Jeff Bezos tries & fails to explain why he killed WaPo’s presidential endorsement

Last Friday, the Washington Post announced that they would not make a presidential endorsement. WaPo CEO Will Lewis, who spent the bulk of his career working for Rupert Murdoch, claimed that it was his decision to dump the Post’s editors planned endorsement because Lewis doesn’t believe in newspaper endorsements. Lewis’s words meant nothing because everyone else, including WaPo’s editors, confirmed that WaPo owner Jeff Bezos gave the order to kill the endorsement. Bezos’ Blue Origin team met with Donald Trump on the very same day that the announcement came. In the wake of the non-endorsement, several WaPo editors resigned and WaPo is hemorrhaging subscribers (more than 200K at last count). So Bezos decided to address his reasons for ordering the Post to kill the Harris endorsement in a new column called “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media.” Some highlights:

In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.

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.

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.

I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally. Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement. I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand. Even Limp didn’t know about it in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning. There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.

[From WaPo]

There are so many fundamental mistakes being made here, and it’s being wrapped up in Bezos’ sanctimony about bias and credibility. Bezos’ perspective is that a presidential endorsement would exhibit “bias” and lessen the Post’s credibility. He fails to see that the lack of an endorsement for Kamala Harris is what looks biased and unreasonable. One candidate is arguing that America is only for white people, that he will overthrow democracy to get power, that millions of immigrants will be rounded up and sent into camps, that women’s pregnancies will be monitored by the state and that women will be blocked from leaving states to receive medical treatment. The other candidate is Kamala Harris. If journalists are not free to say “these two candidates are not the same and here’s why,” THAT is what’s destroying journalism, THAT is what’s ruining the Post’s credibility.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.