On July 31, Jared Kushner buys the New York Observer news media company for $10 million. (He later reveals that the purchase was a “graduation present” from his criminal father and that he found the paper unbearable). Over the next year he purchases a handful of other publications and merges them into Observer Media.
In April 2016, the paper officially endorses Donald Trump for president while spinning a narrative that the media and the elites (both of which are insinuated to be only Democrats) would hate it if he stands in the way of their “dim” plans for the future. That same month, Kushner family friend and former editor-in-chief Ken Kurson is at the center of controversy over helping Donald Trump ahead of a campaign speech.
In July 2016, a staff journalist for the paper writes an open letter to Kushner criticizing his involvement in the campaign, specifically repeated use of anti-semitic branding and dog whistles.
You went to Harvard, and hold two graduate degrees. Please do not condescend to me and pretend you don’t understand the imagery of a six-sided star when juxtaposed with money and accusations of financial dishonesty. I’m asking you, not as a “gotcha” journalist or as a liberal but as a human being: how do you allow this? Because, Mr. Kushner, you are allowing this. Your father-in-law’s repeated accidental winks to the white supremacist community is perhaps a savvy political strategy if the neo-Nazis are considered a sizable voting block—I confess, I haven’t done my research on that front. But when you stand silent and smiling in the background, his Jewish son-in-law, you’re giving his most hateful supporters tacit approval. Because maybe Donald Trump isn’t anti-Semitic. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think he is. But I know many of his supporters are, and they believe for whatever reason that Trump is the candidate for them.
Dana Schwartz, Observer
In 2017, Jared Kushner passes the company to his brother-in-law.
Sources
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/business/media/31observer.html
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ken-kurson-jared-kushner-donald-trump_n_57017526e4b083f5c607f7f7
https://observer.com/2016/04/in-the-republican-primary-donald-trump-for-president/
https://www.businessinsider.com/jared-kushner-received-the-observer-as-10-million-graduation-present-2017-6
https://observer.com/2016/07/an-open-letter-to-jared-kushner-from-one-of-your-jewish-employees/
https://www.businessinsider.com/jared-kushner-steps-down-as-publisher-of-the-observer-2017-1
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/11/how-trump-son-in-law-jared-kushner-ruined-the-new-york-observer.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/05/us/politics/jared-kushner-donald-trump.html?ref=topics
Photograph: Gage Skidmore
