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Saturday Edition – The Guardian
Following a judge’s refusal to grant the Associated Press (AP) an injunction to return the organization to the White House Press Pool, the White House placed “Victory” signs in the White House Press Gallery. The White House and AP have been at odds since the Trump administration changed the “Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America” and the AP Stylebook, used by 1000s of journalists, refuses to recognize this change
01/03/2025
Trump’s war on the news – and another Bezos intervention

Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief

An important part of the Guardian’s identity is that we are a progressive and liberal news organisation – and also that we are open to different perspectives, in the public interest. Our great former editor CP Scott said in 1921 that “the voice of opponents no less than of friends have a right to be heard”, and in a polarised age, with pluralism increasingly under threat and an authoritarian in the White House, respectfully disagreeing with each other feels radical and necessary.

So Jeff Bezos’s intervention this week was troubling. Bezos, the world’s third richest man and owner of the Washington Post, intervened in the newspaper’s editorial output by restricting the kinds of opinion articles they were permitted to publish, telling staff that only commentary that supports “personal liberties” and “free markets” would be welcome in the opinion columns of the Post, junking decades of pluralism at the great title.

As Guardian columnist Margaret Sullivan put it: “Bezos no longer wants to own an independent news organization. He wants a megaphone and a political tool that will benefit his own commercial interests.”

Bezos’s move, much like his pulling of the paper’s pro-Kamala Harris endorsement in October, sends a clear signal to Donald Trump. This week his administration continued its alarming attacks on the press by denying reporters from the Associated Press, Reuters and HuffPost access to a cabinet meeting and taking control of which reporters and organisations have access to the presidential press pool.

Those moves came after Trump threatened to sue the Wall Street Journal over an editorial criticising his tariffs plan and the Associated Press failed in its bid to have its own ban from access to presidential events revoked by a Trump-appointed judge. Sullivan wrote another important column about that case. This, she wrote, isn’t just a disagreement over the name of the Gulf of Mexico, but “part of a wide-ranging effort to control the media, spread propaganda and interfere with the flow of accurate information”.

Like Bezos, many of America’s new oligarchs have moved politically closer to Trump to protect their commercial interests. It will make them richer, as will the AI revolution. In the UK this week the Guardian was part of the huge national campaign, Make It Fair, to demand that the government drops plans to relax copyright laws. Big tech’s AI models should not be allowed to take creative works, including journalism, without permission or payment. (The principle that we should be paid for our work is the reason the Guardian recently signed an agreement with OpenAI to allow them to license our journalism.)

For the past week I’ve been working in Australia, where I spoke about threats to the press on the Full Story podcast with Bridie Jabour. Here, control of the news is highly concentrated and a small handful of companies, led by the Murdochs’ News Corp, control 84% of newspapers, while Google and Meta account for 70% of digital advertising. This lack of pluralism gives a small number of executives – like the tech lords who control social media – massive power over information, which should be a public good. And, as we have seen over decades with Rupert Murdoch, that power can shape our lives in all sorts of dangerous ways.

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