‘Democracy’ Means Newspapers Aren’t Allowed to Fire Democrats

Democracy has a dictionary definition, sure, but when Democrats invoke it (especially in sentences that include “protecting democracy” or “saving democracy”), they mean themselves.

When Biden and the Washington Post masthead talked about “democracy”, they meant the eternal rule of democrats.

And now that a fed-up Jeff Bezos trashed a third of the Post’s employees who had tried to arm wrestle him for the paper, it’s, you guessed it, another attack on democracy.

Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight – New Yorker

As goes the Washington Post: US democracy takes another hit under Trump – The Guardian

“Democracy Dies in Darkness. Bezos Is the Dark”: Photos From the “Save the Post” Rally – Washingtonian

The Destruction of the ‘Washington Post’: Democracy Dies in Oligarchy – Colorado Boulevard

What does the employment status of a D.C. paper’s staffer have to do with a political system under which people are free to elect their own representatives?

Nothing. But if you understand democracy, as Democrats do, as a machine for electing Democrats, the media is indeed a “vital outpost of democracy” because it helps get out the vote for the democrats.

Their fancy name for this is calling the media the “guardians of democracy”, which is like calling the conservative media “the guardians of the republic”. What’s referred to there is a partisan communications arm, not a true institution.

The media is ranting and raving because Bezos, the founder of Amazon, fired some of these ‘guardians of democracy’,. thereby, in the words of the New Yorker’s loathsome editor, David Remnick, having strangled democracy or the prospects of his party,

Before we can put out from this pathetic spectacle of a corrupt trust bemoaning its own loss of power, consider how the media wrote in a passive voice and a vague attitude about the mass murder of tens of thousands in Iran.

And how Remnick writes about the fall of his own institution.

“As someone who worked happily at the Post for a decade a long time ago, and as an ardent reader of the paper, I am sick about all this. I feel like someone forced to watch an arsonist torch the house he grew up in. I cannot imagine how it must feel for the current staff and the hundreds forced to leave. If that is sentimentality or worse, well, then guilty as charged.”

The media hasn’t been this upset since it had to watch Hamas lose a war.