previously violated the company’s terms of service. Zuckerberg then praised Trump as a “badass” and announced that his philanthropic arm would not be repeating any of its past support for nonpartisan election administration.
Jeff Bezos, has divested himself of the Washington Post. The paper’s new owner—an investor group based in Slovakia—has closed the printed edition and refocused the paper on municipal politics and lifestyle coverage. Meanwhile, social media circulate ever-wilder rumors. Some people believe them; others don’t. It’s hard work to ascertain what is true.…
“Trump-critical media do continue to find elite audiences. Their investigations still win Pulitzer Prizes; their reporters accept invitations to anxious conferences about corruption, digital-journalism standards, the end of NATO, and the rise of populist authoritarianism. Yet somehow all of this earnest effort feels less and less relevant to American politics.
Dat laatste is hier te lande ook gaande, is mijn indruk.