What Jeff Bezos Got Wrong About Newspaper Endorsements

I'm skeptical of the length to time that Washington Post will refrain from endorsing a presidential candidate.

Heather MacDonald had a good article about this in City Journal https://www.city-journal.org/article/journalism-dies-in-lock... Critics have mocked the owners’ explanations as just so much smoke obfuscating a desire to curry favor with Trump. This knee-jerk invocation of self-interest is facile. There is no indication that Bezos and Soon-Shiong are anything other than sincere in their stated desire to dial back on the media’s partisanship. Bezos is refreshingly clear-sighted when he observes of the Washington Post and the New York Times: “Increasingly we talk only to a certain elite.”

The problem with their stated reasons is not that those reasons are false but rather that Bezos and Soon-Shiong have massively underdiagnosed the problem. Endorsements are a trivial part of the media’s loss of credibility. The erosion of public trust derives from daily news coverage in which reporters uninhibitedly pass off their own political views as “fact,” editorializing with as much abandon as any editorial writer. It was under Bezos’s tenure that the Washington Post dedicated itself to its anti-Trump Democracy Dies in Darkness crusade. It was under Soon-Shiong that the Los Angeles Times ran one white-privilege mea culpa after another during the George Floyd race riots.