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chairman donald trumpis destroying white HouseThe East Wing move to build the ballroom has put some news organizations following the story in an awkward position, given that the project’s contributors also include corporate owners — and their reporters are covering it vigorously.
comcastwhose owner nbc news And MSNBC has faced on-air criticism from some of the liberal cable channel’s personalities for its donations. Amazon, whose founder jeff bezos The owner of The Washington Post is another donor. A day after critics noted its omission, the newspaper editorialized in favor of Trump’s project and pointed to the Bezos connection.
This is not the first time since Trump’s re-election that the interests of journalists at outlets that are a small part of a corporate titan’s portfolio have clashed with those of the owners. The Walt Disney Company and Paramount have both settled lawsuits with Trump rather than defend ABC News and CBS News in court.
Former NBC “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd said, “This is Trump’s Washington.” “None of this helps the reputation of the news organizations owned by these companies, because it compromises everyone else.”
The companies have not disclosed how much they donated, or why.
None of the individuals and corporations identified as donors by the White House have publicly disclosed how much was given, although a $22 million Google donation was disclosed in a court filing. Comcast wouldn’t say Friday why it gave in, though some MSNBC commentators sought to fill in the blanks.
MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle said the donations should be of concern to Americans, “because there is no company that is just writing a check out of goodwill.”
“Those public-facing companies need to know that there is a cost in terms of their reputation with the American people,” Rachel Maddow said on her show this week, specifically citing Comcast. “When they act against American values, against the public interest, there may be a cost to their bottom line because they want to please Trump or buy him off or somehow profit from his authoritarian overthrow of our democracy.”
NBC’s “Nightly News” followed up on October 22 with a story on the East Wing demolition, which reporter Gabe Gutierrez said was paid for by private donors, “among them NBC’s parent company Comcast.”
Andrew Tyndall, head of ADT Research, said “Nightly News” spent a total of five minutes on the story that week, half the time of ABC’s “World News Tonight,” although NBC had already vacated its Tuesday newscast for NBA coverage. There is no evidence that Comcast tried to influence NBC’s coverage in any way; Todd said the corporation’s leaders have no history of doing so. A Comcast spokesman had no comment.
Todd has spoken out against his bosses at NBC News in the past, but he said he doubts they would have done so in this case, partly because Comcast has not explained why the contributions were made. “By renovating the White House you can defend that it is contributing to the United States of America,” he said.
More troubling, he said, is the perception that Comcast CEO Brian Roberts had to do this to curry favor with the Trump administration. In a Truth Social post in April, Trump called Comcast and Roberts “an insult to the integrity of broadcasting!!!” The President cited the company’s ownership of MSNBC and NBC News.
Roberts may need his help. Stories this week revealed that Comcast may be interested in buying all or part of Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal that would require government approval.
The White House cannot be a ‘museum of the past’
The Post’s editorial last weekend was an eye-opener, even for a class that has taken a conservative turn since Bezos directed him to focus on protecting individual liberty and the free market. The October 25 editorial was unsigned, indicating it was the newspaper’s official position, and was titled “In Defense of the White House Ballroom.”
The Post said the ballroom is a necessary addition and that although Trump is pushing it “in the most troubling way”, it would not have been completed during his tenure if he had gone through the traditional approval process.
“The White House cannot simply become a museum of the past,” the post read. “Like America, it must evolve with the times to maintain its greatness. Strong leaders reject calcification. In this way, Trump’s undertaking is a hit across the bow at NIMBYs everywhere.”
Sharing a copy of the editorial on social media, White House press secretary Carolyn Leavitt wrote that it was “the first dose of common sense I’ve seen from legacy media on this story.”
In contrast, The New York Times has not taken an editorial stance for or against the project. It has run a handful of opinion columns: Ross Douthat described Trump’s move as necessary given the potential red tape, while Maureen Dowd said it was “an unacceptable, unhistorical, disgusting destruction of the East Wing”.
In a social media post later Saturday, Columbia University journalism professor Bill Gruskin noted the absence of any mention of Bezos in the Post editorial and said he had written to a Post spokesperson about it. Gruskin said that in a “stealth edit” that included no clarification, a paragraph about private donors, including Amazon, was added the next day. “Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post,” the newspaper said.
Olivia Peterson, the spokeswoman to whom he wrote, did not immediately respond to a message from The Associated Press.
In a story last week, NPR reported that the ballroom editorial was one of three that the Post wrote in the past two weeks on a matter in which Bezos had a financial or corporate interest, regardless of his personal interests.
In a public appearance last December, Bezos admitted that he was a “terrible boss” for the post in terms of the appearance of the conflict. The Amazon founder said, “A pure newspaper owner who only owned one newspaper and did nothing else would probably be a much better owner from this perspective.”
Gruskin said in an interview that as an owner, Bezos has every right to influence the Post’s editorial policy. But he said it is important for readers to know his involvement in the East Wing story. That said, they may reject the editorial because of the contradiction, or conclude that “the editorial is so well-argued, what I just read has a lot of credibility.”
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David Bauder writes for the AP about the intersection of media and entertainment. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social