Republicans have been awfully quiet over the last few days, and they probably should have been. The question is why they were so quiet.
President Donald Trump’s attacks on retail giant Amazon are characteristic Trump: part hooey, part legitimate criticism, part personal retaliation. His March 29 tweet nicely encompasses all three ingredients: “I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election. Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!”
On state and local taxes: It’s nowhere near true that Amazon pays “little or no taxes to state & local governments”—the online retail giant pays millions every year to state and local governments. On the other hand, Amazon receives enormous tax and other favors from state and local governments—exemptions, fee-in-lieu-of-tax arrangements, and so on—and these go a long way toward offsetting those sales tax remittances. The president has a better argument on the Postal Service, though characteristically he’s not making it: First-class envelope delivery is far more expensive than it should be if the Postal Service’s prices were more rationally arranged, meaning that cheaper parcel delivery (what Amazon uses) is subsidized by more expensive envelope delivery. As a Wall Street Journal report showed last year, “The U.S. Postal Service delivers the company’s boxes well below its own costs.”
Of course, lots of companies profit off government, and Trump doesn’t go after them. But those companies don’t happen to own the Washington Post.
Whatever one thinks about Amazon’s payment and/or non-payment of taxes, it’s a complicated question that doesn’t lend itself to easy one-sided punditry. What little Congressional Republicans and Fox News are saying about it is measured and nuanced, and rightly so. We can’t help wondering, though, what the case would look like if Obama or some other Democratic president had challenged Amazon in such a hard-hitting and slapdash way? We think we know the answer: The president would be guilty of attacking American capitalism and trampling on the American consumer and recklessly interfering in the private sector economy.
And what about the controversy over Sinclair Broadcasting? The Maryland-based media company, which owns 193 local television stations in more than 100 media markets, is reported to have required news anchors at Sinclair-owned stations to read scripts about the dangers of “fake news” (meaning left-liberal biased news) on news broadcasts. Not only that. Sinclair headquarters regularly sends its stations news segments of a politically right-leaning nature with instructions that the stations are required to run them (they’re labeled “must-run”).
Is this a breach of basic journalistic integrity? Is the requirement that news anchors read vaguely pro-administration boilerplate an instance of state propaganda? The answers aren’t obvious. Sinclair is a private company, not a government agency, and its executives can run its newsrooms how they wish. If news anchors feel strongly about the scripts they occasionally have to read, they can work elsewhere. Even so, the notion of mandatory scripts and “must-run” news segments has a whiff of propaganda about it.
Suspicions about Sinclair’s rightward bias were confirmed when David Smith, the company’s chairman, wrote in an email to New York magazine that “the print media is so left wing as to be meaningless dribble [sic] which accounts for why the industry is and will fade away.” We have our complaints about the unacknowledged dominance of left-liberal political opinions in many parts of America’s news media, although Smith’s remark that mainstream print media are “meaningless dribble”—together with his comment that there is a “complete lack of integrity” in print-media newsrooms—strikes us as a deeply unserious appraisal.
As in the Trump-Amazon kerfuffle, the question of Sinclair Broadcasting’s internal policies and ideological direction don’t admit of easy, black-and-white answers. But we wince to imagine the response among lots of famous right-wingers in the media and in Congress if the same were revealed on the other side of the media’s ideological divide. If, say, MSNBC were discovered to require its anchors to recite vaguely anti-administration talking points, or if Jeff Zucker, say, were overheard grousing about the “complete lack of integrity” among conservative journalists, all hell would break loose at Fox News. There would be no allowance for ambiguity and context and the distinction between private companies and public entities; it would be a scandal about mandatory agitprop and radical left-wing media bias.
We’re glad Republicans aren’t saying a lot of stupid things about Amazon and Sinclair. We only wish it were for the right reason.
