Jeff Bezos Doesn’t Understand That He Is the Problem
Late last week, The Washington Post announced that its editorial board would not endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election—which, let’s recall, pits Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president and a fairly mainstream Democrat, against Donald Trump, an aspiring despot who wants to suspend the Constitution, deploy the military against his political enemies, and round up millions of people for deportation. The Post’s publisher, Fleet Street refugee Will Lewis, framed the last-minute decision to remain silent as essential to preserving the “independence” of Washington’s venerable newspaper of record. “That is what we are and will be,” he wrote.
Lewis’s story unraveled quickly and in spectacular fashion. Within hours, Post journalists, courageously investigating their own employer’s decision-making process, reported that editorial page staffers had drafted a Harris endorsement and that the edict not to run it (or any endorsement) came directly from the Post’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Post columnists immediately blasted, skewered, and mourned the move, and three editorial board members resigned. The backlash from paying customers was even worse: Some 250,000 people—about 10 percent of the Post’s subscribers—have since canceled their subscriptions, according to NPR. Nothing illustrates one’s keen business instincts quite like publishing a blog post that single-handedly decimates your customer base in four days flat.
On Monday evening, Bezos made his second-dumbest decision of the week, publishing a bylined column on the Post’s website to explain why readers need not be concerned about a tech billionaire meddling in the coverage of a newspaper he owns just days before voters head to the polls. “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,” he writes. Bezos goes on to challenge readers to find “one instance” in which he has “prevailed upon anyone at the Post” in favor of his own interests—a sentence that raises the alarming possibility that Bezos has somehow already forgotten the incident that prompted him to defend himself in the first place.
Bezos’s column is, to use a term of art in the publishing industry, bad: a jumble of unsupported assertions, inapposite bromides, and circular reasoning. It is the product of a persistent, unearned confidence among this country’s corporate overlords that their success in business necessarily translates to every other task at which they might try their hand, up to and including persuasive writing for an audience of people who are furious with them. Throughout, Bezos appears to be under the impression that he is uniquely capable of assuaging his critics’ concerns, pacifying Post employees and readers through deft deployments of logic and reason. All he managed to do is give them several more reasons to be angry at him.
The thrust of Bezos’s piece is an argument hastily taken up in the hopes that it might backfill a rationale for the decision: Presidential endorsements, Bezos says, create a “perception of bias” on the part of the media, which now fares worse than Congress in opinion polling. “Something we are doing is clearly not working,” he writes. “We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.” Getting the Post out of the endorsement game will not solve this problem by itself, Bezos continues, but it is nonetheless a “principled decision” and “a meaningful step in the right direction.” How he squared the notion that ending the practice is a “meaningful step” with his prior assertion that endorsements “do nothing to tip the scales of an election” went notably unaddressed.
Set aside, for a moment, the assertion implicit in Bezos’s “we” and “our” language that by virtue of his ownership of the Post, Bezos is now a journalist qualified to speak on behalf of other Post journalists, some of whom are in the midst of an open revolt. Citing public distrust of the media to justify an editorial choice that foments public distrust of the media is the sort of stunt that only Washington’s priciest crisis management consultants could imagine as smart or persuasive. It is the Tim Robinson Hot Dog Suit Man sketch in op-ed form: For as seriously as Bezos purports to take the responsibility of restoring journalism’s sagging reputation, the possibility that Americans might also not care for a rich guy leveraging his power to compromise political coverage in the middle of an up-or-down vote on fascism seems not to have occurred to him.
Bezos’s framing also scrupulously avoids discussing the origins of this trust crisis, because even a cursory acknowledgment of the political landscape would reveal him to be, as they say, breathtakingly full of shit. Although just a third of Americans overall trust the media at least a fair amount, the results look much different when broken out by party: More than half (54 percent) of Democrats say they still trust the media, compared to 12 percent of Republicans.
When Bezos says that “most people believe the media is biased,” he is thus ignoring the howlingly obvious fact that one of the two candidates has spent the last eight years priming his acolytes to feel that way, fueling the rise of a conservative media ecosystem that caricatures any outlet to the left of Fox News as a fake news mouthpiece for the Democratic National Committee. As recently as 2015, 30 percent of Republicans said they trusted the media; the following year, when Trump won the GOP nomination and then the White House, the number dropped to 14 percent.
Bezos’s bet is that by not endorsing a candidate—in particular, by not endorsing Harris—the Post can reestablish its nonpartisan bona fides. What he doesn’t understand is that not endorsing anyone, for the specific purpose of wooing skeptical conservatives who candidly have not cared for some time now about what the Post has to say, is no less of a “political” statement. By divorcing the phenomenon of distrust in media from its real-world context, Bezos is tacitly adopting—endorsing, one might say—the narrative of the candidate who calls the press the “enemy of the people” and fantasizes about locking journalists up. One wonders what else Bezos might be willing to say or do to appeal to readers who view the media not as stewards of civic arguments but worthy candidates for violent lynchings.
Finally, Bezos assures readers that the decision involved no “quid pro quo of any kind,” helpfully drawing attention to a cordial meeting that took place between Trump and executives at one of Bezos’s companies, Blue Origin, on the day of the Post’s announcement. Blue Origin is one of several Bezos-owned enterprises that collectively do billions of dollars in business with the federal government and are always angling for opportunities to do more. Yet Bezos claims that the meeting was scheduled at the last minute and that the timing was an unfortunate coincidence. “There is no connection between it and our decision,” he says.
By his own standard, though, whether or not Bezos is telling the truth about the meeting (or any potential conflict of interest) is irrelevant. Newspaper endorsements, he says, are bad because they create a “perception of bias” and a “perception of non-independence.” But this is at least as true of, say, a wealthy newspaper owner going out of his way to withhold a key endorsement in a tight presidential race, when everyone knows he has a powerful incentive to remain in the good graces of whoever ultimately wins it.
Even if you accept the premise that a handful of middle-aged editorial board members weighing in on candidates’ relative fitness for office is inherently a black mark on their integrity, by substituting his self-interested judgment for their own, Bezos is just exacerbating the problem he is gesturing at solving. This is either profoundly cynical or humiliatingly naïve, neither of which bodes well for the future of the Post or its future journalistic endeavors, to say nothing of the democracy that the Post once vowed to prevent from dying in darkness.
Bezos is right to worry about waning trust in the media. But he does not understand that people like him are in large part responsible for this distrust, and that cosplaying as a pundit while pandering to the worst-faith actors in American politics is not a plan for restoring it. Readers do not distrust opinion journalists for forming opinions and sharing them with the public. They distrust condescending, ham-fisted plutocrats who have no blessed idea what they’re talking about moving fast and breaking stuff.