Jeff Bezos: ‘The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media’

Jeff Bezos, in an op-ed in his Washington Post:

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. [...]

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. 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. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.

Bezos has always been a good writer, and this piece is no exception. But deciding to change the Post’s policy on election endorsements 12 days before any election, let alone this election, is not “inadequate planning”. Changing the policy, say, this summer, before the Republican National Convention, would be “inadequate planning”. Now though? No.

And how does any of this square with the fact that The Washington Post has an entire editorial and opinion section, that runs bylined opinion columns and commentary from the editorial board every day? You know, the section where this very column by Bezos ran?

As regards trust: declining to endorse a candidate won’t “tip the scales” an iota for Trump supporters who view The Washington Post as “fake news”. All it has done is wipe out large amounts of trust among readers who do — or at least until last week did — put their faith in the publication.

Update: Dr. Drang:

If I’m following Bezos’s logic, he must not just run the Post without letting his other business interests interfere, he must appear to run the Post without letting his other business interests interfere. The easy way to do that would be to keep his hands off the editorial board. I wonder why that didn’t occur to him? (No, I don’t really wonder.)

I wish I’d thought to make that point — Bezos’s own analogy shows how calamitous a decision this was to block an endorsement less than two weeks away from the election.

★ Monday, 28 October 2024