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Jonathan Turley had a broken clock moment this week when he delved into the debacle unfolding at the Washington Post, where the venerable publication is hemorrhaging subscribers after announcing an 11th hour decision to shelve an editorial endorsement conveniently after Trump’s people chatted with executives within the Jeff Bezos empire. As outraged subscribers fled the paper, Bezos penned a response that is, correctly, being widely mocked. Turley has offered Bezos backup with a Fox News post, writing that “Bezos could do for the media what Musk did for free speech.”
Which is true! Except Turley doesn’t understand that this is a damning indictment. So maybe it’s not a true broken clock moment. Is there a “wounded clock” concept?
What does it even mean to do for the media what Musk did for free speech? Because Musk has used his resources to promote a brand of “free speech absolutism” that dangerously undermines the concept of “free speech” as understood as a bedrock principle of democratic governance.
Free speech traditionally means preventing government barriers to expression, allowing the marketplace of ideas to function without interference. Good ideas rise to the top, bad ideas flounder. Musk has deployed his resources in service of a pernicious trend to flip “free speech” into essentially, affirmative action for unpopular views (and only certain unpopular views, mind you).
It’s the same authoritarian articulation of “speech” trafficked by certain federal judges, that the right should be flipped in favor of obligating the government (or similarly situated authorities) to promote unpopular speakers and crack down on protest or criticism.
To Turley’s point about “what Musk did for free speech,” the billionaire purchased one of the largest social media platforms and proceeded to watch racial slurs explode on the site, right-wing messaging go increasingly (and… algorithmically?) viral, and white supremacist messaging appear next to trusted brand advertisements. Musk’s tweeted himself about the Great Replacement Theory!
Which is all certainly within Musk’s rights as the proprietor of a private company. He can do what he wants and deal with the consequences. Though he seems unwilling to do so, which is why he’s filed a federal lawsuit complaining that big, respected brands aren’t giving him advertising dollars anymore. Again, this is free speech backwards.
Musk and his fanboy Turley suggesting that a private entity openly promoting fringe ideas is a “victory” of some kind for free speech gets it all wrong. That’s like reading Skokie and thinking the moral was “it’s good that there are Nazis.” There’s no intrinsic value in being unpopular.
That’s incel thinking.
It’s also exactly why Turley sees connections between Bezos and Musk:
I used to write regularly for the Post, and I wrote in my new book about the decline of the newspaper as part of the “advocacy journalism” movement: “Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.”
It’s telling that someone paid to be a law professor describes banging out opinion columns for newspapers as “our” profession. Though he’s not alone in that. From the Bezos response piece:
In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.
You’re also not a journalist, dude. What’s with all the stolen valor? You boys ever been working for a local paper in Topeka waiting on a source to call back and confirm while a deadline looms?
“Our”… get outta here with that noise.
Turley continues:
Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis promptly delivered a truth bomb in the middle of the newsroom by telling the staff, “Let’s not sugarcoat it… We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right? I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”
Lewis is full of shit. The audience for legacy media undoubtedly shrunk as cable media expanded and then went into something of a free fall as social media created a whole new ecosphere of short clips and independent news (or fake news) regurgitators. When everyone gets their news from a Facebook post with a short Newsmax clip featuring a story from some right-wing Substack… yeah, the national newspapers are going to suffer.
BUT when he says “We are losing large amounts of money” it’s not an audience issue, it’s an advertising issue. The only reason Jeff Bezos owns the Post is that the Graham family couldn’t overcome the loss of advertising revenue that followed Google cornering the market on digital ads. THERE’S A WHOLE FEDERAL CASE ABOUT IT RIGHT NOW! Lewis, a Rupert Murdoch acolyte, clings to the belief that brought the Murdoch empire so much success in past decades: if you trash it up and appeal to the lowest common denominator, good things happen!
But those days are gone. The Washington Post isn’t going to get a million more subscribers by turning it into The Sun. And even if it did, it’s not closing its revenue shortfall without advertisers coming back.
And you know why advertisers might not come back (even aside from Google being a more efficient advertising play)? BECAUSE THEY DON’T WANT TO BE ASSOCIATED WITH THAT CONTENT.
Maybe that’s how Bezos will do for media what Musk did: piss off all the advertisers!
Fox News built its advertising bundle on reverse mortgages and erection pills. There’s not enough of that to go around, and the audience that might want to buy the Washington Post isn’t the audience those advertisers want anyway.
Anyway, Turley has a different theory:
He could create a bulwark against advocacy journalism in one of the premier newspapers in the world. Students in “J Schools” today are being told to abandon neutrality and objectivity since, as former New York Times writer (and now Howard University journalism professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones has explained, “all journalism is activism.”
Interesting that Turley snidely dismisses the critique of “objective journalism” by quoting a notable Black woman in the field. Almost as though he wants to dress up the notion in racist, misogynist baggage. In fact, the clear-eyed critique of the industry’s flawed reliance on contrived objectivism goes back much further. To quote an esteemed Doctor of Journalism covering the 1972 election (who was also a white guy to the extent Turley’s audience would care):
Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism—which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly.
The blindspots that Hunter S. Thompson outlines have grown more pronounced with time. It’s how Trump’s remarks get routinely “sanewashed” into something vaguely resembling a policy rather than directly quoting insane ramblings about how Democrats are banning windows and cows. Media that won’t call out that one candidate is batshit insane for fear of reprisal that does a lot more to erode its credibility.
Few can stand up to this movement other than a Bezos or a Musk. However, the left has long created their own monsters by demanding absolute fealty or unleashing absolute cancel campaigns. Simply because Bezos wants his newspaper to restore neutrality, the left is calling for a boycott of not just the Post but all of his companies. That is precisely what they did with Musk.
You know… a “cancel campaign” sounds a whole lot like free speech.
Turley here is really arguing that billionaires should use unchecked market power to force citizens to accept viewpoints they otherwise would disagree with. Presumably Turley’s principled stance would be the same when evangelicals boycott Disney for accepting gay people as human beings. Spoiler: he thought consumers should punish Disney for its political stance.
James Clavell wrote a cautionary tale called The Children’s Story back in the 60s. Clavell imagined a classroom transformed into servants of a totalitarian invader simply by cleverly twisting the words of the Pledge of Allegiance. Basically, he warned that empty patriotic pablum lights an easy path to authoritarianism. I think about that story whenever these free speech debates come up. When guys like Turley take a civic virtue and cynically contort the language around it, play on our reverence for the concept, and then twist it all into calls for billionaires to stifle dissent and schools to punish picketers, it moves the country a little closer to the brainwashed kids at the end of that Clavell story.
Anyway, Bezos could do for the media what Musk did for “free speech.” Hopefully he doesn’t.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.