A drama has unfolded over the recent days as one of the leading echo chambers of Washington’s permanent bureaucracy—the Washington Post—announced it would not be endorsing a candidate for next week’s presidential elections. A flurry of protests from within and without the paper have ensued, demanding, of course, that the company endorse Harris in order that the nation be saved from Donald Trump. Reportedly 200,000 subscribers have even canceled their memberships for the newspaper.
While this drama itself is largely laughable, the Post’s owner Jeff Bezos was forced to admit the truth in an op-ed on Oct. 28 about the sad state of the company and American mass media at large. Bezos wrote: “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.”
Not surprisingly however, Bezos doesn’t admit fault, and insists that the Post is publishing purely objective and accurate information. The problem is that the American people don’t recognize or appreciate this—and this is the issue which he is committed to solve. Instead of admitting to the lies told repeatedly by the paper that have engendered distrust in the public, Bezos writes: “We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.”
