The Nobel Prize and Freedom of the Press

It is ironic that approximately two weeks after Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson won their Nobel Prize in Economics for their research on how a nation’s prosperity is dependent on its institutional guard rails that prevent powerful elites from rigging the rules, one of America’s most important safety barriers protecting democratic institutional integrity began to crack.

Freedom of the press and the competitive structure of the press have always  been the single day-to-day check on the abuse or misuse of government power in America. Whether it is discovering that a Long Island Congressman has put his mistress on the Congressional payroll, or cracking open Watergate, freedom of the press in the United States has been a path to maintaining what Acemoglu and Robinson refer to as inclusive institutions vis a vis exploitable/ extractable institutions.

Now, with the Washington Post (arguably, America’s second or third most powerful paper) choosing not to endorse a candidate in the 2024 Presidential election, an extremely dangerous precedent threatening America’s democracy has been established.  Reputedly, the endorsement was withheld not because the paper disagrees with a candidate. In fact, the editorial board of the Post recommended endorsing Harris.  What appears to have happened is that Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Post, overruled his editorial board because his principal business, Amazon web services,could be hurt if Trump won the election and the paper had endorsed Harris.

Press barons having massive influence over the public are not a new phenomenon in the United States. We are all familiar with William Randolph Hearst’s sensationalist campaign in his newspapers advocating for war against Spain, zealously depicting atrocities, both fabricated and real, in his newspapers.

Or Henry Luce the publisher of Time Inc. when Time was the twitter of its day, trying in its magazine coverage to christiannize Chiang Kai-shek  in order to make him more appealing to Americans. 

But what Bezos did was very different. The Washington Post was not advocating for war in Cuba or for favoring one side during the Chinese revolution, it was kowtowing to a fear of possible future retribution, that in reality wasn’t so far in the future. During the first Trump administration, Amazon lost a 10 billion dollar cloud computing contract at the defense department after President Trump asked to have the bidding process reviewed. The White House asked for the review not based on the validity of the contract but on the fact that the Washington Post had criticized the Trump administration.

And of course, the opposite is also true. If a corporation, such as Elon Musk’s entities, owns a media division (X), and that division promotes a candidate way over others, it is easy to see how the corporation could be unfairly favored if their preferred candidate wins.

Censoring the press by pressuring the parent company of the conglomerate is no different than the actions taken by the failed states that Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson talk about in their seminal book, Why Nations Fail. As an example, in many of those nations, Freedom of the Press is guaranteed in the country’s constitution. But it is a show put there to make the country look good. In reality, the government often has a monopoly on newsprint and if the government is criticized too severely, the paper does not get its newsprint delivery that week.

For sure America’s founders never could have contemplated that the freedom of the press guaranteed in the first amendment of the constitution could be quietly silenced when the press itself was no longer independent but just an entity among others in a larger corporation.

America’s economic success is based on several underlying principles which Acemogolu and Robinson would surely label as institutional values.  Among them are the guarantee of the rule of law over the rule of personality, group or ideology, and the freedom to make and have investments and reap the benefits from those investments based on the value of the project not on whether the project is politically well-connected. Sadly if a president subtly and not so subtly undermines these principles, the fact that we now have major media entities owned by large corporations that do significant business with the government puts America’s concept of freedom of the press in severe jeopardy.

For sure Hearst and Luce were no friends of the Democratic Party but there was no way for FDR or Truman to pressure them. And if they had favored Roosevelt or Truman, there was no way they could have been rewarded other than  receiving an invitation to a State Dinner.