#Will Lewis

[justinspoliticalcorner]

The choice for president has seldom been starker. On one side is Donald Trump, a felonious and twice-impeached conman, raring to finish off the job of dismantling American democracy. On the other is Kamala Harris, a capable and experienced leader who stands for traditional democratic principles. Nevertheless – and shockingly – the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post have decided to sit this one out. Both major news organizations, each owned by a billionaire, announced this week that their editorial boards would not make a presidential endorsement, despite their decades-long traditions of doing so. There’s no other way to see this other than as an appalling display of cowardice and a dereliction of their public duty. At the Los Angeles Times, the decision rests clearly with Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the ailing paper in 2018, raising great hopes of a resurgence there. At the Post (where I was the media columnist from 2016 to 2022), the editorial page editor David Shipley said he owned the decision, but it clearly came from above – specifically from the publisher, Will Lewis, the veteran of Rupert Murdoch’s media properties, hand-picked last year by the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos. Was Bezos himself the author of this abhorrent decision? Maybe not, but it could not have come as a surprise. All of this may look like nonpartisan neutrality, or be intended to, but it’s far from that. For one thing, it’s a shameful smackdown of both papers’ reporting and opinion-writing staffs who have done important work exposing Trump’s dangers for many years. It’s also a strong statement of preference. The papers’ leaders have made it clear that they either want Trump (who is, after all, a boon to large personal fortunes) or that they don’t wish to risk the ex-president’s wrath and retribution if he wins. If the latter was a factor, it’s based on a shortsighted judgment, since Trump has been a hazard to press rights and would only be emboldened in a second term. [...] Some news organizations upheld their duty and remained true to their mission. The New York Times endorsed Harris last month, calling her “the only patriotic choice for president”, and writing that Trump “has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest”. The Guardian, too, strongly endorsed Harris, saying she would “unlock democracy’s potential, not give in to its flaws”, and calling Trump a “transactional and corrupting politician”.

Margaret Sullivan at The Guardian on the cowardly abdication of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times by refusing to endorse a Presidential candidate (10.25.2024).

The egregious and cowardly actions done by both the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times deciding to sit out the Presidential endorsements process this election is craven and cowardly, as both papers were set to endorse Kamala Harris (D). Even the New York Times, for all their faults, got it right by endorsing Kamala Harris.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

David Rowe

* * * *

Good morning. This is what fascism looks like.

Lucian K. Truscott IV

Oct 26, 2024

It crept in overnight, while we were sleeping.  Fascism showed its face not with jackboots and concentration camps…not yet, anyway…but rather as just another day in Capitalist America.  Two major media companies, the Washington Post and the LA Times, made decisions to capitulate to the man they fear will be elected president before a single vote has been counted.  They decided not to run editorials endorsing their preferred candidate for president, Kamala Harris, because the owners of the companies, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, are afraid if they anger Donald Trump, he will hit them where it hurts:  In their pocketbooks.

Bezos sees himself as particularly vulnerable to the wrath of Donald Trump.  Before he left office in 2021, Trump appointed a puppet to run the United States Postal Service (USPS):  Louis DeJoy, a long-time Republican fund-raiser and major Trump contributor who was appointed as one of three deputy finance chairmen of the Republican National Committee shortly after Trump took office in 2017.  The USPS prioritizes package delivery for Amazon and sets the price it pays for the service.  Trump has threatened Bezos with jacking up his Amazon delivery prices before, in 2018.  The Postmaster General was then Megan Brennan, appointed during the Obama administration, who resisted Trump’s demand to raise delivery prices, but such resistance is unlikely to happen if Trump is elected and DeJoy is there to carry out his wishes.

This is the way it happens.  An autocrat like Donald Trump, with his history of impulsive decisions and threats against perceived enemies, has two billionaires cowering in fear, and he didn’t even have to pick up the phone.

Fascism is not an all-at-once transformation.  We’ve already had our Brownshirt day, on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump’s MAGA army stormed the Capitol waving Confederate and Nazi flags and assaulting police officers and attempting to hunt down and kill Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, all of it, we now know, with Trump cheering them on from the White House.  Fascism uses symbols – MAGA this time, Swastika last time – to rally followers, and then it feeds them fear and lies and the demonization of minorities and others perceived as not like us.

I don’t even know that you can name the period of fascism we’re in right now.  Giving it a name doesn’t matter.  What matters is that it is happening right in front of our eyes, and little if nothing is being done about it, other than fascism finally being called out by political leaders such as Kamala Harris and other Democrats, and some news organizations have at last crossed the Rubicon of using the “F” word of fascism and the “H” word of Hitler in the same sentences with Donald Trump.

What can we do?  We can all vote for Kamala Harris and whatever Democrat is running for whatever office in your district and state. 

Journalists everywhere, but particularly at the Washington Post and LA Times, have a crucial role to play right now.  It is journalism about Donald Trump’s crimes and political extremism that has revealed him as not just a totalitarian politician, but as a man consumed with a fascist lust for absolute power.  It has been people like Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson who have put Trump’s rise in historical perspective and compared what is happening right now in this country to what happened nearly a century ago in Germany with the rise of Hitler, when German corporate titans of the day bowed down to him in fear. 

Now the reporters and editors at the Post and the LA Times can help show the world what contemporary fascism looks like by refusing to countenance the craven subservience of their owners.  There are leaders at the Washington Post, in particular Bob Woodward and Eugene Robinson and David Ignatius and Ruth Marcus and Karen Tumulty, who can show the way for their colleagues by leading a newspaper-wide walk out.  With what we are seeing every day from Donald Trump, they can call it a “Strike Against Fascism,” or “A Call to Arms.”

You might accuse me as a freelancer of not taking seriously the possibility that people at both papers might lose their jobs for leading or participating in a walk-out.  But people have already resigned in protest at both papers.  This isn’t a time to show fear.  It’s a time to stand up to power. The writers and editors have a lot to lose, but they have already been treated as expendable, and they’ve been told they are in danger of losing their jobs anyway.

The guy Bezos put in as publisher of the Post, former Murdoch hitman Will Lewis, bluntly told Post staffers when he was appointed, “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”   He could have been talking as well to the staffs of the New York Times and the three major television networks and cable news like CNN and MSNBC.  All of them are in an existential crisis at this crucial moment in our history.  Newspapers are closing across the country.  Television networks and cable news shows are hemorrhaging viewers. 

The arrival of Bezos and Soon-Shiong to “rescue” two major American newspapers has shown us how hollow were any hopes that billionaires will or even can make a difference in today’s economic and political climate. 

But workers can make a difference.  With ten days to go until the election, let’s see if a day with no newspaper in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles can make a difference.  Maybe a strike will teach reporters and editors and the rest of us that we are beyond the point of being able to affect our lives and the lives of others.  Or maybe rallying against the fascism that has been stealing our national politics will help to send more people to the polls to vote for Kamala Harris on November 5.

I do know this:  When you are bullied, you STAND UP or you lose your self-respect and your dignity and your right to life. The fascism of Donald Trump would take away all three.

Lucian Truscott Newsletter

[head-post]

British police examining allegations Washington Post publisher purposely deleted emails in phone hacking scandal

A special investigation team of British police is looking into allegations that Will Lewis, now chief executive of the Washington Post, oversaw the deliberate destruction of emails at Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper business when he worked at the company 13 years ago.

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a victim of tabloid hacking, said in an article in The Guardian:

Blazoned across the top of every edition of the Washington Post is the statement, “Democracy dies in darkness.” But what if the publisher himself is a master of the dark arts?

As first reported by The Guardian, the police commissioner wrote to Brown that a review of the case requested by the former prime minister would be handled by a “special investigation team.” According to Brown, this team “reports to the central special offences directorate.”

The investigation poses the most serious threat to Lewis’s position as editor-in-chief of the Washington Post, one of the most respected institutions of American journalism. Since taking the post in January, Lewis has been haunted by allegations related to the years-old scandal. He has previously strongly denied wrongdoing but declined to comment through a spokesman.

News UK, where Lewis worked, said in a statement that Brown was “trying to persuade [police] to take one side or the other in the public debate about media liability” and to help plaintiffs suing the company. British police told CNN, “There is no criminal investigation underway at this time.”

Deleted emails

The investigation centres on events in 2011. The Murdoch’s tabloids had for years hacked into the phone records and otherwise illegally obtained the personal records of celebrities including Prince Harry, government officials and ordinary people in search of juicy scoops. As private lawsuits piled up, police began investigating.

Soon after joining News UK, Lewis became the police’s chief liaison. Documents filed in lawsuits against News UK show that in July 2011, police questioned Lewis and chief technology officer Paul Cheesbrough about the deletion six months earlier of millions of emails that the plaintiffs suspected contained evidence of crimes.

When police asked why the emails had been deleted, Lewis and Cheesbrough said they were told that Brown and another MP had plotted to pay a former News UK employee to retrieve the emails of its chief executive Rebekah Brooks. Brown and former MP Tom Watson denied there was any such plan.Lewis said, according to police records of that meeting, which were later made public in court:

We got a warning from a source that a current member of staff had got access to Rebekah’s emails and had passed them to Tom WATSON. Then the source came back and said it was a former member of staff and the emails had definitely been passed and that it was controlled by Gordon BROWN. This added to our anxieties. Tom WATSON has been remarkably well-informed on this. We apologise for hiding this piece of work from you.

Apart from a single email sent to Cheesbrough describing the alleged conspiracy, News UK has provided no evidence of the source, much less substantiated the allegations. Cheesbrough is now one of the most senior figures at Murdoch’s Fox Corp. in New York. (A Fox Corp. spokesman referred comment to News UK. Both companies are controlled by the Murdoch family).

False security threat

Lawyers representing a large group of people suing News UK, including Watson, argued in court earlier this week that Lewis “fabricated a false security threat” to justify deleting millions of emails during a police investigation.

Lewis is not a defendant in the claims. In its statement, News UK claims the company believed the security concerns were “genuine” and were not used as an excuse to delete the emails, despite police notes documenting that meeting in July 2011.

The company categorically denies it tried to interfere with or hide evidence from police. News UK also cites a 2015 statement from the Crown Prosecution Service that it found no evidence that the emails were destroyed “to pervert the course of justice.”

A rocky start atop the Post

Late last year, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos appointed Lewis to head the well-known but financially struggling newspaper. Lewis led Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal to a strong position by successfully developing digital subscriptions.

NPR reported the allegations against Lewis in December, a month before Lewis took his new position, which were further detailed in a recent court filing.

Subsequent court developments this spring led the Post to cover the cases itself. Those materials became a point of tension between Lewis and then-executive editor Sally Buzbee. He offered her another role in the newsroom, but she chose to leave.

Brown personally asked the police commissioner in early May to conduct a criminal investigation into Lewis’s role in the deletion of the emails.

Read more HERE

[claypigeonpottery]

a kinetic sculpture by Tim Lewis

I know it’s not pottery but it is sculptural and holy shit

it’s beautiful and disturbing and I feel like I could stumble across this creature in a forest and never be seen again???

[sonysakura]

Mystery Skulls Animated - Ghost (Oct 26th, 2014)

Ten years ago on this day...

[werethropy]

"The nonbinary afab who goes by she/her, dresses femininely, and uses a push-up bra when I—" when you what? What's wrong with her?

Is she not nonbinary enough for you? Is the way she experiences her queerness and how she presents not perfect enough for you? Nonbinary people don't owe you androgyny, right? So why is she the exception? Why does she have to hate herself to appeal to your standards? Why is she any less trans—any less worthy of respect—cause it's "not visible"? Queer solidarity my ass. Don't spout this bullshit on Pride, man.

[trendynewsnow]

Jeff Bezos y la Decisión Histórica del Washington Post sobre Candidatos Presidenciales

Un Giro en la Tradición del Post Una tormenta tropical se acercaba a la costa del golfo de Florida a finales de septiembre, cuando los principales líderes de noticias y opinión de The Washington Post se reunieron en Miami con Jeff Bezos, el multimillonario propietario del periódico. Este encuentro, parte de una serie de reuniones periódicas, se llevó a cabo en un contexto de creciente tensión…

[eroticlamb]

Kinetica Art Fair, 2012, featuring 'Pony' by Tim Lewis  (video source)

edit: i feel the need to specify that this is a robot for everyone who's confused 😭

[stillsuchathing]

The Will Lewis Project

I'm compiling a timeline focused the activities of Will Lewis, former Rupert Murdoch consigliere and current Washington Post publisher.

Why?

Because Lewis' role during a police investigation into phone hacking at various News UK news orgs is being reviewed during a lawsuit against News UK and I wanted a way to track the various phone hacking perpetrators and survivors.

2002 ‘News of the World, Murdoch’s now-defunct tabloid, had in 2002 hacked the voicemail of Millie Dowler, a murdered teenager, deleting messages and misleading the police and her parents. The news turned the slow-burning hacking story into a national outrage. When Murdoch visited the family to apologize, he took Lewis.’ (1)

2006 

Will Lewis made editor of editor of the Daily Telegraph.

‘Most editors would have luxuriated in such a scoop. Yet by the time the expenses story absorbed Britain through the summer of 2009, Lewis had already moved on. He was on a two-month sabbatical, studying for a “mini MBA” at Harvard paid for by the Barclays. Restless, he returned to the paper after the brothers agreed to fund a new “R&D” company run by him as chief executive. He remained editor-in-chief of Telegraph Media.

The plan was to reinvent the Telegraph for the digital age. The unspoken upshot was that Lewis’s success—and future pay—would be attributable to his project’s P&L. He briefed that the future of paper lay in Euston, where he had taken satellite offices across town away from the newsroom. The future approached rapidly when Lewis left three months after the company was incorporated. The Telegraph’s actual chief executive had soured on his plan. He may have facilitated it in the first place to kick Lewis upstairs, then out. Company accounts show Lewis’s dalliance cost the Barclays £3m in 2010.’ (1)

September 2010

Will Lewis joins Rupert Murdoch’s News International

‘In December 2010, an unpublished recording of the cabinet minister, Vince Cable, was stolen from the Telegraph’s servers and leaked to the BBC. Cable could be heard describing himself as “at war with the Murdochs,” revealing quite how antagonistic he was. The revelation forced him to recuse himself from the bid. A more pliable minister took over, increasing Murdoch’s odds of approval.

Seven months later private investigators hired by the Telegraph reported that, based on telephone records, they had a “strong suspicion” Lewis was “involved in orchestrating the leak,” or theft, from the Telegraph’s servers. The recording had been leaked to the BBC’s Robert Peston, an ally of Lewis at the FT and friend to this day. Lewis later refused to address the allegation, claiming protection of sources.’ (1)

It is alleged that Lewis took part in the destruction of 30m company emails on three occasions over six months, deliberately wiping out evidence that could have incriminated senior executives. This was allegedly done despite News International having been told to preserve evidence, first by lawyers acting for victims of hacking and later by the police. (1)

Eight filing cabinets full of documents, taken from the offices of the News of the World, are also alleged to have disappeared after being entrusted to Lewis’s care. (1)

The police had no knowledge of such payments to police before News International alerted them. Murdoch laterdisowned Lewis’s actions when he met with Sun journalists in 2013. But Lewis’s approach had an inevitable upside for Murdoch. It dragged attention away from hacking (which Murdoch has since spent $1.5 billion settling in legal fees, damages, and estimated losses). Lewis’s friends say that he was simply draining the swamp. “I know that Will felt at the time 100 per cent morally justified in playing the part that he did,” says one of them.

For two years Lewis served Murdoch at every turn, even at the cost of his own relationships or reputation. In that time he went from being Britain’s most feted journalist to an executive who couldn’t step foot in a tabloid newsroom. (1)

2012

Will Lewis was named chief creative officer of News Corp, a “totally made-up job,” as an executive puts it. (1)

2014

Finally, in 2014, he was rewarded with six years in power, as CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal, one of the most prized media jobs in Murdoch’s news empire. Crucially the job was not in London. He was empowered in a city where his checkered two-year tenure at News International didn’t matter. (1)

2020

These claims of a corporate cover up, and any part Lewis played in it, were not known at the time. They have surfaced slowly, as Prince Harry’s case against Murdoch has wound its way through the London courts. Lewis was named only in 2020. (1)

Communications and consultancy firm, WJL Partners launched (6)

2021

Lewis with co-founders launched The News Movement, an English-language news outlet with a strong focus on social media (2)

June 2023

Former Daily Telegraph editor William Lewis has received a knighthood in Boris Johnson‘s controversial resignation honours list. (3)

2024

Various v NGN Amendment Final Judgment with Schedule

Attacking a reporter who has the goods also has a way of attracting additional reporters to the story, something Lewis must know.

Another day, another terrible story involving Washington Post publisher and CEO Will Lewis.

For ordinary people, tabloid journalism is often just a source of tawdry diversion. But for political and business elites, control over gossip can be a source of real power. 

David Folkenflik, NPR: "The publisher of the Washington Post is currently under criminal investigation."

Sources

1 - Billionaires, Secrets, Zegnas: Will Lewis’ Thirst for Power

2 - The News Movement: creating a social-first outlet with a firm focus on young audiences | Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (ox.ac.uk)

3  - MPs’ expenses scandal editor William Lewis knighted by Boris Johnson

4 - Various v NGN Amendment Final Judgment with Schedule

5 - https://steveschmidt.substack.com/p/the-american-media-crisis

6 - Washington Post publisher Will Lewis retains links to PR firm that bears his initials

[zanephillips]

Jason Lewis and Josh Kelly Midnight, Texas 2.06 "No More Mr. Nice Kai"

[toasttdoods]

Someday I wanna do a portrait mod hehe

[thoughtlessarse]

For much of his five-month tenure as publisher of The Washington Post, former Murdoch tabloid impresario Will Lewis has been plunged into the seamy saga of his Fleet Street past—chiefly the role he played, during his tenure at The Telegraph, in Britain’s long-running phone-hacking scandal. Now a new report from The Guardian suggests that Lewis’s unseemly exploits went further than that: He also allegedly turned the same sleazy skill set to the political advantage of his longtime crony in the corridors of Tory power, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. After Lewis had wound up his tenure as publisher of the Murdoch prestige property The Wall Street Journal, he settled into a role as an informal adviser to Johnson’s government, helping to steer a consortium of flacks dedicated to saving Johnson’s comically scandal-ridden premiership. Lewis and his colleagues worked under a code name seemingly lifted from an Armando Iannucci production: Operation Save Big Dog. Guardian reporters Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Anna Isaac cite three unnamed sources close to Johnson’s government who say that Lewis told Johnson officials to scrub their digital communications in the wake of the disclosure that Johnson and his inner circle had defied Covid lockdown restrictions by drinking and partying in luxe venues. The scandal badly damaged Johnson’s already flailing government, and Lewis reportedly sought to stanch the bleeding by personally urging staffers to disappear WhatsApp and text messages pertaining to the episode—advice that contradicted a December 2021 e-mail directive from Johnson officials to save all such communications as a civil service investigation proceeded. Representatives for both Lewis and Johnson denied these claims to The Guardian. As well they might. It’s a poor look for the successor of Katharine Graham—the former Post publisher who defied the strong-arm press-suppression tactics of the Nixon White House during the Pentagon Papers and Watergate scandals—to be purportedly engineering a cover-up on behalf of a publicly humiliated political leader. Yet such overtures appear to be second nature to Lewis, who previously arranged for Johnson to assume a cushy sinecure as a columnist at The Telegraph in 2008—a gig that paid £250,000 a year, or more than 100,000 quid more than Johnson pulled down at his then–day job as mayor of London.

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[monotcchi]

slowly getting back to sdv again

[thehopefulquotes]

The bravest thing I ever did was continuing my life when I wanted to die.

Juliette Lewis