Benjamin Wittes: “I never expected to see the day when the Washington Post would kneel before Donald Trump…”
“Silence, after all, will not offend the authoritarian should he win. Silence, after all, is more than Trump can reasonably expect from the Post. Democracy may die in darkness, as the Post’s motto goes, but silence is apparently a good hedge…”
“If there ever were an incident that stands for the proposition that democracy, and journalism, cannot rest on the shoulders of oligarchs, this is it. Bezos did a lot of good for the Post when he first took it over, but the consent of the billionaire is not a stable structure for newspapers or magazines in an authoritarian era. Eventually, they can be counted upon to protect themselves, and that may sometimes mean not speaking the truth—either by lying or, as here, just by not speaking at all.”
Magaret Sullivan: “We needed courage. We got cowardice.”
