Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post Op-Ed Is a Remarkable Document
Mark Antonio Wright for National Review
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.
Below is the entirety of his opinion piece.
Opinion The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media
A note from our owner.
October 28, 2024 at 7:26 p.m. EDT
Jeff Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post.
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.
When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.
You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up. You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.
Lack of credibility isn’t unique to The Post. Our brethren newspapers have the same issue. And it’s a problem not only for media, but also for the nation. 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. More and more, we talk to ourselves. (It wasn’t always this way — in the 1990s we achieved 80 percent household penetration in the D.C. metro area.)
While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world? To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course. This is the way of the world. None of this will be easy, but it will be worth it. I am so grateful to be part of this endeavor. Many of the finest journalists you’ll find anywhere work at The Washington Post, and they work painstakingly every day to get to the truth. They deserve to be believed.
I will give him credit for his effort. Having said that, one wonders if it may be self serving. Should Trump win, imposition of higher tariffs on imports from China would have an outsized impact on Amazon. Of other consideration is his positioning himself to be part of any “business roundtable”. Again, for his personal advantage.
