Trump's the new dictator. Somebody's got your back.

The Democrats spent $1 billion or so to stop him, and didn't. But you've got somebody to fight to the death for free

You probably know that we’re all going to need friends next year when things change a bit.

Fortunately, there is a group of people who have gone the extra mile for their fellow Americans for a long time. They’ve died for us, when necessary.

Joe Alex Morris Jr., a veteran Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent, was one of them. He was killed while covering Iran’s Islamic Revolution. 

You’ve probably never heard his name before. But right now, when all news organization representatives don’t seem to share the kind of guts he had, I’d rather you know his name than some others.

I think it should be understood that there are a lot of courageous individuals in the newspaper business. Maybe they don’t include Patrick Soon-Shiong, an L.A. Times boss Morris never lived to see. Soon-Shiong and Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, fled the battlefield, deserting endorsements of Kamala Harris in the most critical election of our times.

So it goes.

Keep in mind, however, no matter how craven they are, these two are much more powerful than about 99% of Americans. And they’re afraid.

You’re probably not too fearful of the kind of things that frightens them. But there’s other stuff.

Bezos battled Trump over a $10 billion military cloud-computing contract in 2019. At one point, Amazon publicly stated, “President Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to use his position as President and Commander in Chief to interfere with government functions – including federal procurements – to advance his personal agenda. The preservation of public confidence in the nation’s procurement process requires discovery and supplementation of the administrative record, particularly in light of President Trump’s order to ‘screw Amazon.’ The question is whether the President of the United States should be allowed to use the budget of the DoD to pursue his own personal and political ends.”

Amazon eventually wrenched the contract, reworked, away from Microsoft. Bezos in 2022 snatched back the whole job, and shared it with three other tech giants, including Microsoft. So he knows how to fight with Trump — with a boatload of lawyers.

But it was fittingly a struggle on The Cloud – a level so high that only guys like him can battle without falling to the Earth.

Not you. Not alone.

You need the rank-and-file professional media, owned by him or not. The people of the presses are everyone’s major defenders against the establishment, including the owners of their own workplaces. They duke it out with everybody.

So you should know that journalists, even those with the Post and L.A. Times, are willing to fight and die for you, and for the right to know.

At least four L.A. Times journalists have been killed on the job over the years. None of them got back aches from carrying their wallets around. Only one was well-known outside the business.

That was columnist Ruben Salazar, killed by an L.A. County Sheriff’s tear gas bomb during a Hispanic Vietnam War protest. 

He became famous, mostly for his advocacy in the Mexican-American community, only after his death.

A single bullet fired through a Tehran window took Morris out in 1979 as he was peering between the Venetian blinds. Young reporter William Branigan was standing right behind him.

Branigan wrote later that his mentor had told him, “It’s not the bullet with your name on it that you worry about. It’s the one marked ‘to whom it may concern.’”

It wasn’t quite as random as that sounds, however. Morris – and Branigin, too, increasingly – had been taking big risks for years, just in the assignments he accepted. Morris covered conflicts including the 1956 Suez Crisis, the 1967 6-Day War in Israel, the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 15-year Lebanese Civil War that began in 1975. 

Morris wasn’t reckless, but he was brave, Branigan wrote on the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

“[H]e chronicled ‘the downtrodden, the manipulated, the cannon fodder’ with devotion and honesty on numerous dangerous assignments, said his close friend and veteran (Washington) Post foreign correspondent Jonathan C. Randal. ‘If he was ever physically afraid, I never knew it.’

‘“Joe Alex was the epitome of Hemingway’s phrase: ‘grace under pressure,’ another friend wrote to the slain correspondent’s wife, Ulla, on the day of his death.”

Morris, 51, a cancer survivor, left a wife and three kids.

American journalists continue to die for the truth. David P. Gilkey and James Patrick Hunter were among those who never came back from the war in Afghanistan. Michael Thomas Kelly and Steven Vincent died in Iraq.

James Edwin Richards, Bill Biggart, Glen Pettit, Robert Stevens, Chauncey Bailey, Alison Parker, Adam Ward, Zachary Stoner, Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Wendi Winters, Aviva Okeson-Haberma, Sierra Jenkins, Jeff German and Dylan Lyons were all killed stateside while on the job for various organizations since 2000.

The most recent on-duty murder of a Times journalist was of Dial Torgerson in 1983. He was a dedicated and resourceful foreign correspondent who had in 1979 broken the story of the cover-up of an Israeli Defense Forces atrocity during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon the year before.

An IDF lieutenant named Daniel Pinto had tortured and strangled four Lebanese. Israeli Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan had claimed it was much more innocent than that, and got Pinto’s sentence reduced from eight years to two. He masked his machinations in IDF censorship, some of the strictest in the world.

Torgerson fled the Middle East and IDF information suppression to file the story in London. Thousands of Israelis soon learned of Eitan’s deceit and poured into the streets, shaking the government.

The Israelis couldn’t stop Torgerson then, but somebody did four years later, as he was covering the long war in Nicaragua between the then-elected Sandinistas and the U.S.-backed Contras. Driving through Honduras along the Nicaraguan border, an explosion blew his Toyota Corolla into the air, cutting him in half, severing his limbs. Richard Cross, a free-lance photographer in the car, was killed, too.

Who did it? Torgerson’s wife of 10 months, the great writer Lynda Schuster, wrote later, “Subsequently the Honduran government and the embassy decided the occupants of the white Toyota were indeed killed by an exploding landmine – planted by Nicaraguan soldiers. But other military analysts, who saw the photographs, believe the charges were of a type used only by the Contras, the U.S.-supported guerrillas. I will probably never know the truth.”

Across the country, at The Washington Post, some of the courage displayed in the past is closer to the top, and much more well-known. After all, it’s been in the movies.

On June 13, 1971, The New York Times published a story about The Pentagon Papers, the huge State Department compendium of documents that detailed significant lies told by the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations in escalating the war in Vietnam. President Richard M. Nixon wasn’t implicated, but he and his bunch feared that their own dirty little secrets would be at risk if they let it out.

The Nixon administration filed for an injunction against The New York Times two days later. The following day, Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee obtained a chunk of the papers, and asked Katharine Graham if he could publish them. 

Katharine Graham, Ben Bradlee

Graham was the only woman to control a major American publishing company. She had taken over when her husband Phil Graham killed himself in 1963.

She knew that Post businesses, like television stations, would be threatened by a famously revengeful Nixon. WaPo was going public, and this could endanger the stock offering.

And many readers might call the Post a stable of traitors, draining circulation. 

Her journalists said backing off would be gutless. Her lawyers said publishing would be foolhardy and recommended against it.

That’s unusual for media attorneys. They’re pretty much a damn-the-torpedoes gang unless things are very bleak.

She said she “took a big gulp and said, ‘Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Let’s go. Let’s publish.”

As the Post was going after more injustice during the Watergate scandal and cover-up, it became evident just how right she, and Bradlee, were about expecting attack.

Nixon was heard to say on a Sept. 15, 1972, White House tape, “The main thing is the Post is going to have damnable, damnable problems out of this one. They have a television station … and they’re going to have to get it renewed.”

Two weeks later, Post reporter Carl Bernstein told John Mitchell,  then heading the Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President, that he had a statement from CREEP that Mitchell, when still U.S. Attorney General, had controlled a slush fund used for gathering intelligence on Democrats. Mitchell reacted on a late-night phone call.

“All that crap you’re putting in the paper? It’s all been denied. You tell your publisher, tell Katie Graham she’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published.”

It was indeed a big fat risk. The Washington Post Company lost half its value for a while.

June 15, in his first days as a U.S. District Judge, Murray Gurfein granted only a temporary injunction, leaving the call to the U.S. Supreme Court.

He wasn’t going to make it easy for The Supremes. "The security of the Nation is not at the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions,” he maintained. “A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know."

U.S. District Judge Murray Gurfein

On June 26, 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court gave the Times and Post the go-ahead.

It seems harder for a media company to luck into finding a newly-minted U.S. judge of Gurfein’s mettle today. Just as likely, a new judge like Aileen Cannon slithering through the Florida swamps in her fresh blue robes.

Trump put Cannon on the federal bench, and she rewarded him by dismissing his documents case. That case of casual treason.

She continues to insert herself into his cases as the appellate court tries to contain her. And there are some she’s assigned to that she insists on keeping no matter what.

Last week, she refused to recuse herself from the criminal case against the man accused of trying to assassinate Donald Trump at his golf course, maintaining she doesn’t care about the “political consequences of my rulings.”

Trump is blatantly threatening media organizations right now. He means it. 

At a rally Sunday, he remarked, “I have a piece of glass over here, and I don’t have a piece of glass there, and I have this piece of glass here,” to protect him from bullets.

“All we really have over here is the fake news, right? And to get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news,” Trump said. “And I don’t mind that so much.”

So Trump-installed judges know right where he stands. And, depending on their ethics, where they themselves stand.

Trump got 234 federal judges confirmed in four years, about a quarter of the total. How many might be like Gurfein and how many like Cannon? How many like the three Trump put on the Supreme Court? 

On Halloween, Trump filed what would seem to be a ridiculous complaint against CBS regarding 60 Minutes’ editing of a Kamala Harris interview.

He’s trying to give the lawsuit viability by filing it in the Northern District of Texas, where one of his nominated judges has to get it. If Cannon’s scenario is repeated, the suit might have traction.

And as Trump has won the presidency and the Senate, the judge-confirming body, he’ll make as many more biased jurists out of shysters found under rocks without anybody to stop him. 

So Soon-Shiong and Bezos do have something to worry about with a vengeful Trump who might have the power of the presidency behind him. 

I don’t sympathize. They’re not protecting their newspapers, they’re protecting enormous businesses outside their newspapers. They’re trying to hold on to the status quo as if they were in trouble even though they don’t have enough pockets for all their money.

Bezos said when he bought the Post in 2013, “While I hope no one ever threatens to put one of my body parts through a wringer, if they do, thanks to Mrs. Graham’s example, I’ll be ready.”

Big talk.

I do give him some credit. While L.A. Times is cutting back foreign and national coverage, the Post retains 21 foreign bureaus, one of the biggest international journalistic efforts of any news organization on Earth. And there was a recent promise to expand. 

But the Post closed its bureaus in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York in 2009. And the L.A. Times closed their Chicago office long ago, too. There’s a Washington, D.C. bureau, and that’s it for any distance from the Beltway.

The Post is not all that interested in you, if you live some place like Chicago, where I am. 

We’ve had our own endorsement issues here. Almost every paper has, and it has to be said.

I was a reporter and columnist for the Pioneer Press, subsidiary papers of the Chicago Sun-Times, in early 2012 when it was decided that all the papers were to stop endorsing candidates. 

Unlike how the Post and the Times bailed on already-written endorsements of a presidential candidate, the Sun-Times just created a philosophy of bailing on everybody at once. 

“We have come to doubt the value of candidate endorsements by this newspaper or any newspaper, especially in a day when a multitude of information sources allow even a casual voter to be better informed than ever before,” said the Sun-Times.

This was untrue. A major reason for suspension of endorsements was that they often militated against the conservative predilections of owners of publications. That’s who the S-T’s owners were then.

So reporters pivoted to just help candidates fill up matrices with political-issue information. Let readers decide, and we’ll stay out of it.

Pioneer was still making money, though not like before the Internet. But the Sun-Times was draining us, and we didn’t have enough staff to cover hundreds of endorsement interviews and conferences without letting other stuff go. 

The editors were relieved at first, but the issue dumps didn’t really replace endorsements, at Pioneer or most of the other places they’re used now. They’re often just compendiums of candidate subterfuge. 

Many of the more talented local candidates were peeved. Now all the competitors looked a lot alike. It got harder to beat a candidate with a constituency, like a guy running for a city council who coached Little League and played park district golf.

In 2014, the Sun-Times editorial page, without saying it was an endorsement, per se, ran a piece that extolled the graces of gubernatorial hopeful Bruce Rauner. Just before running, Rauner, an investor, had sold his stake in the paper.

Ill. Gov. Bruce Rauner

And the S-T’s promise to ban board members from donating to campaigns was broken, too.

Ick.

Before the day was out, the company was back to endorsing.

For a while now, the S-T has been back to non-endorsing, however. It’s a little frustrating. In my local Chicago school board race, three of the four candidates appeared pretty much the same in mini-stories.

You want more than selfless heroism from the media? You want the level of clerical pre-election diligence necessary for endorsements and such? Buy a subscription. There’s no free lunch, asshole.

I’ve told you the truth about all this. I try never to lie. That’s my training. 

Journalists try to tell the truth, kick ass, then move on.

They know that coverage of the Nov. 5 election will be one of the first things forgotten about it. That’s one of the hallmarks of journalism, in general. No matter what it’s about, it’s usually ephemeral. 

Sometimes, fading memory is a blessing. Schuster said she needed 13 years to write about her husband’s murder. 

Near the end of her 1996 essay, she wrote, “Not long after the funeral, Dial’s death ceased to be news. Benigno Aquino, the Filipino political dissident, was shot dead on the tarmac at Manila airport by government soldiers. Two hundred and forty-three U.S. Marines were blown up in Beirut. American troops invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada. The world, in other words, moved on. And so, eventually, would I.”

Those tragedies once loomed large in our consciousnesses, but seldom come to mind now. New ones replace them.

Earth’s awfulness goes on, but we forget much of it, and certainly the way it’s written or spoken about. Days after anyone reads this, Morris, Torgerson, Savala and Gurfein will cease to occupy our thoughts. Maybe even Graham and Bradlee and Bernstein. 

But don’t forget Soon-Shiong and Bezos. And Trump. You need to keep an eye on them.