Is Jeff Bezos going to bring back real journalism?
In a shocking move, The Washington Post announced Friday it would not be endorsing a presidential candidate, after decades of doing so and after the outlet’s editorial board had written an endorsement of Kamala Harris.
Two Post journalists reported that the decision had been made by Post owner Bezos, the billionaire behind shopping behemoth Amazon and rocket company Blue Origin.
For many subscribers, Bezos’ action was a betrayal. More than 200,000 people—or about 8% of The Washington Post’s subscriber base—canceled their subscriptions, NPR reported. Several Post journalists resigned.
Accusations swirled that Bezos’ decision was influenced by business considerations. (He says it was not.)
“The Washington Post has gone from ‘All The President’s Men’ to ‘All The Dictator’s Lapdogs,’” sneered one reader, according to Post columnist Dana Milbank. Another reader wrote, “Without resigning, you are basically endorsing Hitler.”
But for the American people, this might signal the beginning of a new era of journalism. USA Today will also not endorse a presidential candidate this year, and owner Patrick Soon-Shiong decided the Los Angeles Times would not be endorsing this year either.
In a column published Monday night on The Washington Post, Bezos decided to speak for himself—and in the course of doing so, he also spoke up for the millions of Americans who have watched in horror as major American news outlets have morphed into propaganda rags valuing ideology over truth.
“In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress,” wrote Bezos. “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.”
According to the Gallup poll cited by Bezos, more than two-thirds of Americans have no or little trust or confidence in the media.
Given the sorry state of news reporting these days, that’s not surprising—and The Washington Post itself has played a major role in why Americans are rightly skeptical of media.
Consider the Post’s ridiculously hyperbolic slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” That slogan, the first in the Post’s history, was launched in 2017, a mere month after Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. So much for a veneer of fairness toward the new administration.
And what about the Post’s coverage of the alleged Trump-Russia collusion?
The Washington Post in 2021 had to correct and remove significant portions of two articles, published in 2017 and 2019, about the infamous Steele Dossier.
But that wasn’t the only thing the outlet should be embarrassed about when it comes to its coverage of Trump’s so-called collusion with Russia.
The Columbia Journalism Review, no conservative outlet, published last year a damning review of how top outlets, including The Washington Post, covered the matter.
For instance, Post opinion columnist Josh Rogin wrote an article during the 2016 GOP convention headlined “Trump campaign guts GOP’s anti-Russian stance on Ukraine,” referring to the Republican platform.
Rogin’s report “caught the attention of other journalists,” writes Jeff Gerth for the Columbia Journalism Review. “Within a few days, Paul Krugman, in his [New York] Times column, called Trump the ‘Siberian candidate,’ citing the ‘watering down’ of the platform. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, labeled Trump a ‘de facto agent’ of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. He cited the Rogin report …”
Gerth, who spent decades at The New York Times as an investigative reporter, adds, “The story would turn out to be an overreach.”
“Subsequent investigations found that the original draft of the platform was actually strengthened by adding language on tightening sanctions on Russia for Ukraine-related actions, if warranted, and calling for ‘additional assistance’ for Ukraine. What was rejected was a proposal to supply arms to Ukraine, something the Obama administration hadn’t done,” he explained.
Whoops?
Bob Woodward, the longtime investigative reporter who broke the Watergate story, referred to the Steele Dossier as a “garbage document” in a 2017 interview with “Fox News Sunday.” According to Gerth, Woodward attempted to make the case against the dossier to his Post colleagues.
Those colleagues apparently weren’t interested in what the respected investigative journalist had to say. “To be honest, there was a lack of curiosity on the part of the people at the Post about what I had said, why I said this, and I accepted that, and I didn’t force it on anyone,” Woodward told Gerth about his colleagues’ response.
Of course, we know now from special counsel John Durham’s 2023 report that the Steele Dossier was indeed a “garbage document.” In an analysis of the Durham report, Heritage Foundation legal scholars John Malcolm, Cully Stimson, and Zack Smith wrote that “the Russian intelligence officers could have fed disinformation to the very people who were ultimately cited in the series of six reports prepared by Christopher Steele—the so-called Steele dossier—on behalf of the [Hillary] Clinton campaign and furnished to the FBI.”
Nor was it only Russia collusion where the Post seemed driven by politics, not facts. In Trump’s first 100 days in office, the Post calculated he made 492 false or misleading claims. But the Post claimed that President Joe Biden only made 78 false or misleading claims in his first 100 days in office. While Trump may talk more and in a looser style than Biden, it simply strains credulity that he was guilty of five times as many falsehoods as Biden in the same period of time.
Another clear example of bias was how The Washington Post approached the issue of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop and his emails, first reported in October 2020 by the New York Post. Writing on the New York Post report in that same month, Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler talked about former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s conversations with a Ukrainian lawmaker and commented that those “interactions have given rise to fears that the [Hunter Biden] emails could be part of a broader disinformation campaign.” (Talking to Ukrainian lawmakers wouldn’t be cool until Democrats did it, apparently.)
It wasn’t until March of 2022 that The Washington Post admitted the laptop–and the emails—were legitimate.
While Bezos may be pivoting, all of these examples took place under his ownership of the paper, which he acquired in 2013.
Furthermore, Bezos’ own words suggest that he thinks The Washington Post is more guilty of the appearance of bias, rather than actual bias.
“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,” he writes.
“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.”
But of course, journalists in major media outlets are also failing on the first requirement.
That’s not good.
Sure, I’m grateful to be part of The Daily Signal, which—along with outlets such as The Federalist, Just The News, The Daily Wire, The Washington Free Beacon, The Daily Caller, and more—has risen up in a time when Americans desperately need more options for credible news reporting.
But the fact is that The Washington Post employs around 940 journalists. The New York Times employs 1,700 journalists. Prior to layoffs earlier this year, NBC News and MSNBC had 3,500 employees, as did CNN.
The Daily Signal currently has 13 full-time employees.
You see the problem?
Sure, my fervent hope is that The Daily Signal will continue growing and adding new reporters. (Donate here to support our serious news reporting.) But even if we quadrupled our number of journalists, we would still be less than 5% the size of The Washington Post.
Good, exhaustive reporting that prioritizes truth is expensive and time-consuming. To thoroughly cover the enormous U.S. government, it’s critical to have a huge staff.
Bezos has an enormous opportunity here to use his and the Post’s resources to bring back serious, credible news reporting, reporting that is driven by the truth and the need for the government to be accountable to the American people.
He was brave enough to stick his neck out and deny an endorsement to Harris. And he was brave enough, amid the uproar, to defend his position.
“I will … 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,” wrote Bezos.
“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.”
He’s certainly right about exercising new muscles. The Post could start by trying to cover lawmakers from both parties similarly and by adding conservative voices to its opinion pages more regularly.
But if Bezos is serious, this could be an amazing opportunity for the Post and for Americans hoping for a serious news organization that informs, not indoctrinates.
