Don’t Fall for Bezos’ WaPo Column

Jeff Bezos’ WaPo, like the LA Times before it and USA Today shortly after, has refused to endorse Kamala Harris for President.  He wrote an op-ed about it here:  The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media

If you haven’t read that yet, it’s worth the time, but take your blood pressure meds first.  As is typical with leftist framing, he says that the problem is perception of bias, rather than bias itself.

We [newspapers — bdb] 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.

Not off to a good start. He could have spoken about the “first requirement” to actually be accurate, but this is the last time you will see it mentioned in his column.  The rest of the piece deals only with perception.  He could have addressed the ninety-plus percent leftist population of newswriters in general and especially his own employees, but he did not.  More on this later.

He then discusses the insignificance, the trivial uselessness, really, of newspaper endorsements in Presidential races.  He says a true thing (good job, Jeff!) in that:

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.

All about perception.  He’s mostly right in this, but misses the mark in his first sentence.  Convincing people to change their votes is as he says unlikely.  No, the real effect is in reinforcing voters.  Humans are predictable creatures.  Excitement, energy, safety in numbers, rbeing on the winning team (or gaining distance from a lame nag) and all of that come into play in the psychology of going out to vote.  Your candidate is in trouble and cannot even convince the friendly papers to endorse her?  Why even go?  See, that’s not the same as “doing nothing to tip the scales.”

And so he seems to make this non-endorsement, and now a mandate to hire some better people, the result of a sudden desire for objectivity.  It’s not odd for this to be a last-minute thing, as endorsements are typically just before the election.  No foul there (other than the fact that people have already been voting for weeks).  Endorsements do not “create a perception of bias.”  Decades of biased reporting is what creates a perception of bias.  Here’s another leftist ignoring the disastrous facts and seeking the right framing, the right messaging, the right contextualization.  But this is a matter of substance, not of presentation; the thing itself matters.  Bezos is not refraining from endorsement due to any regret about endorsing in general — he’s just another casualty of their ridiculous candidate flailing about after being installed through a ridiculous process.  We all saw it, no need to be coy — you’re screwed.

The waffling and special pleading goes on for a bit, with no apology in sight, because indeed, Bezos is not sorry.  And then we come to the central mystery, the flaw in the diamond.  See if you can pick it out:

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.

I left it in its paragraph-long wrapper for context.  Somewhere between “Only my own principles,” and “It hasn’t happened,” he hoped that we would lose the thread of accountability.  He wants us to see him being accountable, but he in fact is not doing any such thing.  Not only did he not commit the strawman offense of “prevailing upon” anyone at the Post for Bezos’ own interests, but he also did not prevail upon them to do anything at all.  The dog that did not bark before now was Bezos reeling in his unhinged, partisan, post-objectivity NeverTrump newsroom and editorial function. Indeed, “it hasn’t happened.”  Since 2013, his principles never once got in the way of the Washington Post’s appalling, Orwellian propaganda mission.

The principles (cited, but not identified) which he would like us to imagine are probably things like professional standards, objectivity, and journalistic uh… integrity (I just couldn’t put those two words any closer to each other).  Yet the principles he actually displays here are shall we say, different.  Up in the first quote, he describes the problem as a “continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact).”  It is not the bias which he sees as the problem, only the perception of bias.  It is not the activism he means to fix, only the impotence of that activism.

Lack of credibility is […] 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.

You don’t say.  One of those prizes was the “2018 National Reporting prize shared by the Washington Post and the New York Times for reporting on Russiagate.”  This was misinformation — it was flat-out lying.  It was inaccurate, unverified, and too good to check.  Yes, I know that a lot of work went into it, but all of that work was at best paid stooge-ism for the DNC, and in fact it was much uglier.  The WaPo and the NYT are Marxist propaganda outlets, and they willingly, gleefully shellack America and Americans, inflicting any amount of harm for even scant praise from the deep state masters.  Over the top?  I’m holding back.

I presume that neither of the “prized” papers mentioned above have actually apologized, or returned the prize, or any such thing.  I am aware that both papers “corrected” some articles at some point.  We all know how this goes.  Shocking headline on Sunday’s page 1 gets corrected on Wednesday’s page 37.  But I really wouldn’t know the specifics.  I stopped reading papers, and then stopped watching TV news, and when the COVID struggle sessions were upon us, I stopped watching excerpts online even from news shows I liked on networks I used to tolerate.  All I need is an internet connection and strong bullpoop filters.   I do not need and will not accept people like Bezos deciding what I will think.  And by now, they all look like Bezos to me.

Amazingly, there are Republicans who still read WaPo.  There are some Republicans right now urging their countrymen to buy subscriptions to Bezos’ Washington Post, just because Bezos followed the LA Times’ lead in not endorsing this sham candidate, the product of not one but two back-to-back coups.  Imagine reading this Bezos column and thinking “we need more of this!”  As if this were some oportunity to sneak in and set things right at the Post!  Thanks for the money, GOP chumps.  In the column, Bezos explicitly says that he wants to eliminate the public’s perception of bias, because it limits their impact.  No form of the words “honest,” “objective,” or “fair” appear in the article at all, and the word “truth” only appears in the headline to describe the low opinion that people have of the Washington Post.  Those Republicans must be cheap dates.

Bezos is not sorry and he’s certainly not interested in changing anything other than perception.  He’s on a mission, and he has correctly identified newer forms of media as the real threat to his Clinton-adjacent effort to keep us all indoctrinated to the same approved set of facts.  We must all read from the same page of government propaganda, and he will publish that page!  If not for Elon Musk’s frankly heroic actions restoring free speech at the renamed X, and defending it from government malfeasance, we would likely not have much of Samuel Adams’ “animating contest of freedom” left.  These are not ordinary times.  The crisis is NOW, and too late is just around the corner.

We can still lose this election, we can still lose this war, and Jeff Bezos is still on the other side.