Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight

[Nevilledog]

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/us-democracy-media-takeover-by-those-avoiding-accountability-by-carla-norrlof-2026-02?h=%2bqfStIz6pyEY7Opoonpib%2be7LanwDYGaZYdTWd2bB9E%3d


TORONTO – “Democracy Dies in Darkness” became the motto of the Washington Post in 2017, four years after Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and one of the world’s richest men, purchased the newspaper. Today, however, Bezos, who has throttled the Post’s opinion page and now slashed the newspaper’s staff, seems determined to demonstrate that a free press, an essential component of democracy, can be killed off in broad daylight.

Democracy is dying in America because those in positions of power – starting with President Donald Trump but including media and tech owners like Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who is doing to CBS News what Bezos has been doing to the Post – have learned how to make facts harmless. What began as a disinformation campaign has matured into a systematic project aimed not at controlling what people think, but at dismantling the structures that turn facts into consequences.

For years, the crisis in journalism was described largely in terms of partiality, polarization, and declining trust. Those problems are real, and they have provided cover for treating the mainstream media’s supposed “liberal bias” as a justification for weakening professional standards. But there is now a deeper crisis: those who were previously pursuing this institutional weakening no longer need to bother winning an argument with the press. Instead, they have diminished the press’s ability to impose accountability at all.

After Trump’s first election in 2016, many commentators argued that universities, newsrooms, and cultural institutions had lost touch with the public, and that this mattered politically. But building credible alternatives to such institutions takes years and requires money, talent, distribution channels, and trust.

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