By Mark Antonio Wright
Tuesday,
October 29, 2024
The
most interesting aspect of Jeff Bezos’s op-ed in the Washington Post Monday evening explaining his newspaper’s decision to decline
to endorse presidential candidates is that it appears to have been written by
an actual human being rather than by an AI chat bot or a crack team of drones
at a crisis PR firm, but I repeat myself.
It
turns out that Mr. Bezos — the mega billionaire famous for his monomaniacal
drive, who over the last 20 years has quite literally transformed American
retail and commerce and inserted himself into the daily lives of almost every
last one of my countrymen, and who is ultimately responsible for the artistic
murder-suicide that is The Rings of Power — is a human after all.
Amazing.
Jokes
aside, Bezos displays a remarkable amount of self-reflection for someone
involved in one of the English-speaking world’s most important and most famous
news organs. (You may have heard that honest self-reflection isn’t always the
legacy media’s strong suit.) If you’re concerned about the long-term trajectory
of the American press and the long-term decline in the public’s trust and
confidence in institutions that were once extremely important to the
functioning of our republic, it’s worth reading.
“Let
me give an analogy,” Bezos writes. “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.
Bezos
adds: “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.”
I
happen to think that decision makes a lot of sense for the Washington Post.
If an endorsement at the top of the ticket isn’t changing any minds, and if
it’s only serving to solidify a view that the paper is biased against one
party, then it seems worth dropping — especially if the goal is to reach a
broader audience, as Bezos says it should be. Indeed, Bezos notes that as
recently as the ’90s, the Post “achieved 80 percent household
penetration in the D.C. metro area.” He doesn’t say what the paper’s reach is
these days, but the implication is that the numbers have cratered.
Now,
I’m not against endorsements in all contexts. For example, I find my hometown
paper, the Tulsa World, a very useful resource when it endorses in local
races. Even if I don’t agree with an endorsement — and I often don’t — a
well-written and well-argued endorsement of a city-council, mayoral, or other
local race in which information can be relatively scarce can provide some
insight that can be tough to come by otherwise. But a presidential race is one
that is supercharged and oversaturated with information. And I agree with Bezos
in that I don’t think any American is waiting around to be persuaded by what the
Washington Post — as an institution — thinks, and it makes a lot
of sense for it to keep its powder dry.
One
other thing: It’s notable that Bezos twice mentions that so many Americans “are
turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other
unverified news sources.” Is this a dig at Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk? I
find it hard to see how it isn’t.
There’s
no doubt in my mind that, at their best, newspapers — complete with careful
editing and fact checking — benefit the public. At their worst, of course, they
are next to useless.
But,
on the other hand, I think almost all Americans are beginning to realize that
while social media can sometimes break news or highlight undercovered stories
that are being ignored by the mainstream press, at its worst, social media is
genuinely toxic to the body politic. Say what you will about the Washington
Post or the New York Times, but even those sometimes very silly
organizations are usually much, much better sources of accurate news than your
Uncle Jerry’s Facebook feed or whatever trash the Twitter algorithm serves up
on its “For You” feed. In all cases, of course, what’s needed is a layer of
discernment on the part of the reader.
At
the end of the day, Jeff Bezos is in the somewhat unique position of owning a
major news organization while not needing it to actually make any money. That’s
of course different from saying that Jeff Bezos wouldn’t prefer the Post
to operate in the black. Naturally, he would. Billionaires don’t become
billionaires by developing holes in their pockets. But it does mean that one of
the two or three richest men on earth can afford to subsidize an organization
dedicated to the pursuit of truth. And it seems that if Bezos is going to
continue paying the bills, he’s going to insist that the Post start
to change the way it does its work.
I
don’t think there are very many conservatives who think that the Washington
Post doesn’t have a long way to go on this front. But Bezos’s
forthrightness and openness in explaining himself is as good a start towards
the reputational rehabilitation that the Post requires as could be hoped
for.
If
Jeff Bezos wants to invest money, time, effort, and prestige into producing a
better sort of legacy media organization, one that can reestablish trust across
a broad spectrum of the American public, I’m not sure I’d bet the mortgage that
he’s going to succeed — but I would at least like to see him try.
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