Washington Post Owner Jeff Bezos: Endorsements ‘Create a Perception of Bias’
“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.”
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos pointed to the public’s distrust of the media as justification for not endorsing a president.
Man, Bezos fed a massive dose of reality to those who live in the Washington bubble.
The left lost its mind because WaPo refused to allow the editorial board to endorse a president. Over 200,000 people canceled their subscriptions. Some people have resigned.
Blah blah blah.
Then The New York Post reported that Bezos wants the paper to hire more conservative opinion writers! Whoa.
Well, the public does not trust the media.
I repeat: Us normies do not trust the mainstream media. Why do these people think non-traditional media outlets (like Legal Insurrection!) have become so popular?
Why have podcasts become popular? We do not trust the media.
As Bezos mentioned, the public trusts Congress more than the media and journalists:
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. 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.
We also know that newspaper endorsements don’t move the needles. To me, endorsements are a way for these writers to feel important and like they matter.
No one cares:
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 promised that no politician influenced the decision to squash the presidential endorsement.
Bezos promised no one decided against the presidential endorsement as a favor to him or to help boost his businesses.
No personal interest went into the decision.
I enjoyed Bezos telling everyone that those who work at WaPo or The New York Times have “increasingly” started to speak “only to a certain elite,” and they mostly “talk to themselves.”
It’s 100% true.
These journalists and editorial writers think they’re the cream of the crop. They think we hang onto their every word.
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Comments
“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.”
No Jeff, you are failing on both requirements not just the second one.
Step one.
Keep it up.
Wanna show you’re serious about *reporting* in an unbiased way?
Return that 2018 Pulitzer the WaPoo shared with the NYT for flacking the Russia Collusion Hoax.
and the 1980 Jimmy’s World fake news story
EXCELLENT point.
WaPo is such a fraud.
Bezos is halfway there. In fairness to him, he may in fact know that his paper has a rich history of being wrong, particularly at the expense of Republicans & conservatives. But, he can’t talk about it publicly ATM because he has too many liberals working at the paper.
In any event, he’s absolutely correct that political endorsements by newspapers – and I think newspaper editorial boards more broadly – undermine the credibility of any paper. How can any organization be seen as an impartial arbiter of facts when at the very same time, have an entire section dedicated to the publisher’s & editor’s opinions? Why did anyone ever think that was a good idea?
Because us poor plebian fools need the mental elite of newspaper editorial boards to do our thinking for us because we’re too dumb to properly consider the facts in their proper context so as to allow us to arrive at the correct conclusions. Thankfully, those mental elite REALLY like to tell us what they think.
This shouldn’t be taken at face value. With Limousine Libs, media bias is a feature, not a bug, of the software programming.
Endorsements just say the quiet part out loud.
Well if Elon Musk was to work with Kennedy to take out Whole Foods and Tucker takes out Media and V takes out Pharm and Tulsi takes out military and Navarro banking…….
Guess add dollars are drying up.
CIA is running out of Color Revolution money?
In the comments, they mention that apparently the Post is still endorsing local politcal races
He can contribute to press accuracy by shutting down the paper.
Or by hiring people who don’t purposefully lie all the time.
Or eve a few people with a different world view to ask about stories that are obviously lies.
“I Repeat: Us normies do not trust the mainstream media.”
It’s “we”, not “us”.
We do not trust the media.
JB is hedging his bets as he sees a Trump victory. But he cannot direct the paper to endorse him because it would cause a revolt among his employees and readers. So the best compromise is to not endorse Trump but at the same time not to endorse the candidate running against Hitler.
So JB took that compromise route to avoid the revolts, and viola– readers and staff revolt anyway.
When the bandage has to come off…
Continuously being biased while pretending not to be also creates a perception of bias.
I think it creates a perception of intentional deception.
“Washington Post Owner Jeff Bezos: Endorsements ‘Create a Perception of Bias’”
In WaPo’s case, it’s like the perception of death that fentanyl causes.
“Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion.”
And yet, sex changes are still a “thing.” I bet WaPo still runs local ads for them.
Do away with the editorial page completely. Ditto for the OpEd. Those writers can go to substack. With the Internet the pubic has ample resources to get opinions. Let the newspaper staff concentrate on hard news. We could also form a citizen corps to do the hard news. There are retired people who have time to be citizen journalists.
The MSM has degenerated into a pseudo Pravda, and public has caught on. The French newspapers have a different approach. Everybody knows Le Monde is center left. Figaro is center right while L’Humanite is full communist. So the French buy several newspapers to get a balanced picture. We have this fiction that our newspapers are objective. A fiction no longer sustainable.
I don’t care if the NYT and the Wash Post go out of business. I stopped reading them 20 years ago.
“There are retired people who have time to be citizen journalists.”
I think O’Keefe is demonstrating how well that works.
(Though not the retired ones — they can’t seem to get Tinder dates with rich, evil young executives,)
Something doesn’t smell right. Since when do Limousine Libs care about media bias?
When it craters their profits.
Bezos lost $77M on WaPo last year, which is enough money to get the attention of someone who makes as much as Bezos does.
Endorsements ‘Create a Perception of Bias’
No. Endorsements usually reveal a bias.
he is correct
but what really is happening is he is PRETENDING to be unbiased
so what ,,no endorsement
when 99% of your “facts” are left wing subterfuge against america
its STILL A LEFT WING BIAS
I think Bezos has it backwards. A newspaper should report the news with zero bias and then, with a long standing reputation for neutrality, help the public decide major issues on the editorial page. IMO he is trying to explain away a decision made for another reasosn …. either he has had a change of political heart like Musk did, or wants to curry favor with a future Trump administration.
As Bezos at least pays some lip service to restoring balance to the Washington Post, the New York Times this morning is advocating that Joey Bosa be ‘disciplined’ by the NFL for wearing a MAGA hat after the game ended.
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1851274070190440572
“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.”
You have made a mockery of the first requirement, and now, with this pathetic essay, have doubled down on the pathetic, sick joke that the WaPo is.
Bezos is a despicable twerp.
What’s going to be funny is the next step. When Trump wins and liberals are convinced he didn’t win on actual merit, but because the newspapers didn’t endorse Kamala. Bezos will be the most evil man in the world at that point.
So then, they’ll be primed to applaud any move Trump takes to “punish the press,” right?
I can’t imagine life as a liberal. The constant see-sawing inside your head as you attempt to decide whether you’re for or against something when you discover the rest of your Blob didn’t come to the same conclusion.
The newsroom will be firing Bezos in 3, 2, 1 …
But bias on the editorial page is to be expected. WaPoo’s problem is the bias in the news articles.
The entire concept that a staff can write objective news in an unbiased fashion regardless of their personal biases (or their bosses’, which is more to the point) is a fable. I couldn’t write an unbiased article on the cost/benefit ratio of communism no matter how hard I tried.
And yet… what does the WAPO publish ( according to a site I won’t link here)?
“An Oct. 27 report from The Washington Post alleges that Musk began his career working illegally in the U.S. for a period in 1995 while he was building a Silicon Valley startup, Zip2, which sold for about $300 million four years later.
—-
I was in fact allowed to work in the U.S.,” Musk said in the Oct. 27 post.
In another post, he provided more details about his immigration status. Musk says he was initially on a J-1 visa for international students to pursue academic training or research, then transitioned to an H1-B visa allowing temporary employment for specialty occupations.
“I was on a J-1 visa that transitioned to an H1-B. They know this, as they have all my records,” Musk said.
….
I don’t know what the truth is, but Bezos is correct that the wide-spread presumption of bias leads most people to view this as an attack on Musk in retaliation for his support of Trump: especially when you look at the timing.
Something that allegedly happened 1995 hasn’t been worth reporting until the week before the 2024 election?
Hmmmm
Their far-left bias appears on every single page, every single day
There are over 22,000 comments on Bezos’ piece on the WaPo website. The comments are really something to see. Want to know where the crazy people are….? It’s scary.
You know what else creates a perception of bias? Bias does.
Not if he thinks the problem is with our perception, not with the reality being perceived.
The problem is not the opinion pages. The problem is the news pages. The WSJ, for instance, has a conservative-leaning opinion page, but its news reporting is the same leftist trash as every other newspaper. Ditto for the NY Post, for the most part.