If you hear the sound of wailing tonight, it’s probably Washington Post columnists screaming out of their windows. WaPo owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos finally weighed in on the endorsement controversy embroiling his newsroom, and what he had to say just might cause even more editors and staff to resign.
The controversy stems from his spiking a planned endorsement for Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris. Instead of backing her as everyone expected, he ordered that they endorse no one.
Why might his Monday op-ed in his own paper freak out many of the staff even more? Because he delivers some hard truths:
In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.
Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.
Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement.
There it is: The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media, by Jeff Bezos
“Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion.” https://t.co/0eXBYmgwk7 pic.twitter.com/XY1PCP00bA
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 28, 2024
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The truth, Bezos said, is nobody believes journalists anymore. He wouldn’t come right out and say that it’s because most of them are DNC sycophants and are desperately biased for the Democrats, but it’s hard not to come away with that conclusion:
Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.
Case in point: New York Times Goes Full Monty With Trump Hysteria, Throws All Pretenses of Journalism Out the Window
He also makes a point that many commenters have made here at RedState: why do endorsements in the first place? They create a sense—nay, a reality—that a given outlet is biased. Ending them is the principled thing to do, the zillionaire wrote. “Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right.”
He also said he was not influenced by Donald Trump or anyone else, adding that while he understands the perception of conflict of interest—he’s not only the owner of the Post, but he’s still executive chairman of Amazon and is the founder of the aerospace company Blue Origin—he has nonetheless never let his personal interests affect his decision-making at the paper. “I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up.”
While I am no fan of Jeff Bezos for a variety of reasons, I have to admit this op-ed is solid. He’s 100 percent correct that most people with brains don’t trust the mainstream (or corporate or legacy, whatever you want to call it) media anymore—mostly because they constantly lie and mislead.
If he and others don’t fix this problem, we may very well be watching the slow-motion death of traditional media right in front of our very eyes.
As it stands now, that would be a good thing.
Bezos, whose paper lost $77 million last year, is absolutely right. Good for him. https://t.co/Qyy43FCvu1
— Brit Hume (@brithume) October 29, 2024
