Billionaire Wisdom: Bezos Admits Nobody Believes The Media Anymore

by Jeff Childers

Yesterday, Amazon billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos clapped back. He published an editorial in his own newspaper titled, “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media.” The story intersected with three of C&C’s favorite subjects, so of course it leads this morning’s post. We had to know: did the man who invented same day delivery cave to the virtuous mob after all yesterday’s celebrity cancellations? Or, did the free (not free) shipping magnate bravely double down?

The e-catalog billionaire doubled down! Well, sort of. Bezos’ apologia took the form of a short, pugnacious editorial that sneakily mentioned a single candidate: President Trump. True, Trump’s name popped up in a completely neutral context. But still. There’s something psychologically significant that Bezos left Harris out altogether, in a kind of inverse Freudian slip. Or was it was intentional?

Either way, it was a perfect metaphor for the WaPo’s non-endorsement snub.

In case you, like me, wondered whether the media is aware that during the pandemic it nuked whatever shredded credibility it had left, we can thank Jeff Bezos for clearing that up. It turns out that they do know. And Bezos blamed that, the rotten cavity where eviscerated media’s credibility used to live, for the paper’s decision not to endorse any president this cycle.

Everyone — readers and non-readers alike — expected WaPo to endorse  Kamala “Plan B” Harris, and that, according to Bezos, is the problem.  And so Bezos, surely under assault from every conceivable direction yesterday, pushed biased media right back in his critics’ ugly faces.

I’ll let WaPo Publisher Bezos explain the media’s bias problem as he sees it, in his own words (just edited for brevity and clarity):

In the 1990s, the Washington Post achieved 80 percent household penetration in the D.C. metro area. But in this year’s Gallup poll, our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.

More and more, we talk to ourselves. 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.

Most people believe the media is biased.

See! Media does know we hate them! They just don’t like talking about it, I guess. Well, who can blame them? Anyway, Bezos continued, linking the problem of perceived media bias directly to presidential endorsements:

Presidential endorsements create a perception of bias and non-independence. They do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None.

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.

I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. No quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. My views here are, in fact, principled.

His views are principled, but they are principled views informed by economic interests. Every single day, some Bezos-owned business or charity somewhere is meeting with another government official. As Bezos admitted in the editorial, “you can,” if you want to, “see this as a web of conflicting interests.”

Ha! The liberals do see it that way, and how. Welcome to the party, liberals. Live by the billionaire, die by the billionaire. Liberals fret that Bezos will break their favorite toy, a newspaper that always agrees with them, praises them, and constantly reminds them what virtuous little boys and girls they are. (Actually, it is controlling their minds and telling them what to think, but hey, they seem to like it.)

Wrapping our third C&C pet issue into one short editorial, and proving that even a broken liberal can tell correct time twice a day, Bezos made a terrific point about voting machines — apparently another Freudian slip. Did he mean to slip the voting machine issue in, only a week from the election?

On the surface, Bezos’ voting machine analogy supported a similar point about newspapers needing trust too. But look deeper:

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.

A truer word was never spoken, and Bezos’ argument should begin every conversation about electronic voting machines. It’s just as important that voters believe the machines are accurate as actually being accurate.

It raises a critical question: Precisely what are the voting machine makers and people pushing them doing to increase voters’ trust? Related to that: how much do you trust the machines?

Now lets talk about the comments. Hoo boy. There’s was nearly 13,000 of them when I started, and 250 more came in while I was writing this part of the post. Bezos triggered the WaPo’s liberal readers even harder than the paper’s non-endorsement announcement. They don’t give a damn what Bezos says. They don’t give two squirts about his high-minded neutrality ideals or his idealistic goals to rebuild lost trust in journalism.

They just want their far-left paper back, bias and all. (I’d quote you an example or two but you can easily imagine them.)

Bezos bought the Post back in 2013, for the inflated price of $250 million. At the time, the Washington Post was what they call “a distressed asset.” In other words, the far-left paper was going out of business. Revenue and circulation were plummeting, and, in the understated words of then-owner Donald Graham, the paper faced “a period in which the Post’s future would be more secure with someone else.”

Go woke, go broke, then a billionaire snaps up your woke newspaper.

Finally, I must mention the paper’s current discount for a digital subscription: only $29 for a year. If you’d asked me ten days ago who or what could have forced me to subscribe to the Washington Post … well, I’d have been hard-pressed. Maybe terrorists. No wait, make it alien terrorists, and only if they were giving out free vaccinations and playing rap music.

Yet here we are. It was too funny to pass up.

The non-endorsement hot tub must look pretty good right now, and baby, it’s cold outside. The Hill ran a story yesterday headlined, “Over 200 Gannett outlets not ‘endorsing in presidential or national races’.” In other words, USA Today and all its local papers are out, sayonara; more than 200 papers in all, none of them will endorse the Cackling Candidate.

Maybe it’s the latest trend? Maybe newspapers, having decided for principled reasons to leap out of the presidential endorsement racket, will stay out? Or maybe they’re just chicken, and they can see like everybody else that the Democrats selected a disposable candidate, and so they’re like, why should we stick our necks out?

So far, the LA Times, the Washington Post, and now USA Today (and its 200 local papers) have defied furious readers and refused to run a simple endorsement. It’s really something.

Read more