"They're so poor, all they have is money" - Kara Swasher

Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, wrote an opinion editorial in his own paper:

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. 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. [...]

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. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.

Mr. Bezos has always been effective writer and this piece demonstrates his command of it. Mr. Bezos has never meddled in the newsroom or editorial decisions during his tenure at the Post. He rarely emails staff and has only appeared in person a handful of times. His been a fantastic owner and steward of the Post since his purchase of it in 2015. Until now.

After reading his op-ed a couple of times, I’ll admit—it’s almost convincing. Sure, the media has a trust problem. There’s a perception of liberal bias in the major news outlets. Fox News’s entire business is built on their cynical tagline, "Fair and Balanced.” The saliency of endorsements is also questionable. How many undecided voters read the Washington Post's endorsements in the past and thought to themselves, “Sure, I’ll vote for that guy.”

There’s a discussion to be had about whether a paper like the Post should keep publishing endorsements. But that discussion should’ve happened months ago. A policy change 12 days before an election—especially this election—isn’t “inadequate planning.” If he’d made this call back at the Republican National Convention, it would’ve been a bad decision. But now? Forget it. This is just a disaster.

In his op-ed, Mr. Bezos argued that presidential endorsements coming from the opinion section—where they publish opinions—is too much opinion, claiming that endorsements “create a perception of bias.” By blocking the drafted endorsement, Mr. Bezos created a bias for sure: as the owner of the newspaper, only his opinion counts -- steamrolling the independence of editorial section of his newspaper. Instead of the op-ed, he could’ve just tweeted, “It’s my paper, and I’ll do what I want. No endorsements now or ever. If you don’t like it, buy your own newspaper.” At least that would’ve been honest.

In my view, Mr. Bezos intervene in a such a cowardly and obnoxious way, that his letter resulted in compounding a shit-show into a shit-sandwich. CEO and Publisher Will Lewis's original piece on the Post not publishing an endorsement, started this mess in the first place. The word salad he wrote on from Friday, October 25, 2024, set off a shit-storm that led to over 200,000 subscribers cancelling by early Monday. As of today, after Mr. Bezos's letter, that number went up to 250,000 people cancelling their digital subscription. Many comments to Mr. Lewis and Mr. Bezos respective letters said the Post betrayed their trust as readers and subscribers.

Oliver Darcy on threads.net makes a good point that the Post's brand is speaking truth to power and gestures a key reason for the enormity of cancellations:

Readers have been sold on the idea that the paper stands up to the powerful, without fear or favor. If that isn't true anymore, and readers lose confidence that the paper does stand for a noble mission, they will cancel their subscriptions.

Since the beginning of the year, like many media businesses, the Post has made a big push to add more subscribers. That revenue funds reporters, engineers, designers, product, finance, and legal staff. It pays for the kind of investigative journalism that wins Pulitzer Prizes, like the Post’s coverage of the January 6th Insurrection. Most of the staff at the Post must feel deflated after swimming upstream for so long, only to be blindsided by a reckless, bozo decision that tossed aside their hard work and commitment to the institution.

Moreover, Dr. Drang following Mr. Bezos's reasoning by his analogy, it does not occur to Mr. Bezos his intervention is what in politics is called, "bad optics".

If I’m following Bezos’s logic, he must not just run the Post without letting his other business interests interfere, he must appear to run the Post without letting his other business interests interfere. The easy way to do that would be to keep his hands off the editorial board. I wonder why that didn’t occur to him? (No, I don’t really wonder.)

It so happens that on the day Mr. Bezos and Will Lewis blocked the endorsement, Trump visited the CEO of Blue Origin (Bezos’s space company, which has juicy sweet government contracts to launch satellites). I'm told it's not what it looks like!

Come on. Mr. Bezos's own analogy shows how disastrous a decision to block a drafted endorsement less than two weeks away from the election. Did Mr. Bezos obey in advance like in Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny? It stands to reason that indeed, Mr. Bezos lost his spine somewhere between off the coast of Miami, where his custom yacht is too big to port, and his Vogue photoshoot at Yellowstone, where he cosplayed with his girlfriend, um Yellowstone. What is the point of amassing all the wealth and power if you can't stand up for your own newspaper.

What does it say when one of the richest and most powerful person on earth, is so scared of a second-term Trump presidency, that he can't count on the rule of law such that his businesses might come under intense scrutiny, even broken up, or taken away? If even Bezos isn’t confident his business would remain secure, what message does that send to the broader business community?

Also, Jennifer Valentino Devries at NYT puts it in another way what really is the problem:

This whole Bezos WaPo decision strikes me as emblematic of the way many tech billionaires (or even mere millionaires) seem to think about journalism and, in fact, a plethora of other professions that aren't their own. They think it's easy and that they could do a better job of it than its own practitioners. That it really should be improved by adding technology and a Silicon Valley mindset.

His explanation sounds almost absurd, and yet it reminds me of so many other opinions I've heard.

Call it an “education” for Bezos and his billionaire peers, but the ones footing the bill are the staff of the Post, LA Times, and USA Today. I am very doubtful Mr. Bezos is going to write a check at the end of the year to avoid Post having to do layoffs, again. It would suggest that he made a mistake -- something he is not capable of doing. Just how far will the appeasement go in anticipation of a second Trump term, even before the election? I don’t know, but it could cost us more than just a paper’s subscribers.