The Patriot Post® · The Leftmedia Are Who We Thought They Were
Seeking to clarify his decision to have his paper refrain from endorsing a presidential candidate, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos published an op-ed titled, “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media.”
As Bezos notes, polling shows Americans’ positive opinion of the media and journalists has “fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress.” Bezos then used the analogy of voting machines to make his point, suggesting that there are “two requirements” at play. In order for people to trust the outcome of an election, the vote must be counted accurately, and the people need to “believe” the vote was counted accurately.
He then 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. 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.
Bezos continued: “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.”
On this last point, we agree with Bezos. Media endorsements, especially from outlets that clearly present and promote one ideological view and party over and against the other, as the Post has for decades, do little to sway the opinion of voters. They simply reinforce a preconceived bias.
Well, apparently, several members of the Washington Post’s staff don’t agree with Bezos, nor do they likely agree with his assessment of the distrust of the Leftmedia. Two of WaPo’s editorial board members, Molly Roberts and David Hoffman, resigned in protest, with Roberts contending, “I’m resigning from The Post editorial board because the imperative to endorse Kamala Harris over Donald Trump is about as morally clear as it gets. Worse, our silence is exactly what Donald Trump wants: for the media, for us, to keep quiet.”
The response from the Post’s staff merely exposes just how radically leftist the paper is. As we have repeatedly noted, our humble publication exists because legacy media outlets have been — for decades now — propagandists for the Democrat Party.
Bezos is correct to recognize that the mainstream media has a trust problem. However, he fails to identify its cause, still asserting that the media is accurate and suggesting that the problem is simply a matter of perception. Indeed, he entirely dismisses the root cause of the public’s distrust— its fact-based belief that the media is biased.
Until that bias is addressed, Bezos’s efforts to repair the Post’s reputation will fail. WaPo and other mainstream media outlets will have to embrace radical change, rejecting the destructive hubris that journalists exist primarily as agents for social change.
A journalist’s reporting may occasionally help bring about social change, but his or her goal should be accurate information sharing. Steering public opinion one way or the other is advocacy, not journalism. The journalist should always care about reporting the truth, not upholding some popular political narrative, like climate change fearmongering.
Bezos may be trying to realign his legacy media outlet back to a point in the past when it enjoyed a greater degree of public trust. But thanks to new media, those days are likely long gone. While Bezos disparages new media as “off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts, and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions,” is the record of legacy media any better? At least the new media doesn’t give itself awards for pumping out misinformation like the “Russia collusion” hoax or falsely framing the January 6 Capitol riot as an “insurrection.”
People have lost trust in legacy media because it has long lied to them, shading the truth, omitting the truth, or downright peddling fake news as the truth. Until Bezos and his paper commit to stopping this, his attempt to regain the public’s trust will be fruitless.