On Morning Joe today, they were talking about news companies appeasing Trump.  As Mike Barnacle put it, “the blanket of fear” that President Trump has spread over everything, including the media, “is the largest story of our times.”

Then Joe talked about the fact that news companies are part of mega-conglomerates that are less concerned with actual news than with things like the larger company’s ability to guide the federal government into a successful permission slip for a merger with another mega-conglomerate.

I agree.

Donny Deutsch added the following, “And if you’re a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you say to yourself, forget your personal beliefs, I have a fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders, this is the reality, this is the world I’m living in, this is the way to justify it, and if you’re running a company, you do have that responsibility and it’s just kind of a state of where we are right now.”

I do not agree. 

And I am more than a little tired of people justifying bad behavior in the name of the responsibility of bowing to the almighty dollar.

This disgraceful cowing to King Trump is indeed fostered by the fact that most of the news media companies no longer represent only news media.  The choice to fall in line for Trump, to let our democracy slide away, little by little, decision by decision is dangerous.  And to justify these betrayals of the people’s trust in the absolutely-necessary-for-democracy fourth estate, for money reasons, is an abomination on our moral fiber, and on our ability to hold onto our democracy.

It is interesting to note that the person, in my estimation, who brought up this desperately needed way to look at it, was Eugene Robinson, who is not any long working for Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post.  He has moved to The Atlantic, which does not have conglomerate issues, or a fear of losing millions or billions on a deal with the federal government.  They do news, period.  (By the way, Eugene looked happier than I’ve seen him since before his wife passed away two years ago.)

Eugene said, “Yes, on the one hand, there is fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders, on the other hand, that could be seen as a very short term interpretation of one’s fiduciary responsibility because after all you would think that these conglomerates have a real interest  in the rule of law, which has allowed them to amass these hundreds of billions of dollars.”

That’s the kind of appreciation of the bigger picture that we need more commentators, and citizens, to have.

The blithe excuses made for Republicans who did not stand up to Trump early on because they were afraid of not being reelected was nauseating.  This simple, shallow, greedy response to something as big as losing our democracy needs to be called into question on a daily basis.  So what if they don’t get reelected?!

We excuse people’s greed and selfishness at our peril.