The Press Barons Feign Impartiality. No One Believes It.
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, and USA Today corporate media giant Gannet have announced that their respective newspapers will not be endorsing any candidate for president in the 2024 election. This has reportedly caused editors to quit and customers to cancel their subscriptions. Bezos acknowledged that “Americans don’t trust the news media,” and endorsements “create a perception of bias.” Soon-Shiong said that “he feared that picking one candidate would only exacerbate the already deep divisions in the country.” A spokesperson for USA Today explained that “our public service is to provide readers with the facts that matter and the trusted information they need to make informed decisions.” In reality, those newspapers don’t need to officially endorse Kamala Harris — their “news” stories and editorial writers have effectively done so. Who do they think they are fooling?
The bias in broadcast evening news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC is obvious to anyone who still watches them. The Media Research Center recently reported that Harris has received 78 percent positive coverage by those three networks while Trump has received 85 percent negative coverage. The bias against Trump of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times is not only self-evident to anyone who reads those papers but has effectively been confirmed by actions of the editors and subscribers who have quit the papers. How do you tell your editors and readers who have overseen the demonization of Trump for the past nine years that you are suddenly worried about the “perception of bias”? The New York Times obviously isn’t worried about the perception of bias against Trump — they live off of it. They have unsurprisingly endorsed Harris, just as they have endorsed every Democratic presidential candidate since 1960. Everyone knows that the so-called “paper of record” is a leftist rag that hasn’t been unbiased for decades. Educated, sophisticated people still read it either because they agree with the Times’ bias or they want to be perceived as educated and sophisticated by their friends and peers.
Bezos is, of course, right that Americans don’t trust the news media — and they have nobody to blame but themselves. The Washington Post built its reputation on the political grave of Richard Nixon, and thanks to Geoff Shepard and a few other courageous writers, we have learned that the Post’s reputation is undeserved. That doesn’t stop the Post’s Bob Woodward from continuing to thrive as a “reporter” who helped the Democrats get Nixon — presidents and their advisers since Watergate think they have to talk to Woodward or be punished for not talking to him in one of his books. Woodward finally dropped the pretense of unbiased reporting in his latest book, War, (coincidentally released just a few weeks before the 2024 election) in which he declares as a “reporter” that Trump is unfit to be president.
And we know from the so-called Twitter files, and thanks especially to Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi, how biased most social media platforms are (were, in the case of Twitter, which is now X and owned by Trump supporter Elon Musk) against Trump.
Bezos and the other press barons who have decided not to endorse Harris (a Trump endorsement was never possible) could have spared themselves the trouble of hiring new editors and finding new subscribers by just doing what everyone expected. Most voters don’t care about newspaper endorsements. It is highly doubtful that such endorsements move the electoral needle at all. In the end, the non-endorsements may be nothing more than a publicity stunt to prove to themselves that they still matter. They don’t because most Americans, as Bezos said, don’t trust them. And its all their fault.
READ MORE:
The Washington Post’s Looney Liberal Readership
There Is a Reason Michelle Obama Wasn’t the Nominee. This Is It.
Liberals Are in Love With the ‘F’ Word
The post The Press Barons Feign Impartiality. No One Believes It. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.