Three Cheers for Jeff Bezos
Finally.
A hard truth — and a very old one — is openly addressed by new Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos in, amazingly, the Washington Post.
The Bezos headline:
The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media
A note from our owner.
Among other pointed truths, Bezos, with bold print for emphasis supplied here, says:
In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. 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.
…
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. 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.
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.
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Many of the finest journalists you’ll find anywhere work at The Washington Post, and they work painstakingly every day to get to the truth. They deserve to be believed.
Well bravo for Mr. Bezos.
The American media has a problem — and a big one.
In the past few months, here are a few sample headlines:
New York Times publisher responds to staff outrage over Tom Cotton op-ed
And now, the Washington Post has joined this group of three:
So what do we have here? What we have is the recognition that whether it’s the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CBS News, or now the Washington Post, their respective staffs are not filled with journalists but rather with left-wing activists masquerading as journalists.
But only recently have the liberals doing this been publicly outed — by themselves. And now, along comes the owner of the Washington Post — Jeff Bezos — to both admit the reality of liberal media bias the world has long known and vow to do something about it.
Here at The American Spectator, the pages reflect the honesty of what the magazine has always been, right from its creation by founder R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., all the way back there in 1967. It is an “opinion” magazine showcasing conservative views on the issues of the day. Along with other opinion publications like William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review or the liberal New Republic, The American Spectator makes no pretense to be anything other than what it was designed to be right from the start.
The same cannot be seen with a number of major media outlets. It was perfectly plain to most readers that outlets like the Washington Post, the New York Times, CBS News, and more were created to … gasp! … report the news. To borrow from an ancient police detective show — Dragnet — they were supposed to be about what the main character, Detective Joe Friday, repeated frequently: “The facts. Just the facts.”
Or, as CBS anchor Walter Cronkite used to say at the end of his nightly broadcasts, “And that’s the way it is.” Or, as the motto for the Times had it on the front page of every issue, the Times was about “All the news that’s fit to print.”
Alas, in today’s world, as all these cited examples above illustrate, these and other major supposedly “fact-oriented” outlets are hell and gone from fact-based journalism. They are about left-wing politics. There is everything right with a paper having an op-ed section that is specifically designed to publish opinions. But the op-ed section is not the front page or the inside pages that are supposed to be about “the facts, just the facts.”
And for Jeff Bezos to not simply buy the Post but admit in his own opinion piece — in the Post! — that the journalism profession, including his own Post, has a serious problem, takes considerable courage. He may well be a billionaire, but that will not — and has not — protected him from being targeted by Post staffers and others for speaking truth to establishment media power.
Again, Bezos said:
Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working….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. Most people believe the media is biased.
Bingo.
So three cheers for Jeff Bezos. Big time.
READ MORE:
Two Media Giants, No Endorsement
The Press Barons Feign Impartiality. No One Believes It.
The Washington Post’s Looney Liberal Readership
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