Jeff Bezos Explains

Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, made the decision for that newspaper to stop endorsing presidential candidates. His decision has been controversial: something like 200,000 readers have canceled their subscriptions, and several Post employees have quit in protest.

Which is revealing in itself: many Post readers, and I suspect most Post employees, thought that helping to elect Democrats was the whole point of the operation. Bezos explained his thinking in a “note from the owner” in today’s Post:

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.

This isn’t too big a hurdle for voting machines, because they do in fact count votes accurately. They are machines. Newspapers are in a completely different category.

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. Most people believe the media is biased.

Bezos suggests, but doesn’t actually say, that the Post and other newspapers are in fact accurate. But they aren’t, which is why no one trusts them. What follows, though, is excellent:

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.

That is extremely well put. I like Bezos’s assertion that reality is an undefeated champion. It is something the Democrats should keep in mind.

He goes on to explain why not endorsing candidates will help to regain credibility, without claiming too much for his change in policy:

What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. … By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction.

Bezos contrasts the Post with allegedly less reliable news sources:

Lack of credibility isn’t unique to The Post. Our brethren newspapers have the same issue. And it’s a problem not only for media, but also for the nation. Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions. The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite.

The idea that podcasts and social media posts–in other words, conversation among Americans who are not “journalists”–are somehow defective compared with the Washington Post’s “verified” reporting is false. And I do not think it is true that the Post’s readers are in any important sense elite.

What Bezos doesn’t acknowledge–and can’t acknowledge, give his position–is that The Washington Post, the New York Times and other liberal news sources have lost all credibility, not because of some inexplicable and inaccurate perception on the part of the public, but because they have been willing to lie in order to advance the Democratic Party’s interests. It will take a lot more than a decision not to endorse a presidential candidate to convince Americans that the Post has stopped reporting falsely in pursuit of a political agenda. Still, if Bezos seriously intends to reform the Post and not just make cosmetic changes, it could be, as he says, a step in the right direction.

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