Several newspapers have refused to endorse any candidate for the upcoming Presidential election. These (infamously) include the Wall Street Journal (which hasn’t endorsed a candidate since Herbert Hoover), and the Washington Post, but there are many other papers who refused to endorse as well, including the Minnesota Star-Tribune and the Tampa Bay Times, as well as several large newspaper chains. In the case of the Post, owner Jeff Bezos said that the paper will no longer make any Presidential endorsements (that of course could change should the ownership change.) From the link above:
Big headlines popped up in media circles last week when the billionaire owners of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times blocked editorials that would have endorsed Kamala Harris. News staff turmoil followed with resignations at the Times and op-eds and a petition from opinion writers at the Post.
USA Today, which endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in its 38 years in 2020, has reverted to neutrality. The Wall Street Journal hasn’t backed a presidential candidate since Herbert Hoover. If it were to shift course in the next few days, that would be a true October surprise.
That leaves The New York Times by its lonesome among national newspapers in still endorsing (Harris, of course, several times over).
I had already been looking at regional papers, where the steady move away from taking sides in presidential elections has become an epidemic. The largest chains — Gannett and Alden Global’s MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing — have all stopped. (Hearst and Advance Local still leave their papers the option.)
Independent, locally owned organizations dominate the shrinking list of holdouts. Here, too, disengagement is becoming a trend. The highly regarded (and recently renamed) Minnesota Star Tribune alerted readers on Sept. 23 that no endorsement would be forthcoming.
When the Washington Post refused to endorse, the theory immediately spread that Jeff Bezos, who apparently overrode the editors’ decision to endorse Harris, had become “politically neutral” as a nefarious ploy as insurance against a Trump victory. (Apparently Amazon, also owned by Bezos, might stand to lose substantial government business, as Trump is known to be a retributive person.)
Now I am not sure what motivaated Bezos to do this. But, as I said, I was willing to be charitable and assumed that Bezos, like the other owners, were being institutionally neutral as a way to maintain their papers’ reputation for objectivity in the news. Other people were not so charitable, and, in the end, we cannot know what was in Bezos’s mind.
But he did explain his decision in a new Washington Post editorial, and it comes down to the institutional neutrality explanation. (He does admit that the timing was bad.) You can read it yourself by clicking on the headline below or find the article archived here. Whether you believe Bezos or not is up to you, but I think that at least as a long-term strategy to prevent people from distrusting the media, journalistic neutrality in both news and lack of official endorsements is the way to go.
I’ll quote Bezos (indented):
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. 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. 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.
I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally.
. . . You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up. You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.
. . . While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world? To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course. This is the way of the world. None of this will be easy, but it will be worth it.
As I said, lots of people won’t believe him, nor do they think the L.A. Times‘s failure to endorse a candidate was principled, as the owner has $6 billion. But what about all those other newspapers and chains? All hedging their bets against a Trump victory?
Perhaps, but I am still in favor of ideological neutrality. And what paper would adopt such neutrality, say, two years after an election? The timing was uncomfortably close to the election, which is bad, but I still think Bezos’s decision is a harbinger of good things that promote freedom of speech and thought. And I now that many readers will disagree with me.
The paper even has an article about Bezos’s refusal to endorse, which you can read by clicking on the headline below, or reading the archived version here.
And some straight reporting on the fallout:
The op-ed, which appears in Tuesday’s print edition, comes as nearly one-third of The Post’s 10-member editorial board stepped down Monday in the wake of Bezos’s decision.
The board members — all of whom have said they intend to remain at the newspaper in other roles — include David E. Hoffman, a 42-year Washington Post veteran who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for columns on autocracy and resigned Thursday, the day before publisher William Lewis shocked the board by announcing the decision to cease a long-standing practice of issuing endorsements in presidential races. Board member Molly Roberts confirmed that she is stepping down. The third board member is Mili Mitra, who also serves as director of audience for The Post’s opinions section. Bezos made no mention of the resignations in his opinion piece.
. . . The Post’s editorial board is part of the newspaper’s opinions section, which operates independently from the staff that provides news coverage. The remaining members of the board following Monday’s board resignations are Shipley, Charles Lane, Stephen Stromberg, Mary Duenwald, James Hohmann, Eduardo Porter and Keith B. Richburg.
“It’s extremely difficult for us because we built this institution,” Hoffman said in an interview before the public announcement of his decision to step down. “But we can’t give up on our American democracy or The Post.”
Finally, as Bezos surely would have known, his decision to avoid endorsement cost the paper, and cost it seriously. The headline below tells the tale. Click on it or find it. archived here:
An excerpt:
The number does not take into account how many new subscribers have signed up for The Post during the same period, or how many who canceled may have changed their minds later and re-subscribed.It’s also unclear how many of those who canceled subscriptions also receive print editions of The Post.
A Post spokeswoman declined to comment on subscription numbers. The Post is a privately held company that does not typically share such data with the public.
. . .But despite the assurances from Bezos and Lewis, the blowback has been intense. More than 20 Post opinion columnists dissented in a piece The Post published, and three members of the editorial board stepped down from that role, while remaining on the staff.
Tens of thousands of readers left comments on The Post stories about the fallout, including from those who said they were canceling subscriptions after being loyal readers for decades, alarmed by what they viewed as a capitulation to Donald Trump.
, , ,The Post saw its digital subscribers peak at 3 million in January 2021. It has dropped off since then to about 2.5 million now.
The company was projected to lose $100 million last year, but ended up losing $77 million after an employee buyout program reduced company staffing by about 10 percent. Bezos brought in Lewis this year to help recover lost subscriptions and grow other parts of the business.
Earlier this month, employees were told at a companywide meeting, which was also reported by the New York Times, that The Post was starting to see modest, positive subscriber growth after two years of declining numbers.
As I said, Bezos surely would have foreseen this. So if you take the less charitable view of his actions, he courted Trump knowing that it would cost the paper dearly, and even, perhaps, bring about its death. Perhaps he didn’t predict so many lost subscribers, and made a calculation that Trump’s favor (if he won) would be worth the subscription loss.
Readers have to decide for themselves here. I cannot psychologize Bezos, but in the end I think the trend towards increasing journalistic neutrality is a salubrious occurrence.
Bezos is worried about Trump and the GOP’s retribution if Trump were to God forbid win. If institutional neutrality was a concern, this would have been done months ago. To think otherwise is fantasy. WaPo is losing money and journalists hand over fist anyway and Bezos was probably going to dump it or close it in the next five years regardless, as this was a loss leader cleanup op for his reputation as the owner of a company which has been spearheading the push to drive brick and mortar retail into an early dirt-nap.
Well, I’m glad you know Bezos’s motivations absolutely! And no, institutional neutrality is growing, both in universities and newspapers. Finally, most people realize that newspaper endorsements have almost no effect on elections or votes (Bezos mentions this). Remember in 2016 when the vast majority of newspapers endorsed Hillary Clinton and she lost anyway? I can’t help but feel that all this psychologizing of Bezos reflects at bottom an anger that the newspaper (and others) simply won’t endorse the candidate they want to win.
But, as I said, I am not as sure of Bezos’s motivations as you are!
I’m actually all-in on news organizations no longer making endorsements at all. Media should be unbiased. The trend in the past twenty or so years of journalism morphing from being the bearers of unbiased truth into either A) advocacy journalism (Slate/NPR/BBC) B) opinonews (Fox/MSNBC), or C) edutainment is, in my opinion, socially detrimental if not outright toxic. Endorsements imply that the news organization in question is playing favorites, which in turn, erodes the trust that the public has in that organization. I, for one, can barely listen to the BBC World News these days because its bias on so many issues is so plain as day that it puts into question just about everything that they say on the topic.
But just because I think that Bezos made the right move, theoretically, to put a kibosh on endorsements, doesn’t mean that I disregard the timing. Bezos ain’t no dummy. Unlike some people, he didn’t make his money hawking NFTs. He knows that WHEN you say something can matter as much as what you say. The maintenance (or creation of) neutrality would have been just as well served, perhaps even more so over the long term, had WaPo announced “this will be our final political endorsement moving forward. We understand that endorsements have minimal, if any weight in modern election cycles, and believe that more can be gained by doing our part to try to end the siloing of news. We strive to be the kind of newspaper that everyone in America regardless of political stripe would choose to access and trust.” But instead they do this a week before an election? THIS election? This is a message. Maybe to Trump, maybe to shareholders. Bezos is a businessman. WaPo hemorrhages nearly $100M a year and the people that I follow in the industry make no bones about their doubts that it may well cease to exist at least as a national newspaper sooner rather than later. On the other side of the ledger, Amazon has billions in federal contracts which would be put in jeopardy if someone as petty as Trump and his minions retake the Presidency.
Furthermore, doing this much reputational harm to WaPo is hardly a help to capital-M Media neutrality. If his decision puts the cliff that WaPo is racing towards even closer, then even should WaPo become a bastion of perfectly unbiased journalism tomorrow, what good does it do society if the day after tomorrow it goes out of business? Newsmax isn’t going to suddenly decide to become responsible. Al Jazeera isn’t going to suddenly become a neutral observer. There will just be one less place to go for people who DO want true journalism.
Clinton won the popular vote and lost the electoral college. The papers do continue to make other election endorsements (Senate, Governor, etc.), so why stop just Presidential endorsements?
I’m not sure whether papers should be endorsing anybody officially, though editorial writers can of course continue to express their opinions.
I’m going to suggest that, more simply, Hilary Clinton lost the election. Full stop. The winner is determined by who gets a majority of Electoral College votes. The popular vote is reported just for its entertainment value. (Annoyingly, Canadian coverage of our elections has started to report the aggregate popular vote, which heretofore no one paid any attention to because the winner has always been the party that wins the most seats. A Liberal Party hack even gloated after the last election that the Liberals had formed a government despite polling only 33% of the vote, behind the main opposition party. “Congrats to efficient campaigning! How low can we get to? Anyone up for trying for 30% next election? Let the Tories waste their votes in landslides.” (Quoted freely from memory.)
Now if you want to make the national popular vote determinative, you have to recognize that millions of Republicans in large blue landslide states would show up to vote, knowing that their votes would now make a difference. So will Democrats, feeling the hot breath on their necks. If the rules said the popular vote determined the winner, you can’t assume it would break the same way as when it doesn’t.
I respectfully suggest that it doesn’t help people trust the electoral process if Democrats complain that the results aren’t legitimate if their losing candidate garnered more individual votes than the winner did. They are all playing the same game with the same rules applying to both.
Bezos’s timing makes sense. The editorial board (of the WaPo) was about to endorse Kamala. He intervened at that point. Why the editorial board did not attempt a Kamala endorsement earlier, is unknown to me. It appears that newspapers traditionally endorse candidates around a week prior to elections.
Does it make sense that after having his newspaper make multiple endorsements of candidates for House and Senate seats this month and having his editors finish an endorsement of Harris, at that moment decide that endorsement is partisan? Even Bezos says his timing was bad, but then gives no reason why he made the decision now.
Bezos intervened when he was forced to do so. Below you will find the comment on this by “gbJames”. He states (and other sources confirm) that Bezos intervened just prior to an endorsement being published.
A recent article by NBC shows why American don’t trust the media and are not about too. The article refers to the male on the San Jose Volleyball team as ‘her’. Of course, TWAW is a religious dogma on the left. Of course, the left (cultural, not economic) controls such institutions as NBC.
Some of the editors have shown how brave they are, by resigning from the editorial board, but not the paper. In other words, they intend to keep their paychecks.
I’m with you on this one. The institution of journalism has lost much of its credibility with far too many people. Restoring confidence in media so that we can, perhaps, all live in the same informational world (one without “alternative facts”) is urgent and well served by institutional neutrality.
+1.
Some good insights: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/10/30/bezos-business-federal-government/
The whole thing is meaningless without the admission that they are also failing on the first score. Also, I think it’s a stretch in the first paragraph for Bezos to include himself as a journalist.
Let’s try this: To succeed at this business, we must sell desirable products, and people must believe they are desirable products. The consumers are failing on that second part.
I won’t speculate about the motives of the (non)endorsement, but Bezos seems to be throwing a sop to his whiney journalists with that “We are accurate, but we are not believed” nonsense. Until they face their failings, journalists (as a group) will court scorn from those who don’t swill their Kool-Aid.
The fate of the Free World depends, not on Bezos, but on Sleepy Joe’s quasi-garbage : men without a college education who live in swing states and who consume prodigious quantities of beer, conspiracies on XItter, and manly podcasts.
[ GIF of Orson Welles clapping in Citizen Kane ]
Another suggested motivation is that Bezos owns Blue Origin which could lose valuable government launch contracts should a retributive candidate win the presidency.
Whatever the motivation, I found the explanation published by the Post’s editor to be so vacuous (e.g., “Let people make up their own minds”) that I cancelled my subscription. The Post has a responsibility to report the best ideas and opinions; it opines on social and political issues, informing us on their reasons to make the choices we face. To abdicate that on the most consequential decisions is to abdicate their mission when it matters most.
Bezos’ comment that “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” could be a principled position had it been taken before the election. At this point, it’s not. Or he could simply have said we won’t endorse next time. By doing it now, he created a problem of failing expectations and raised issues of editorial mission, objectivity, and independence that shouldn’t be in question.
There I was thinking that the primary role of a newspaper is to present news and information, not to tell its readers which opinions to hold.
Lacking the Post’s guidance, are you now bewildered and unsure who to vote for?
> There I was thinking that the primary role of a newspaper is to present news and information, not to tell its readers which opinions to hold.
That seems naive. All writing attempts to persuade its readers of opinions to hold, beginning with the opinion that the writer is worth listening to. In our information-rich environment, there are thousands of purported facts and opinions bombarding us daily. Considering sources, motivations, and moneyed interests should be second nature to modern media consumers. The opinions, judgements, and reasoning in editorials and endorsements are more such information that we integrate or reject according to our values.
I’m sorry, but since you define “opinion” as even writing a column (“the writer wants people to make the reader think the writer is worth listening to”), you lump all forms of journalism as equally opinionated. That won’t fly. A Presidential endorsement is not as “opinionated” as say a report of a fatal car crash, a sports article, or a report on the shortage of avocados. It seems naive to equate all journalism as opinion particularly when you lump together all journalism as opinion simply because it is written and printed.
I don’t lump all forms of journalism as equally opinionated. The media we consume lies on various spectra of trustworthy or not, factual vs opinionated, relevant to us or not, well-reasoned or not, etc. So I don’t think editorials tell readers which opinions to hold. They tell us what individuals or organizations who specialize in the news assert so we can decide based on their supporting facts and reasoning.
Bezos shutting down the editors and their endorsement undermines the editors’ hard-won and carefully-maintained position of independence and transparency.
Well, I guess the entire paper should be labeled “opinion” then, since the reporters also have hard-won and carefully-maintained positions of independence and transparancy.
Regardless of how nefarious you consider Bezos’s motives, as he said: it’s unlikely an endorsement would change opinions. (BTW, your saying that editorials don’t tell readers which opinions they should hold is exactly the same as telling us “what individuals or organizations who specialize in the news assert so we can decide based on their supporting facts and reasoning.”. If that’s not supposed to influence opinion, I don’t know what is.
There is one study of what endorsing Presidential candidates did for a scientific journal, and it doesn’t favor your view: endorsements merely make readers think the venue is slanted. This is when Nature endorsed Biden four years ago (a first) and they measured what effect it had. I quote from a summary:
I suspect that endorsements do the same for journalists, and that is what Bezos said. People are made for largely one reason, they WANTED the Post to endorse Harris because they wanted their own views buttressed by a newspaper.
We have both had our say now, so I suggest we close this discussion.
Dr. Gary, thank you for canceling your subscription. If enough people do, maybe some of the young woke journalists who think the paper and the country should look like their version of nirvana will have an opportunity to go live in the real world and the journalists who remain will be wise enough to stick with objective truth. Those of us who hope for a return to objective reporting salute you and hope that the NYT has a similar epiphany and woke exodus.
I have no idea why Bezos and others chose to break with the practice of their newspapers endorsing a candidate but I assume the promise of VP Harris to repeal the Trump tax cuts and even increase the taxation on the very rich individuals and corporations had a lot to do with it.
I’m a bit perplexed. If you have “no idea” why Bezos did what he did, why then do you offer an idea that it’s based on tax cuts?
At any rate, now we have several theories about Bezos doing what he did, all of which contradict why he said why he did what he did.
I said this because I don’t know his rational but with uber billionaires like Bezos and Musk one would think the tax cuts would have to play a role in their decision.
Not knowing what it is like to be a multi multi billionaire I can only guess.
I doubt it. I also don’t think he expected to have editors resigning. People in his position are more accustomed to having their decisions just accepted.
Full disclosure… I’m one of the 250,000 who cancelled my subscription. I think it is vacuous nonsense to pretend that a newspaper doesn’t have an editorial position. Do we now eliminate all editorials so that “people can decide for themselves”? Of course not.
The timing of this decision just as an endorsement is about to be published says it all.
That would be good, yes. Or, rather, the paper could still run op-ed columns written by named individuals, but should aim to have a range of such voices, and should often run two adjacent columns arguing for the opposite conclusion.
This is false impartiality. All people, and institutions, have biases. I prefer that the ideological biases of sources be clear.
Why can’t the bias be for neutrality, a neutrality bias?
Two hundred fifty thousand subscription cancellations, plus reading some of the comments here, makes me wonder: how many of us really want our primary source(s) of news to be unbiased? There’s certainly comfort in having one’s point-of-view validated.
I cancelled my WaPo digital subscription months ago because I grew tired of what I saw as its pro-Palestinian slant. Was I just looking to have my viewpoint validated? I can’t deny that’s at least possible.
I do think the idea of journalistic neutrality is a good one and something the press should seek to attain.
As an aside, I despise Trump, and factually reporting what he says and does is all it takes to reveal him as the narcissistic autocrat he is.
Exactly! — If indeed hardly anyone is swayed by an endorsement, its function must rather be to reinforce the sense of belonging to the “right” tribe.
“factually reporting what [Trump] says and does is all it takes to reveal him as the narcissistic autocrat he is.”
And his cult simply don’t care, unfortunately. My only hope is that he has lost all independents.
The move to neutrality is laudable if true, and must now be substantiated in print.
Over the past few years I became increasingly irritated by the sheer sanctimony infusing almost all articles in the WaPo and even more so in the NYT. The changes in board and staff brought about by the non-endorsement might yet turn into a chance for a new start.
If you cancel the Post because they didn’t endorse a presidential candidate, you’re a knob.
What, you can’t decide who to vote for unless the paper you read tells you who they think is better? Please…
We have a serious “team brain” problem this close to the election and want everyone to support our chosen candidate. After all, if the other candidate wins it will be the end of civilization as we know it. Almost every election. Primates, right! Very human to dump a newspaper for not supporting a desired candidate but, in my case, it would also be very petty if I chose that way of expressing my opinion.
I agree with the principle of institutional neutrality, so I agree with this move at the Post. The problem is that ending the practice of endorsing candidates only contributes the appearance of institutional neutrality. It does not of itself create or enforce institutional neutrality. That, it seems to me, would be a much more difficult matter, one that would require policies and practices that go beyond simply not supplying a printed editorial endorsement. Nonetheless, I do think that it is a step in the right direction.
I take Bezos at his word. This is just the first, small step toward restoring the Post’s credibility.
If you want to see media bias, check out most of New Zealand’s! You’ll also find lack of integrity, unfounded opinion camouflaged as ‘journalism’, and censorship posing as ‘ensuring free speech’. No need to mention here the ubiquitous anti-science, pro-triabalism woke-wash, since Jerry covers that consistently and well.
I think Bezos is right, whatever his motivation. Perhaps he’s read some NZ media and can see the future for the WaPo (ie., either none or survive by government hand-out… with the conditions that will be attached, as with NZ’s now thankfully defunct Publioc Interest Journalism Fund: https://www.taxpayers.org.nz/pijf).
Good luck with the election over there, and the aftermath, whichever outcome.
Some on here don’t seem realize there is a difference between the news department and the opinion department. Endorsements of candidates comes from the opinion department, which, as the name implies, is the opinion of the writers/editors.
There is a good argument for a newspaper not to endorse public candidates for office to remain neutral, but that would apply to the news department. The opinion department is there for opinions, which are not usually neutral. They should have a variety of opinions from the political spectrum for balance, but when there is a consensus opinion among the editors for a candidate or a piece of legislation or any newsworthy issue, they should be free to post it, and they do all the time. For example, Bezos seems to be ok with the WaPo endorsing Alsobrooks for her Senate race this year and Vindman for the House in Virginia.
It is clearly cowardice and fear of reprisal from Trump that caused Bezos to, at the last minute, stop the editors from publishing their Harris endorsement (and no other candidate endorsements). Of course, no one can know for sure, but that would be MY opinion.
I have still kept my WaPo subscription, for now. But Bezos’ response is lacking and has caused lasting harm to the WaPo. It’s not just leftist subscribers that see this, look at the editors and writers who have resigned their positions. Hubris or cowardice, either way his decision is a blot on the newspaper.
It might signal a consolidation to the center, depending on who the new hires are.
From Bezos’s article: “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.”
Exactly. Of course there are still opinion sections but one might hope for more than one point of view.
WaPo is far to the left and Bezos hopes to centre it a bit. Completely reasonable IMHO.
WaPo has never been far to the left. It runs as many conservative editorials as liberal ones. Its news reporting is impartial.
OK. I haven’t been a long time subscriber. I was going by the comments.
I’ve been a long time reader of the WSJ, whose opinion section and readers trend more conservative.
Reputable newspapers have clear divides between the newsroom and the editorial board, and that’s the case at WaPo. The news is reported impartially, while editorials offer analysis and take positions on issues. To maintain their reputation, the editorial board has no influence over news reporting, and vice versa.
But also, it’s important for the owner to not influence either reporting or editorials. And that’s Bezos’ problem now. The editorial board had already prepared an endorsement of Harris, but Bezos spiked it.
When he meddles in the paper’s content, readers can’t be sure that what they’re reading is free from his personal influence, something he had pledged not to do when he bought the paper. And that’s just bad for the paper’s reputation. It was an incredibly poorly timed move.
I want the opinion pieces I read to have someone’s name on them. I can assess who columnists and guest editorial writers are. The Editorial Board? I really have no idea who they are or why I’m supposed to be interested in what they have to say.
If they didn’t claim to have a hard separation between the news and editorial divisions I would feel differently about this; if the editorials reflected the biases of the reporters then I would be happier for them to be open about these. The separation makes the very existence of an editorial voice puzzling, especially if it claims to be independent of the ownership – someone hired these people, after all. I’ve always assumed that if the paper has a point of view it would be that of the owners.
“…I am still in favor of ideological neutrality…”
I am less concerned with parsing Bezos’s motives than I am with the impression of the WaPo that his decision leaves. Newspapers have never been ideological neutral since the first newspapers in the American colonies were rabidly anti-British, and the WaPo has been well-known for its left/liberal slant for decades, and its readers and subscribers expect that. Here in D.C., if you want a conservative alternative, you read the Washington Times or these days the Washington Examiner online. In the past it was the Washington Star or the Daily News. To suggest that the WaPo be the only paper in town — or in the U.S. — that is “ideologically neutral” is perhaps an unfair burden. The journalistic principle should be accuracy, reliability, and honesty, and both liberal and conservative newspapers can achieve that despite their ideological biases.
Again, not a liberal paper. Their editorial writers include George Will, Kathleen Parker and Marc Thiessen, the latter being a Republican operative. Their principal cartoonist is Michael Ramirez, a conservative who regularly skewers Biden and Harris. They dropped Michael DeAdder, who is a liberal cartoonist.
Compared to European papers, the Post would be considered solidly conservative.
You are referring to the editorial side, not the reporting side, which are separate divisions of the paper. A few conservative op ed columnists do not make the WaPo less of a liberal paper. Their presence was an effort to expand the readership and subscription base when the WaPo competed with more conservative local newspapers. Comparisons to European newspapers are not relevant to the evaluation of U.S. newspapers since the nature of politics is so different. I’m been reading the WaPo for more than 60 years, so I have some sense of its slant, which is consistent with other judgments, e.g.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/washington-post/
That was a defensible claim a decade ago. After the Trump years, not so much.
From the first link:
There’s a disconnect here: no studies of election endorsements are cited, only of editorials in general. For all we know from the given information, endorsements might be the one type of editorial that is widely read. And if the goal is to cut staff or reassign them, the solution would be to cut editorials to fewer pages, or none – not to stop endorsements and nothing more.
Here’s what has passed for news in the Post when Amazon interests were directly affected. In 2017, cities were competing to host the second Amazon headquarters. What would these cities get if they won this competition? A Post story claimed
Which just so happened to match the numbers in an Amazon press release at the time. A press release which was not even cited as a source for the dollar numbers, but was cited for the list of cities competing.
Now, did Jeff Bezos tell this reporter how to write that story? He didn’t need to. The reporter obviously knew he could get away with lazy, inadequately sourced reporting, as long as it was friendly to the right people.
Do you have evidence that those numbers are incorrect?
You need to realize that there are a lot of stories written that are based on uncited press releases. I work closely with our PR office, and we measure the percent penetration that our messaging achieves in media, with target as 98%, meaning that 98% of the sources we give info to report the key points exactly as we give it to them. They may reword it, but they get our message across. They also usually never cite that they got the info from us. This is normal reporting. Lazy? Maybe, but on the other hand, how would a normal journalist ever figure out how much Amazon added to the local economy without being told by somebody?
Bezos’s stated reason is more or less identical to that given by Bari Weiss over at the Free Press for not endorsing a candidate.
https://www.thefp.com/p/the-free-press-votes
Bezos states media must be accurate, and must be believed to be accurate, then claims the media is failing at the second. Only the second? Is it not the case that trust in media has fallen as a result of clear biases? The Washington Post is hardly a straight down the middle unbiased source. Does he actually believe the WP is fully accurate and neutral in it’s reporting, but for some strange reason the public don’t believe it? In which case claiming the media is “failing” at the second is incomprehensible.
Bezos is no dummy. He’s also very tuned in to how to make customers happy and build trust, as he’s done with Amazon.
It sounds like his goal is to shore up trust around his product (WaPo).
Canceling one’s subscription because they claim to want to move toward a position of official neutrality seems silly, but I guess this is human nature. We claim to want to keep an open mind, but in reality only want to read things that reinforce what we already believe. No different from a typical Trump supporter who only wants to hear good things about Trump.
While the official position of WaPo might be to not endorse a candidate, the sheer volume of reporting favoring one side over the other clearly shows which way their bias lies. I also agree with others that if they are truly moving away from endorsements, that should be on the full slate, not just president.
TNR’s interns are also not endorsing any candidate, but for much different reasons. They are against TNR’s endorsement of Harris because she is not sufficiently pro-Jew-Killer / Nazi. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/kamala-harris-counter-endorsement/
I’m still unsure as to why newspaper endorsements are any kind of big deal for anybody.
D.A.
NYC
Right on!
The only thing it does is act as a signal to the readership of which tribe they belong to. And that can clearly be seen by the slant of the overall reporting, which even though they employ a couple of right leaning opinion writers, is (IMO) solidly left-biased. They are currently working on a story, initiated by Media Matters, the propaganda arm of the Democratic party, regarding how podcasters and media on the right are not sufficiently controlled and are as a result spewing misinformation. We’ll see if they also include podcasters and media on the left. If they include examples of both and come out in favor of an open marketplace of ideas, then I’ll take back my left-leaning bias comment. If they come out only against the right, then it will stand.