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The Media Today

Moderating Content

What the genuflection of billionaires means for the press.
January 10, 2025 By Jon Allsop
AP Photo/Susan Walsh

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Before Christmas, Ann Telnaes, an editorial cartoonist at the Washington Post, submitted a drawing that depicted four billionaire media and tech executives and one mouse genuflecting before Donald Trump, shown standing on a garlanded dais. The cartoon, Telnaes wrote last weekend, was inspired by recent reports of “men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-Lago” to visit Trump in the wake of his election win in November. (The mouse in the cartoon, Mickey, was a symbolic stand-in for the Walt Disney Company, the owner of ABC News, which recently paid sixteen million dollars to settle a defamation case brought by Trump despite many observers feeling that the network could successfully—and certainly should—have fought on.) The cartoon, however, never appeared in the Post, an outcome that Telnaes attributed to the fact that one of the billionaires she caricatured was Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner. “I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at,” Telnaes wrote. And so she decided to quit. “I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist,” she added. “But I will not stop holding truth to power.”

The decision did cause a stir in media circles—indeed, it was perceived as exacerbating a crisis that has roiled the Post ever since Bezos made the decision, shortly before the election, to block the paper’s editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris, Trump’s rival. Bezos presented that move as downstream of concerns about trust in journalism, but many observers suspected, given the timing, that he was trying to curry favor with Trump given his voluminous outside business interests (and Trump’s threats to use the power of the state to go after his perceived enemies)—including, apparently, many Post subscribers, some three hundred thousand of whom reportedly canceled in the wake of the scrapped endorsement. Since then, negative headlines have cascaded out of the paper: the reported reluctance of top candidates to take on the Post’s chief editorial job; an exodus of celebrated political reporters to rival publications; sharp layoffs on the business side of the paper; Telnaes’s resignation. To be sure, these developments are traceable to a financial and leadership malaise at the Post that is much broader than concerns about Bezossian conflicts of interest. After Telnaes quit, David Shipley, the Post’s editorial page editor, said that he hadn’t nixed her cartoon out of any “malign force,” insisting, rather, that it had been too thematically similar to text-based articles that were slated to run around the same time. (“The only bias was against repetition,” he said.) Still, as with Bezos’s claims about the Harris editorial, there are reasons to be skeptical of this assertion. At the very least, the optics, as they say, are very bad.

The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists certainly wasn’t buying it: in a statement, the group said that “corporate billionaires once again have brought an editorial cartoon to life with their craven censorship in bowing to a wannabe tyrant.” As the week progressed, Telnaes’s cartoon would appear to come to life again and again, as more stories emerged that were interpreted as genuflection on the part of its protagonists. (Sadly, Mickey Mouse remains a cartoon for now.) One of those involved Bezos again: the day after Telnaes resigned, we learned that the video arm of Amazon, the company Bezos founded, would distribute a documentary about Trump’s wife, Melania, made by Brett Ratner, a director who has mostly been sidelined since he was accused of sexual abuse during the #MeToo moment. (He denies the claims.) Per Puck, Amazon is set to pay forty million dollars to license the project.

Then, on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg—the CEO of Meta, who was also depicted in Telnaes’s cartoon amid reports that he went to Mar-a-Lago to dine with Trump and stood for a rendition of the national anthem recorded by jailed January 6ers—announced what looked like a major volte-face on his company’s approach to moderating content: Meta will wrap up its partnerships with third-party fact-checkers—a signal commitment of the early Trump era, with its perhaps utopian hope of inoculating social media against the rampant spread of lies—and instead move toward a crowdsourced system of user feedback similar to the one implemented by Elon Musk, the billionaire turned explicit Trump ally, after he acquired Twitter and turned it into X. Just as the current crisis at the Post isn’t only about Bezos’s decision to block the Harris endorsement, Zuckerberg’s announcement cannot entirely be reduced to raw power politics—online content moderation, ultimately, is a more thorny and contentious matter than bromides about fact-checking saving democracy would allow. Some free speech groups and tech-watchers applauded Zuckerberg’s direction of travel. Mike Masnick, of Techdirt, wrote that he “is exactly right that Meta has been really bad at content moderation, despite having the largest content moderation team out there.”

In many ways, though, Zuckerberg’s announcement was clearly about raw power politics. “The timing of all of this is obviously political,” Masnick wrote. “It is very clearly Zuckerberg caving to more threats from Republicans.” Not that we need to take Masnick’s word for it: Zuckerberg may have styled his decision as a return to Meta’s supposed pro-free-speech roots (which never really existed, as Masnick likewise deftly notes), but he also said that Meta’s fact-checking partners had become too “politically biased” (echoing a common right-wing talking point), that the company’s “restrictions on topics like immigration and gender” had become “out of touch with mainstream discourse” (echoing another), and that Trump’s election was a “cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech.” In case you didn’t get the point yet, Zuckerberg also promised to move Meta’s content-moderation staff from California to Texas (on the sophomoric-at-best, nonsensical-at-worst grounds that this will somehow alleviate concerns about “bias”), and dispatched Joel Kaplan—a Republican recently promoted to become Meta’s policy chief—to the studios of Fox & Friends to roll the pitch. (Among those who interpreted all this as Zuckerberg kowtowing to Donald Trump was Donald Trump: asked whether he thought Zuckerberg was responding to Trump’s past threats against him, Trump replied, “Probably.”)

Meta is not the news media, but its latest policy change will clearly have ramifications for our industry. (For starters, many newsroom fact-checking initiatives have received financial support from Meta, the withdrawal of which is unlikely to be good for their free speech.) Of the other billionaires depicted in Telnaes’s cartoon, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, isn’t a media mogul either, in the classic sense—but he also has immense power within the news media business as a result of the disruptive technology his company makes and the deals it has done with various traditional publishers. Challenged by Bloomberg this week on his decision to donate to Trump’s inaugural fund, Altman cast the move not as pro-Trump but pro-America. The other billionaire in Telnaes’s cartoon, the medical entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong, is, like Bezos, the owner of a major newspaper, in this case the LA Times. Writing for CJR this week, Norman Pearlstine, who served as that paper’s executive editor under Soon-Shiong, recalled that, despite “occasional disagreements,” Soon-Shiong never meddled editorially on his watch. Last year, however, Soon-Shiong also blocked his paper’s editorial board from endorsing Harris; he has since been accused of various edicts that appear aimed at curbing the opinion section’s critical coverage of Trump, while making publicly supportive comments about several of Trump’s nominees for key health-focused roles. “Soon-Shiong seems to have shown no concern that his comments have had an unmistakable chilling effect on the Times newsroom,” Pearlstine writes.

Pearlstine’s wider point in his essay is that billionaire owners have proven themselves unreliable stewards of news media organizations whose primary commitment is to the public interest: “The truth may not matter to the wealthy owners and CEOs who are treating Trump as much like a pope as a president,” Pearlstine wrote (channeling the spirit of Telnaes’s cartoon), “but journalists must redouble our efforts to expose every conflict of interest, every lie, and every threat to democracy.” He also offered a note of hope, pointing out “that America has lived with popular demagogues before and that, over time, truth prevailed.” To this end, Pearlstine cited the defiant work of Herbert Block, or “Herblock,” a long-serving editorial cartoonist at the Washington Post. Telnaes, of course, performed that role, too. Whatever the ins and outs of her departure, she is now gone.

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For now, Telnaes is continuing to hold truth to power on her Substack. The Post, for its part, has continued to publish good journalism on both its news and opinion pages; so, too, has the LA Times, which won widespread praise among media-watchers this week for its essential coverage of devastating wildfires that continue to rage in the area. Billionaire ownership hasn’t yet put an end to critical coverage; a generous observer might even say that it has enabled it. But these billionaires’ recent behavior has cast a hulking shadow that is at best a shameful distraction and at worst an outright threat. “I remain in major awe of my colleagues,” Hannah Wiley, a reporter at the LA Times, wrote on X yesterday, of the fire coverage. “For those who cancelled their subscription in the last year in protest of whatever, I urge you to take a look at our homepage and argue that this work isn’t worth supporting.” You can find the LA Times’ live blog on the fires here, and Pearlstine’s CJR essay here.


Other notable stories:

  • In 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch, a North Carolina man, fired a gun inside Comet Ping Pong, a Washington pizza restaurant that—according to the viral right-wing conspiracy theory that would come to be known as “Pizzagate”—was the center of a child abuse ring orchestrated by Hillary Clinton. Welch later expressed regret for his actions, and was sentenced to four years in prison. Over the weekend, police in North Carolina shot Welch after he pulled out a gun during a traffic stop; earlier this week, he died as a result of his injuries. The Charlotte Observer has more details.

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.