Ann Telnaes Warns Billionaires Bowing Before Trump
A few days ago, Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit the Washington Post when they prevented her from publishing a cartoon that criticized billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.
Ann is right to criticize these newspaper owners and social media executives for kowtowing President-elect Donald Trump.
As a Filipino American editorial cartoonist, I saw how former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte threatened the business interests of the owners of newspapers and news sites to try to bully journalists into compliance. Duterte threatened to sue journalists for libel in the hopes that they would get trapped draining their financial resources in courts.
Early in 2017, the owners of the Philippine Daily Inquirer sold their newspaper to Duterte ally Ramon Ang after the Inquirer received verbal threats and constant pressure from President Rodrigo Duterte.
Duterte’s allies in the Philippine Congress refused to renew the franchise to the news site ABS-CBN due to its coverage of Duterte’s extrajudicial killings. The loss of the franchise meant that ABS-CBN would no long be able to access the government’s free air waves and it had to shut down its free TV and radio broadcasting operations and lose its millions of viewers.
Maria Ressa, the founder of the Philippine news site Rappler and the winner of the Nobel Prize, was sued early in Duterte’s administration for cyber libel that threatened to put Ressa in jail for several years.
Duterte was following a playbook that autocrats like Vladmir Putin, Viktor Orban and others have used to try to silence critical journalism.
Donald Trump is using that same playbook to threaten the business interests of newspaper owners and social media executives like Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Patrick Soon-Shiong and Jeff Bezos (the owner of the Washington Post).
Business owners like Jeff Bezos mistakenly think that they can appease Trump and protect their business interests without selling their soul.
David Brooks wrote an article titled "The G.O.P. Is Rotting" (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/opinion/the-gop-is-rotting.html?sear…) where he observes:
"There is no end to what Trump will ask of his party. He is defined by shamelessness, and so there is no bottom. And apparently there is no end to what regular Republicans are willing to give him...
...That’s the way these corrupt bargains always work. You think you’re only giving your tormentor a little piece of yourself, but he keeps asking and asking, and before long he owns your entire soul."
If you want to support Ann Telnaes, you can subscribe to her Substack page at https://substack.com/@anntelnaes
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It's sad. It's also scary.
Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Patrick Soon-Shiong and Jeff Bezos are some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in the world. Yet they feel the need to curry favor with Trump.
I get the feeling they're scared of Trump's craziness. And if they're scared and are willing to bow down to Trump, we shouldn't trust them to defend democratic values when Trump attacks those values.
I think Ann's cartoon is trying to warn these billionaires that bowing down to Trump is in the long run not going to help them or their business interests. Trump is going to keep asking them to do things against their values, until they no longer have any values.
That's what happened to the Republicans. It's going to happen to them.
Really sad...