Washington Post Owner Jeff Bezos Isn’t Completely Wrong About the Media
Jeff Bezo during a CNN interview.
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is getting his share of criticism for stopping the paper’s presidential endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris less than two weeks before the election. Much of the criticism is well deserved, but Bezos correctly identifies the declining credibility of the mainstream media, including his Post as well as the New York Times.
On a minor level, Bezos correctly states that “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” and of course this is a good thing. On a major level, however, Bezos has correctly noted that “Americans don’t trust the news media” in increasing numbers, and the “lack of credibility” has led to greater support for “off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources.” At the risk of blowing my own horn, I believe there is greater diversity and contrarian content in CounterPunch than in the mainstream media on a daily basis.
The mainstream media is particularly guilty of false moral equivalence, which helped Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and is helping him once again against Kamala Harris. The day after Trump’s infamous Madison Square Garden rally, which was reminiscent of the German American Bund’s Nazi rally in 1939, the Post’s story above-the-fold was titled “Trump praises ‘inclusion’ at NYC rally laden with insults.” But the day after President Joe Biden’s use of the word “garbage,” the lead story in the Post was titled “Biden’s ‘garbage’ remark has Harris seeking distance.” The fact that Biden’s gaffe could be compared to a three-hour rally that disparaged American women and virtually all minorities speaks to the moral equivalence that dominates editorial and news desks in the American press community.
The 1939 rally was a cocktail of white supremacy, fascist ideology and American patriotism. “It looked like any political rally—only with a Nazi twist,” said Arnie Bernstein, author of “Swastika Nation.” Roosevelt was denounced as “Rosenfeld.” Trump’s 2024 rally was no different, but the former president described the rally as an “absolute love fest.” The former Fox News host Tucker Carlson described Harris as a “Samoan-Malaysian” with a “low IQ.”
But the mainstream media gave more attention to Biden’s stumbled verbiage than the fact that a parade of speakers at the Trump rally spent hours disparaging Latinos, Blacks, Palestinians, and Jews. There was the worst kind of misogynistic, bigoted, and crude remarks that Trump has never disavowed. Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policy, referred to “America for Americans,” which was a slogan used by the Ku Klux Klan. Tucker Carlson emphasized the “great replacement theory,” a racist claim that Democrats are trying to “replace” white American with immigrants. Tony Hinchcliffe, who stated that there was a “floating island of garbage in the middle the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” also referred to Palestinians as “violent” and Jews as “cheap.”
As for the mainstream media generally, most of what you read in the press comes from official sources, particularly government sources. There is little that passes for contrarian thinking in the U.S. press. The press defends, for example, the huge spending on defense and strategic modernization. It repeats the government’s justification for inflated spending by echoing the threat perceptions of the White House and the Pentagon. Over the years of the Cold War, the press regularly heightened the Soviet threat, and currently there is regular hyping of the threat from China. Arms control and disarmament has become a forgotten topic.
The mainstream media have never done a serious job of explaining the problems that are confronting the United States. Currently, the media spend too much time with the results of polling, marking the worst-covered election in recent history. Journalists can’t be blamed for the emergence of Donald Trump, but they failed to examine the causes and consequences of Trump and his MAGA movement. Broadway shows face more criticism than the Broadway huckster from Trump Towers.
The Post and the Times have influential columnists who act as apologists for one cause or another. Ruth Marcus of the Post and Bret Stephens of the Times have been regular apologists for Israel over the years, and the Post’s David Ignatius has been an apologist for the intelligence community, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency, for decades.
Bezos argues that Americans’ trust in the mainstream media is at an all-time low, which is part of a larger trend that finds less trust in presidential politics and the Congress. For the past several years, Americans have stated that they have no trust in the media or reduced confidence in the media. According to a recent Gallup poll, the news media is the least trusted group among ten U.S. civic and political institutions involved in the democratic process.
The crisis in confidence of many U.S. institutions is weakening our democracy and contributing to an international perception that U.S. influence and credibility are in a state of decline. This could portend a shift in the global balance of power. The fact that the Post, whose masthead proclaims that “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” does not recognize the threat to American’s democracy in the Trump candidacy could portend an even more dangerous shift in U.S. domestic politics.
Non-Endorsement Isn’t “Neutrality” or “Objectivity”
Photograph Source: Jengod – CC BY-SA 4.0
In late October, the Los Angeles Times published its list of candidate/issue endorsements for this year’s general election. Missing from the list: Any endorsement for president. Semafor reports
A few days later, the Washington Post similarly announced that it won’t endorse for president this year or “in any future presidential election.” Once again, NBC News reports, that decision was made by Post owner Jeff Bezoz, who vetoed the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Harris.
The stories drew applause from some media critics — unsurprisingly, mostly those associated with the Republican Party — for a supposed move toward “neutrality,” or even “objectivity” (those two words do not mean the same thing) by the Times and Post.
Those same stories, of course, drew condemnation from other media critics — unsurprisingly, mostly those associated with the Democratic Party — over their faux silence in the face of e.g. Trump as “existential threat to democracy.”
Let’s get that “neutrality” and “objectivity” nonsense out of the way first.
American news media are not and never have been “neutral.” Neutrality means taking no side in a conflict. American media — newspapers in particular — have a long history of identifying with political parties and endorsing those parties’ candidates in elections.
In fact, many newspapers once bore the stamp of their party affiliations in their names (I grew up with the Lebanon, Missouri Daily Record, previously the Rustic Republican) and others still do (for example, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette). They weren’t “neutral.” They took sides.
In the 20th century, under the influence of journalists like Walter Lippmann, journalism began portraying itself as “objective.” While many (including far too many journalists) treat that as a synonym for “neutrality,” it isn’t. Objectivity means accurately representing reality.
Reality, objectively reported, often implies a better or worse side.
Reality, neutrally reported, just reports the sides and refuses to take one.
In reality, most news media are neither neutral nor objective. Their reportage is biased, just more subtly than openly.
Most journalistic outlets use the more attractive-sounding term for the side they support and the less attractive-sounding term for the side they oppose. Even if a story is accurate in its factual statements, it’s written to make one side sound like the good guys and the other side sound like the bad guys.
Quick example: Pro-choice and pro-life versus pro-abortion and anti-abortion.
Or look at reporting on the war in Gaza. Supporters of one side or the other will mix and match words like “self-defense,” “resistance,” “terrorism,” and “genocide” to make precisely the same actions sound better or worse depending on which side takes those actions.
We know which candidate the editorial boards of the Times and Postprefer — and which candidate the owners of those newspapers prefer. Silence on both isn’t “neutrality” or “objectivity,” it’s just one preference vetoing the other.
We’d all be better informed if media just went back to wearing their biases on their sleeves.
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