Trump can smell weakness – but there is a way to beat his dark arts

Among Elon Musk’s current obsessions is his view that the only place – the only place – where truth can be found is on X, formerly known as Twitter. That need not worry us unduly except that he is said to regard himself as the real vice-president of the United States come next January.

It is clear that he shares with the incoming president a complete and utter contempt for what we are nowadays obliged to call legacy media. Which, again, might not matter much except for the absence of any other meaningful restraint on the autocrat who has captured the White House, Congress, and, to all intents and purposes, the Supreme Court.

Last time around, we at least had The New York Times and The Washington Post to perform the essential role of watchdog, as a necessary check and balance on power. And then, shortly before the election, the owner of the latter publication, Jeff Bezos, blinked. Let’s hope the paper recovers its nerve, but autocrats are famed for their ability to sniff weakness.

I’ve written before that the best gift Bezos could give to the journalists at the Post would be to create a governance structure whereby he could never interfere with editorial decisions – thus enabling him to shrug in mock impotence the next time Donald Trump menaces him.

Here’s another idea: set up an endowment using just 2 per cent of his wealth (he says he wants to give most of it away before he dies, anyway) to preserve The Washington Post in perpetuity. Two billion ought to do fine. The Scott Trust, owner of The Guardian and The Observer, has shown one way of doing it.

Meanwhile, the fate of two other grand legacy titles hangs in the balance. The Daily Telegraph is still under the hammer, and currently looks as if it might end up in the hands of one Dovid Efune, while The Observer may be destined to be owned by Tortoise Media, a still-unprofitable start-up launched by former Times editor James Harding.

Of the little-known Efune there is not much currently to say, except that he seems to have offered the most money. A former owner and editor of the New York-based Yiddish newspaper The Algemeiner, he resurrected The New York Sun as a neo-conservative website. His sole personal editorial contribution to the US election was to interview the wingnut candidate RFK Jr, who has now been nominated by Trump to be health secretary.

As I write, the NY Sun’s main comment piece celebrates the prospect of Trump going to war on the “nonsense of net zero”. Disgraced Canadian former press baron Conrad Black is one of the most regular contributors, while the main British voice is that of Julie Burchill, whose most recent column celebrated Suella Braverman, “who may well go down in history as the great lost leader of the once-United Kingdom”.

But, no matter. Efune is offering the most money.

And so to The Observer. Here is a great paradox, little understood by those whose main reading matter is balance sheets: the paper was, during the latter half of the 20th century, at once one of the most glorious on the planet and one of the least – in a conventional sense – successful.

Its owner and editor for 27 years was David Astor, the very opposite of any Hollywood newsman, who was said to be “so shy on grand occasions that he didn’t even know how to get out of a room”.

But what a newspaper he edited! He quietly assembled a glittering cast of the brave and the brilliant. Kenneth Tynan was the theatre critic; Proust translator Terence Kilmartin the literary editor; and the great German writer Sebastian Haffner a political correspondent. Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Arthur Koestler, Muriel Spark, Neal Ascherson, Victor Gollancz and AJP Taylor were regulars in the comment and literary pages.

Nora Beloff wrote from Moscow, Washington and Westminster. Katharine Whitehorn saw her role as being the first to “bridge the divide between women’s writing and what I suppose the blokes would have called serious writing”.

The football writers – yes, the football writers – included the philosopher AJ Ayer, the art critic David Sylvester, the lawyer Louis Blom-Cooper, and the academic John Sparrow. Michael Frayn and Clive James lightened the mood. The incomparable Jane Bown and Don McCullin took the pictures.

The paper never stopped campaigning – in favour of decolonisation and against apartheid. It led the charge to abolish capital punishment and to reform the laws criminalising homosexuality. It denounced Suez (“We had not realised that our government was capable of such folly and such crookedness.”) It sent the great writer Anthony Sampson to cover the Rivonia Trial in 1964, and may well have been instrumental in saving the life of one of the defendants, Nelson Mandela.

But what of the balance sheet? Because that is ritually invoked as the real litmus test of whether a media company is succeeding or not, regardless of the purpose it serves.

Through the late 1950s, the paper was already struggling. During the 1960s, it simply couldn’t compete with the resources the Canadian press baron Roy Thomson lavished on The Sunday Times, and it came close to merging with The Guardian. By the time Astor finally surrendered ownership, the paper was haemorrhaging money.

It was sold in 1976, to a US billionaire, and again in 1981, to the buccaneering businessman Tiny Rowland. The Independent came close to buying it in 1993, until the Scott Trust, owners of The Guardian, swooped in instead – and for the past 31 years has spent a small fortune sustaining it.

It had another possible near-death experience in 2009, when its post-financial-crash losses threatened The Guardian, then without the £1.3bn endowment that now protects it. But the Scott Trust decided to continue with the Sunday paper as a distinctive and important liberal voice.

The Observer’s current financial position is unclear, except to the extent that the Scott Trust seems keen to offload it to Harding, who is simultaneously trying to convince sceptical journalists that he has the funds to sustain it. Depending on the accounting, it’s probably making a moderate loss – though nothing like the $77m (£61m) deficit of The Washington Post.

The Scott Trust may not have had the deepest of pockets, though it did invest tens of millions of pounds in trying to give The Observer a decent chance of cracking the Sunday paper market. But its model of ownership should, in theory, put serious liberal journalism at the heart of everything it does and ensure that its editors are free to say, and do, what they like. They can even endorse political candidates – an option denied to The Washington Post in the last election. No spreadsheet can value that. Nor can any autocrat capture it.

It would be indelicate, as a former denizen of Guardian Towers, to express a view on the Harding bid, except to hope that The Observer – along with the Telegraph and The Washington Post – not only survives, but thrives. The three papers are, in their different ways, essential to the preservation of democratic liberal societies in ways that Musk and Trump could not begin to fathom.

Some of the greatest newspapers have resembled lighthouses. These structures were, at least until the advent of GPS, necessary to save ships and lives, but there was no real business model to finance them. So they were widely thought of as public goods: a service that is necessary, but that the market on its own may not be able to support. The BBC is a notable example.

With democratic darkness, to paraphrase The Washington Post’s rallying cry, comes the need for more lighthouses.