OPINION:
As if the 2024 campaign hasn’t seen everything, with just days to go until Election Day, one of the greatest journalists to ever live has made a stunning decision.
No, not Peter Baker of The New York Times. No, not the legendary Catherine Herridge. And no, not CNN’s Anderson Cooper (just kidding about that last one).
Nope, it was the iconic journalist Jeff Bezos, he of the 417-foot, $500 million yacht Koru (you know, a man of the people). He decided that the once-great Washington Post would not endorse a candidate this time around.
The wannabe astronaut (remember when the Federal Aviation Administration took away his wings, so he made his own?) bought the newspaper — made famous during the Watergate scandal — for $250 million a decade ago. Since then, the liberal daily has been hemorrhaging money and killing off journalists at a record pace (plus, the paper’s so tiny you can barely line your bird cage with it nowadays).
The paper, right down the street from my home at The Washington Times, has gone hyper-liberal in recent years, no longer even bothering to mask its leftward bent. Even more, the Post now seems to run on the loosest of journalistic standards — single-source stories, anonymous, unnamed sources, not to mention the omission of anything and everything that doesn’t push the liberal agenda. It’s just the way journalism is these days.
But luckily for the industry, Mr. Bezos, who made billions by exploiting workers who live on food stamps and are forced to urinate in bottles as they deliver Amazon packages, is here to save the day. He took to the pages of his own newspaper to deliver the kind of wisdom that only an out-of-touch billionaire can spout.
Newspapers, he wrote, “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.”
Well, now, that is brilliant. If you don’t have the stunning intelligence Mr. Bezos has, let me explain: Readers need to believe that a newspaper is giving you the unvarnished — and untilted — facts to have credibility. But the man worth $211 billion (according to Forbes) apparently doesn’t know that all that ended years ago: No one — except the hard-core Kool-Aid drinkers — believes what his paper pumps out on a daily basis.
Mr. Bezos says his decision not to endorse in the 2024 election is “principled” (as if he knows the word’s meaning). To explain, the “astronaut” said: “I once wrote that The Post is a ’complexifier’ for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.” Got it?
Billionaires love to play journalist. Elon Musk bought Twitter to, as he said, level the playing field, but he has done anything but. His social media platform now skews hard right, giving voice to the nutball fringe that once had no place to post their vicious garbage.
But Mr. Bezos has the solution: “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?” He also made this plea for his team of journalists: “They deserve to be believed.”
Sadly, they don’t. The Washington Post (my first employer in journalism as I delivered the paper as a teenager in the 1970s) went down the tubes long ago. Its home, Washington, is 90% liberal, so it delivers only the news its readers want to hear. That was a choice the powers that be made, and bringing in an exploitative entrepreneur simply cannot change that.
Here’s the state of journalism right now: “Since July, ABC, CBS and NBC have treated Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris to 78% positive coverage, while these same networks have pummeled former Republican President Donald Trump with 85% negative coverage,” according to Media Research. So, yeah.
And Mr. Bezos is wrong about what readers want: 250,000 Post subscribers canceled their digital subscriptions after he announced it. Here’s what they really want: news they agree with. It’s that simple. Give us that, we’re good; if not, we’re gone.
It has nothing to do with integrity. “To declare a moment of high principle, only 11 days before the election, that is just highly suspect. That is just not to be believed, that this was a matter of principle at this point,” former Post executive editor Marty Baron said.
Come to think of it, maybe this is the best ending to the 2024 presidential campaign.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on X @josephcurl.
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