Bezos Just Wrote an Endorsement of Not Writing Endorsements

The Washington Post owner published his reasoning on why there's no point publishing your reasoning

You can endorse TFN’s endorsement of endorsements by becoming a paid subscriber to The Fucking News:

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Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos doing some typical rich-guy overlord shit on Jan. 29, 2018, in Seattle, WA. (Uncredited photo / Seattle City Council.)

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos published a controversial opinion piece explaining why the Post doesn’t do presidential endorsements anymore. 

First of all, let me congratulate Bezos for having the Washington Post select his essay as worthy of publication. A tremendous honor indeed and a clear measure of its quality.

And in all sincerity it’s great that Bezos is explaining his thinking. He gave this some thought, made a choice, and explained that choice to his readers. It’s great to see him appreciating the value of a newspaper disclosing its preference and articulating its reasons for choosing this specific path forward.

Newspapers should do more of that kind of thing!

Now, let’s unpack his arguments, since we already paid for shipping.

Argument One

Bezos argues that trust in journalism — “our” profession — is on the decline, and that most people believe the media are biased.¹

And…that’s the end of the argument.

In a normal argument, the kind you or I would have to craft to get published in a newspaper, one might explain how those two assertions support…some conclusion. But fuck that shit. Let the poors do logic.

Argument Two

Newspaper endorsements don’t influence voters. “None,” Bezos says. This is laughable on its face because it’s impossible for Bezos to know this.

What evidence does Bezos cite? “Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same.” There ya have it, kids. You want presidential endorsements? Well you can suck Eugene Meyer’s big ol’ 1933-1946 wang.

Any reason to think that Meyer was any good at journalism things? Well, he was a newspaper publisher. Eventually. But first he was a money guy. In fact, he was the money-guy choice of that brilliant, esteemed, good-decision-maker, President Herbert Hoover.

In that capacity, Meyer was blamed for all kinds of financial shit. Including making the Great Depression worse. Which must have taken some kind of brilliance to sire the Even Greater Depression. In fact, Meyer helped make the economy so bad that he was able to get a great deal on…the Washington Post.

Anyway, that’s Bezo’s appeal to authority. From 80 years ago.

To Meyer’s credit, he did give us his daughter, Katharine, who spent her whole life in newspapers. And based on that experience…she began running endorsements when she was publisher of the Washington Post.

Argument ThrNo That’s About It

I can’t know, but I suspect that neither Bezos nor anyone close to him saw that his op-ed piece is inherently self-defeating. 

For one thing, it is an endorsement. Of his policy not to endorse.

Why endorse a non-endorsement policy by arguing that endorsements don’t influence people? Obviously, to influence people.

He wants people to trust him, so he’s sharing his thinking about why sharing your thinking makes you less trustworthy.

It’s not a profound² insight that Bezos’s article is self-defeating.

And it’s not surprising that the ostensible thinking by Bezos and his leadership team is this shallow, given that they only figured out two weeks before an election that they should decide what to do about it.

Just look at how well their handling of the decision has gone. It’s prima facie evidence of how bad they are at thing-doing.

DVD Extras (A Few More Points Cuz I’m Annoyed)

Now that we’re on the same page with Bezos that newspapers should identify and explain what course of action they endorse choose, let’s dig a little deeper into the reasons Bezos endorses has for his decision not to endorse.

Bezos cites Gallup polling, saying “Our profession is now the least trusted of all.”

“Our”?

Did the Main Street-destroying billionaire become a journalist when TFN wasn’t looking?³ Broken many big stories, have we? Or does Bezos think “stories” = small towns and independently owned stores?

Let’s consider the second word in Bezos’s claim: “Profession.” Was the Gallup poll about trust in the profession of journalism? My detail-stickling Newsfuckers, it was not. Gallup’s question [emphasis added for Bezos reading comprehension]:

“In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media — such as newspapers, TV and radio…”

Mass media. That’s you, bezosuddy. Don’t drag the profession into this.

This is part of why people don’t trust mass media. They are often sloppy!

I was a local print reporter in the 1990s⁴ and I routinely saw “mass media” get stories with which I was personally familiar profoundly wrong.

And even despite that sloppiness, very recently, some Americans had a great deal of trust in the media. Look at what happened with Democrats when some mass media started standing up to Donald Trump:

I suspect part of that was simply Democrats rushing to defend mass media from Trump’s “fake news” claims.

So why the big dip since then? I dunno. Maybe without Trump as the center of gravity, Democrats didn’t appreciate whatever both-sidesing the media did to Democrats. I do think newspapers through no some fault of their own have a customer problem.

Empiricism has less cultural value than it used to. That’s partly the fault of hippies who told us everything anyone believes is cool, which obviates facts. And it’s partly the fault of rich people who helped savage government guardrails around media (not the reporting, the business of it, e.g., the anti-monopolization thereof).

But hiding your biases — which every functioning brain and most others have — is not how you engender trust.

Trust comes from transparency, not opacity. Democracy isn’t the only thing that dies in darkness!

By Bezo’s reasoning [sic], people will trust the Washington Post more if the people who control it don’t disclose their views and explain the reasons for them. By that thinking [sic], the following exchange would be reasonable:

Person: Why should I trust you?
Newspaper: Because I won’t tell you who I think should be president or why.
Person: Can you watch my baby for an hour?

In what profession do we trust more the professionals who won’t recommend a course of action?

Doctor: You have cancer of the face.
Face-cancer Patient: Should I have my face amputated or try chemo?
Doctor: Your call.
Patient: But what do you think I should do?
Doctor: If I told you, you’d stop trusting me.
Patient: So true. Put me down for a face-ectomy.

And it turns out that some Americans, especially the ones who’ll be around longest, are increasingly trusting non-mass media: Podcasts. (And Substacks!)

Why is that? Most of them don’t pretend that “objective journalism” is a rational concept or a real thing. Podcasters/Substackers have personal relationships with their audience. Which means they work to build trust with their audience — that involves acknowledging mistakes and disclosing biases.

Biases are not disqualifying for trust.

Failing to disclose biases engenders suspicion, as does letting biases sway the work.

When I created the MSNBC weekend show Up with Chris Hayes, it was praised by conservatives because Chris was politically transparent and accorded perspectives with he disagreed both respect and intellectual honesty. He was biased. And trusted…by the opposition.

But for the most part, mass media are insulated from the kind of feedback that powerfully incentivizes journalists to question their biases, be uncertain about many/most things, and practice the kind of journalism that earns respect.

Having worked in print, radio, and TV, I can tell you that the bigger the outlet, the less direct feedback its creators are exposed to. Has the internet changed that? Somewhat, for those who choose to engage in it.

But nothing on the internet rates on the feedback meter like having an angry police captain and two lieutenants corner you at a meeting with their gripes (they were right) or having a gang of drug and gun dealers ask you what if they don’t like what you write about them.

Podcasts tend to be closer to their audiences, so they can know and respond when they fuck up. (There’s a danger to this, too, in becoming a confirmation-bias machine. As if we don’t have that/those in mass media!)

Bezos tries to make his point about bias and trust with an analogy. He writes:

“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.”

Of course, he can only give this analogy because no one would buy it. Even with free shipping.

Bezos says that people’s belief is a requirement for voting machines. In fact, no. Not a thing. If voting machines meet Bezos’s first requirement — being accurate — there’s nothing more they can do to win people’s beliefs. Functional epistemology in an unfucked culture should take care of that. It makes no sense to make functioning machines responsible for people’s beliefs about them.

But the macro-reason Bezos’s analogy doesn’t work is that he uses it as a get-me-off-the-hook machine:

“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.”

The possibility that “we” are failing on the first requirement isn’t even on the table! And to Bezos it’s axiomatic that accuracy is the sole requirement. It doesn’t even occur to him, accuracy about what?!?

Deciding what to cover is the core issue, and Bezos doesn’t even see it.

Look, I’m not unsympathetic. It’s hard to make your brain do thinking-adjacent activities when the only people you can hear atop your giant mountain of money are the people trying to climb it.

That’s why Bezo’s endorsement of his non-endorsement policy is full of the kind of reasoning you can get away with only when you answer to no one, let alone have to face a grumpy editor — who has zero reason to fear you or let you off the hook — chewing through your attempted logic.

That’s the kind of empirical and social guardrails our billionaire overlords can’t buy. Because no one with access to these people will bet on getting rewarded for dicing up their reasoning over betting on getting rewarded for praising their brillionance.

That’s how our institutions erode from within. And that’s the social danger we all face in allowing unaccountable billionaire overlords to run things.

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1. Bezos writes that people believe the media “is biased,” even though “journalists” know that the word “media” is the plural of medium. Print is a medium. TV is a medium. They are media.

2. Okay, maybe a little.

3. TFN is always looking.

4. Disclosure: I am old.