Biden, in Farewell Address, Mentions the Editors
Plus, surprise follow-up on anti-capitalist Columbia law professor

President Biden gave a farewell address to the nation last night, and he mentioned us—The Editors—by name. Well, sort of, at least. “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit,” Biden said.
Speaking for The Editors, contrary to Biden’s claim, we aren’t “disappearing,” we are right here with the trustworthy information to pierce through the nonsense—including Biden’s own. The Free Press isn’t crumbling, either; it’s prospering, and we don’t mind at all being mentioned by Biden in the same breath with that publication.
In fairness to Biden and in all seriousness, his concerns about trustworthy information and analysis, or the lack of it, while surely somewhat different from my own, probably are also at least somewhat similar to some of the ones that partly motivate this project. The veracity crisis is a bipartisan, consensus issue—when Trump talks about “fake news” and when Biden talks about “lies,” or when I ask “where are the editors?”—we all are expressing similar frustrations. The devil is in the details. My hope and bet is that in the long run, the most power and profit comes with being the most trustworthy source of information. It’s possible I have an overly rosy perspective.
Biden’s lament for disappearing editors wasn’t the only part of his farewell address that made me chuckle. He warned of “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultra-wealthy people…an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy…a tech-industrial complex.” He said, “We need to get dark money — that’s that hidden funding behind too many campaigns’ contributions — we need to get it out of our politics.”
This comes after an election in which Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Laurene Powell Jobs (Apple), and Alexander Soros all reportedly made vast donations in support of Vice President Harris and the Democrats. If there’s indeed an “oligarchy,” it’s not just on the Donald Trump and Elon Musk side of things, and you kind of wonder where Biden was in terms of denouncing it when Bloomberg and Gates were being solicited for the $50 million contributions to back Harris. What was the pitch, exactly? “Hey Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Gates, can you pitch in $50 million each to help us Democrats fight the oligarchy and the tech-industrial complex?”
If Biden really thinks “editors are disappearing,” maybe he means the ones who could have saved him from some of the embarrassment on the way out the door by dialing back some of the more purple prose in his farewell speech.
The curious case of Katherine Franke: Yesterday, in a piece headlined “Columbia Professor Departs With Shot at “Bankers and...Capitalists,” we highlighted an anti-Israel professor at Columbia Law School, Katherine Franke, who, on her way out the door, complained:
As Columbia’s Board of Trustees has become constituted largely by hedge fund managers, investment bankers, and venture capitalists, the university has become more of a real estate holding concern than a non-profit educational institution. With this degradation of the university’s leadership has come, in some cases, an inability to resist pressures placed on the university by outside entities carrying a brief for the destruction of higher education, and in other cases, a shared commitment to a right-wing, and pro-Israel, ideology.
After publishing the piece we learned a bit more about Franke’s family background.
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