The Washington Post’s decision to avoid an endorsement in next week’s presidential election has been greeted with the sort of indignant squealing and self-righteous disappointment that one would more typically associate with the confession of a crime of high moral turpitude. As a practical matter, there is not much evidence to suggest that the advice of famous newspapers swings the behavior of even a single voter, but, to a certain sort of person, it performs a crucial function nevertheless. Like Harvard or the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Washington Post enjoys a certain cachet among the bien pensant class, and its imprimatur provides an affirmation that its readers are prone to seek. In essence, its endorsement plays a role as a sorting mechanism, which, when switched on, serves to separate People Like Us from People Like Them. When it is forthcoming, the Post’s subscribers feel that they can read its coverage in the knowledge that its authors are of sound political mind. If it is not, an ineffable fear begins to creep in: that someone, somewhere, might be struggling with heretical thoughts. And we can’t have that from a newspaper.
In a missive explaining his decision, the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, explained that the shift was not the product of intimidation, of a conflict of interest, or of a dirty quid pro quo, but of the American public’s catastrophic lack of trust in journalists as a group. “Our profession,” Bezos writes, “is now the least trusted of all,” and, in his view, this cannot be fixed while the members of that profession are seen openly siding with the politicians they have been asked to cover. Ending political endorsements, Bezos concluded, “is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.” Henceforth, it will be the paper’s routine approach.
This, to put it mildly, was not the view of a majority of the newspaper’s staff and contributors, a handful of whom quit. Neither did it please the 250,000-plus readers — about 10 percent of the total number — who canceled their subscriptions in anger. But, in his core assessment of the problem, Bezos is correct: Americans do not trust the media, and the trend line is getting worse, not better. In the short run, it will be unpleasant for him to own a newspaper whose staff is in revolt and whose subscriber base has been decimated overnight. In the long run, he has little choice. Last year, Bezos lost $77 million running the Post. It is a passion project, not a business endeavor. One can understand why certain of the paper’s reporters might like the idea of their esoteric political preferences being subsidized by a billionaire, but one cannot see why Bezos would. If, as he insists, Bezos believes good journalism to be a vital component of American democracy, he is obliged to take seriously the contempt in which journalists are held. “We must be accurate,” Bezos proposed, “and we must be believed to be accurate.” Currently, “We are failing on the second requirement.”
That assessment is charitable. But the first step on the road to recovery is admitting that one has a problem. Jeff Bezos has admitted that he — and the broader industry into which he has dipped his toes — has a problem. Given the scale of that problem, the next few years will be difficult. Bezos will face internal revolts and orchestrated campaigns of pressure. He will be called a fascist and a coward and a dilettante. And, inevitably, he will lose more staff and more subscribers along the way. But he has the benefit of being very rich and of being very correct and, perhaps most important of all, of being very patient. For years, Amazon eschewed profits in the name of building trust and market share, and ensuring that it was well-placed to fill the hole in the market that Bezos had identified at the outset. Restoring the American media will take the efforts of more than one eccentric billionaire, but if one were looking for a trailblazer to get the whole thing started, it is hard to think of a better candidate than him.
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