Jeff Bezos, shown here with his lovely fiancé Lauren Sánchez, clearly has bigger things on his mind than the freedom of the press, and, really, who can blame him? Jeff, who, his intimates say, prefers to be addressed as “Hef”, also has to think about things like, well, his space program “Blue Origin”—which, unlike, say, the Washington Post—could be worth billions, as is so thoughtfully pointed out for us by, well, the Washington Post in this excellent feature, For Jeff Bezos and his businesses, Washington has become more important, by Isaac Stanley-Becker, Aaron C. Davis, Josh Dawsey, and Christian Davenport, who demonstrate, almost without meaning to, how central Washington has become to the nation’s and indeed the world’s economy, and how both big business and big government have become enwrapped and entwined with one another until it’s impossible to tell the two apart. And how, no matter who is in office, Biden or Trump, someone will always be waving a big stick and demanding to be humored.
Okay, I’m losing my thread. This was supposed to be a smart ass takedown of Old Baldy, and that’s damn well what it’s going to be, because what, to get back to Jeff, is his riff?
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.
I am surely not the first to note that Jeff’s use of the term “our profession” is a little rich—though not nearly as rich as Jeff—so I’m afraid Mr. Big Shot is getting off on the wrong foot with me from the get go.
It gets worse. Do you know why the public doesn’t trust “the media” any more? “[P]residential endorsements”! Yeah! You heard that right! Presidential endorsements!
This is ridiculous. No one judges the quality of the reporting in a newspaper by considering which candidate the paper endorses for president. It’s “funny” that Bezos quotes Eugene Meyer, the publisher of the Post from 1933 to 1946, to support his claim. Meyer, a well known Republican who purchased the Post after the election of Franklin Roosevelt, very likely made his statement in the hopes of avoiding charges that the Post would, thanks to his ownership, become a Republican paper, even though, unsurprisingly, the Post followed a right-wing editorial policy during the New Deal years.
Newspapers have been purveyors of strong “opinions” for well over a century, going back before the Civil War—Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, for example, was famous for its advocacy of the abolition of slavery. Editorial pages have long been the most prestigious section of a “thoughtful” newspaper like the Post, despite all the emphasis on “scoops”, which do make a paper’s name. In any event, the loss of trust in the media affects the broadcast media as much as the newspapers, and broadcasters almost never make presidential endorsements. And if they do, no one listens.
What has caused the loss of trust in the media is not presidential endorsements but the loss of trust in the “establishment” as a whole, the failure of the establishment to respond effectively to the challenges of the new millennium—including terrorism and “globalism”—both prosperity and collapse disorienting hundreds of millions of lives around the world—as well as the massive immigration flows prompted by such disruptions, not to mention the sexual revolution(s) and COVID and, well, other stuff too. Millions in the U.S. have been driven to the left by these disruptions, and millions have been driven to the right, so that, not only do we have massive “disaffected” populations, their disaffection divides rather than unites them, leading them to seek “information” that confirms rather than questions the tribal emotions stimulated by their fears.
As a result, we have today in the United States about half the voting population ready to vote for a man who is the greatest criminal in American history. January 6? Okay, that was, you know, bad, but, well, it’s history, dude! Get over it! We need to get on with our lives!
And so a man who claims to be a “journalist” somehow thinks it would be “wrong” to denounce a man who is the greatest threat to the freedom of the press—and all our other freedoms—in American history. You would think a “journalist” would be worried about this. But not Jeff Bezos. He has bigger things on his mind.
Afterwords
I urge you to read the article in the Post on Bezos and how dependent his multiple operations are on the good will of the federal government, like so many other businesses. It is very easy to imagine how Bezos could quickly decide that owning the Post is far more trouble than it’s worth. Perhaps Bezos bought the Post because he wanted to “save” free speech. But I suspect that he’s gotten a little tired of that little toy.
It’s possible that, in the future, I will resubscribe to the Washington Post. But I wanted to be one of the ones who canceled, to let Jeff know I was one of the ones who was not quite as stupid as he hoped I’d be.
