Anyone in business knows the old saw: “The customer is always right.”
Commentary by Stephen Macaulay
The customer, of course, may not be right, but given that any business depends on customers, it is a good rule to keep the customers at the very least satisfied.
There is another rule that isn’t often stated but is arguably truer.
This is for the employees who work at a business: “Don’t piss off the boss.”
That can be job ending.
There is no one who has ever worked for someone else (i.e., most of us) who hasn’t come to the conclusion, perhaps on a regular basis, the that boss is a jackass.
This leads to two choices: (1) Suck it up and continue. (2) Quit.
(Some might suggest there is a third: Get fired. But that isn’t a choice; that’s a consequence.)
Which brings us to Ann Telanes, who had worked at The Washington Post until last Friday, when she quit.
Telanes quit because she submitted an editorial cartoon that showed, among other people, Jeff Bezos, the Washington Post’s owner, in an obsequious position vis-à-vis Donald Trump.
Telnaes told NPR, “I’ve never ever, since I’ve worked for the Post in 2008, been not allowed to comment on certain topics by having cartoons being killed.”
Washington Post opinions editor David Shipley, presumably her boss, told The New York Times that the reason the cartoon was rejected was because “we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”
Reporting about the incident often includes “Pulitzer Prize-winning” to modify Telanes’s name, as though this elevates the contretemps to Major National Issue status.
The Pulitzer Prizes were established through an endowment in Joseph Pulitzer’s will; they are meant to honor excellence in journalism.
Which is somewhat — no, fully — ironic inasmuch as Pulitzer made his fortune through yellow journalism. Yellow journalism opts for the “wow!” at the expense of the true.
Truth, justice and the American way? Phooey!
Clearly Telanes has skills.
But there are a couple things about this that need to be considered.
- While she may be a highly talented cartoonist, anyone who is in the creative space knows that getting things killed by someone who has responsibility for it — either a boss or a client — is a fairly common thing. That she hasn’t had anything killed for 17 years is astonishing.
- That she has been honored with a Pulitzer and that her award is called out by some outlets makes this seem all the more extreme. It isn’t. A friend of mine has a Pulitzer. While he is an immensely talented writer and reporter, not everything he does is worthy of being chiseled in granite.
Let’s posit that Shipley is not being entirely forthcoming about the reason why he killed the cartoon. (I actually think that his explanation is the case, but that’s not so titillating.)
Let’s say that he killed it because it makes Bezos look bad.
While there are levels upon levels between the two, Bezos is ultimately Shipley’s boss. Shipley doesn’t want to piss off the boss. Period.
Is this an attack on the First Amendment?
Well, this gets to the point that Bezos owns it. This isn’t some sort of public-interest operation that is independent from all considerations other than abiding by the law.
He bought it for purposes of ROI.
Simply consider this: Why would Bezos want something he owns to make fun of him?
I’ve never had a boss that paid me to publicly humiliate him or her.
Is it a bad thing that Bezos owns The Washington Post?
Some might argue that it is, if the newspaper is going to “cave” to the Trump administration. But is it better that he does and that it exists than if he didn’t and it ceased to exist?
While Bezos is the owner, in a sense he is also the customer for what Shipley and (formerly) Telanes produce: he buys work from them.
Even if Bezos had no idea of the cartoon and subsequent controversy, Shipley probably knows what lines can or cannot be crossed before the customer becomes concerned.
Meta’s (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) Mark Zuckerburg, Apple’s Tim Cook, and other executives have all ponied up cash for the Trump inauguration. This is a business decision they are making. Bezos contributed, too. Again, probably because it is a business decision. Will they all have better chances of making more money with Trump at least not feeling completely negative toward them (although this is undoubtedly a fool’s errand as his feelings about people lack any consistency: just think of all of the people who were in his first administration who went from being the best people to being losers)? Maybe.
The cartoon was spiked.
While some would like to clutch their proverbial pearls and think this is tantamount to a constitutional crisis, it is really about business.
Whether it is what Shipley said about avoiding repetitiveness or as speculated here it is about not pissing off the boss, it is all the concern of a product in the capitalist market, which The Washington Post is, not more than that.
Macaulay is pundit-at-large.