Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos fired off an op-ed on Monday explaining his decision to stop endorsing presidential candidates. The move is the right one, even if many of the newspaper’s staff are in open rebellion.
“Most people believe the media is biased,” he writes. “Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion.”
Reports say the Amazon founder also intends to employ more conservatives, a welcome move, given that the legacy media’s idea of a conservative tends to be never-Trumpers like the Post’s Jennifer Rubin. She has flipped on some of her most heartfelt issues rather than share a position with the ex-president.
I get the sense, though, that Bezos still doesn’t grasp the scale of his problem. He implies that the Post holds the high ground against “off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources.”
[Check out Russell’s new novel, The Insurrectionist.]
The issue isn’t just that some random guy (or millions of them) spouts off inaccurately on X, which of course happens incessantly. It’s that taken as a whole, multitudes of social media users provide vastly more perspective than the handful of writers and editors involved in shepherding any given story into the paper.
The Covington kids fiasco
Consider the 2019 Covington kids fiasco, in which legacy media vilified a group of schoolboys as right-wing aggressors against a Native American elder. The media ginned up a nationwide storm of fury at the minors based on a brief video segment. Within hours, social media users provided a fuller and more accurate picture that exonerated the boys. The Post (like CNN) was eventually forced to settle a $250 million lawsuit brought by one of the boys.
Speaking of “off-the-cuff podcasts,” was Joe Rogan’s three-hour conversation with Trump less illuminating than scores of “do you or do you not agree with my premise”-type interviews that define much of the legacy media’s approach to Republicans? The question begs itself when reporters tend to interrupt, pose gotcha queries, and treat their own takes as objective truth. On top of that, daily journalists often don’t release raw footage or audio from their interviews.
UPDATE: Billionaire Bill Ackman addressed just this issue on x today, as quoted by @KanekoaTheGreat:
“I don’t want to sit here and just be an advertisement for 𝕏,” Ackman says, “but if someone writes a profile on me in some media form, within an hour of that article coming out, I can very specifically fact-check, rebut, address the issue. Prior to 𝕏 being this neutral platform, you beg the Times for a correction, and in a few weeks, on page 43, in a place no one will read, the correction would appear. The more the public has lost confidence in conventional media, the more they will look to empirical voices in podcasting and citizen journalism on 𝕏.”
Bezos approvingly cites the Post‘s awards, though he correctly frames them in the context of elites talking to themselves. But was the Post’s seasoned investigative team more accurate than the social media users who recognized the idiocy of a Trump-Russia hoax that originated as a Hillary Clinton campaign op?
Last year CJR spent thousands of words in a post-mortem on the Russia story, exploring how reporters got it so wrong. Was bias confirmation at the root of the Post’s and The New York Times’ investigations?
As newspapers lose their relevance in a digital age, I don’t see a way out of these problems for the Post or any other media outlet—even if the decision not to endorse a candidate was the right one.
The Elephant Box 