Photograph Source: ajay_suresh – CC BY 2.0

Last week, the Washington Post audaciously posted a lead editorial that warned about “A threat to First Amendment Rights.” For the past six months, the Post has been conducting its own assault on the First Amendment, despite a daily masthead that proclaims “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Jeff Bezos, the Post’s owner has censored editorials and even an editorial cartoon. As a result, the cartoonist and several prominent editorial writers have resigned from the paper. Many staffers have left as well, and several hundred thousand subscriptions have been canceled. Conversely, during Donald Trump’s first campaign for the presidency, the Post wrote a series of six editorials outlining the “clear and present danger of Donald Trump” with no complaints from Bezos or his senior editors.

There was a similar series of events at the Los Angeles Times, whose editor—Patrick Soon-Shiong—is heavily dependent on support from the Trump administration. Soon-Shiong proclaimed that the paper’s editorial writers were “very left” and that he wanted the paper to be more “middle of the road.” Bezos and Soon-Shiong are heavily dependent on support from government agencies for the billions of dollars they earn in the fields of satellite technology and medical technology, respectively. They are particularly intimidated by the pressure the Trump administration and the Federal Communications Commission are placing on such networks as CBS, ABC, NPR, and PBS.

Bezos’s truckling to Trump began in the run up to the November election, when Bezos made the eleventh-hour decision to kill a lead editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for........

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