The Problem Bezos Can’t See
The whimpering op-ed by WaPo owner Jeff Bezos, which Marcy shredded here, starts with a true statement: trust in the media is lower than trust in Congress and has been falling steadily since 1972, according to this from Gallup. Here’s the question Gallup asks:
In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media — such as newspapers, TV and radio — when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly — a great deal, a fair amount, not very much or none at all?
How would any thinking person answer that question? Do I average across all the media I consume or all the media I hear about? Do I average across all the reporters I read or all reporters? Do I allow for size of audience? Does it matter if I’m talking science or SCOTUS rulings or political campaigns? Are we talking about the language of the reporters, the headlines, the way they handle anonymity or something else? I know some of them are deliberately lying. How do I factor that in? I don’t know what this question is measuring, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t very useful for the purposes Bezos uses it.
The interesting fact shows up in the tabs. The huge change comes from Republicans, where the total of “great deal” and “fair amount” went from 68 in 1972 to 12 in 2024; and Independents, from 60 to 27. The drop in Democrats is far less, from 74 to 54, and most of that is in the last two years.
I’d guess that no one distrusts the media they follow. If the question to Republicans was “do you trust Fox News”, the answer would be either “a great deal” or “a fair amount”.
I don’t “trust” the media. I have more confidence in some than others, and I start with an inclination to trust reporting in those. Trust comes from checking the sources cited, documents linked, and the input of other people whose opinions I’ve come to value. Like Marcy.
The actual problem
Ever since early 2016, Democrats in the general population have been complaining about the tilt of major media against Democrats and in favor of Trump and his cronies. Even before that, activists were pointing out that the Sunday shows feature Republicans, and rarely Democrats. It was a running joke that eiher John McCain or Lindsay Graham or both were on every Sunday. The complaints became angry as the media swarmed over the ridiculous Her Emails and Coney Says pieces, because most of us think that coverage made the difference in Hillary Clinton’s loss.
The complaints grew louder after Trump took office and reached a crescendo after the 2020 election when the idiot media failed to recognize that Trump was planning a coup. Tben the media told us that the second impeachment would never succeed, even before it was initiated, and treated it as a game. The facts didn’t matter, and they didn’t care.
Then Biden took office, and instead of attacking Trump as a proven danger, the media treated him as a candidate in waiting. They failed to report the utter failure of Trump’s policies. Tax cuts for the rich raised the national debt without creating any value for the nation. Appointing a SCOTUS so corrupt it would throw out any precedent Republicans don’t like had horrendous consequences for millions an no gain to anyone. Roe ve Wade is replaced by a reign of terror in Red States? Not news. Student loan forgiveness thrown out on spurious grounds? Perfectly normal, and forgotten immediately.
They treated the effective team of Biden and the Democrats as equivalent to the obstructionist Trump and his lickspittle Republicans. They refused to report the successes of the Biden Administration on the economy and on the lives of us normal people. Instead they spewed a steady stream of lies and distractions pumped out by Trump and his billionaire backers.
The media assaulted Biden over his age, but refused to apply the same standard to Trump’s degenerating brain. Instead we got constant sane-washing of Trump’s weird rants. We only knew about them because of assiduous clipping and posting to social media and the amplification given by those not-journalists Bezos derides.
The spiked endorsement was just too much. People exploded.
And Bezos thinks this problem is affected by endorsements? His newspaper treats fantastical Republican talking points as equivalent to reality for years, and he condescends to explain that he has principles so we should suck it up and give him more money? He can’t figure out why his most likely readers and those with the highest trust in media, are furious?
Admit it Jeff: you’re afraid of Trump, and you kissed his ring.
Bezos worked hard to create Amazon and put Barnes and Noble out of business. Then the pandemic hit and Amazon made billions of dollars. But now Bezos is playing it safe. In the world of ideas, he’s chicken, as Ed noted. In the process, he is probably destroying the Washington Post. Its OK. The independent media will take over in ways we can’t even anticipate.
Good work. Thanks. There a few typographical errors.
I hope I got the typos. Bad eyes, small screen.
“Comey says”?
That’s a damn good rundown.
When will this takeover begin? I retired from my newspaper job 14 years ago, and so far no one else is reporting the stories I would be doing if I were still active.
250,000 reporters and editors were RIF’d from daily newspapers. I don’t know how many found other perches from which to gather news, but it’s nowhere near that many.
Did Amazon put Borders out of business? Or did they just mismanage themselves into oblivion?
B&N is still in business, as far as I can tell. A lot fewer stores, though, and more tchtchkes than books.
Borders is long gone to bankruptcy, however. But the founder came out OK: AFIK they still own a $10m spread in the hills above Portola Valley.
Borders ultimately over-expanded and mismanaged the company; the brothers forgot their roots and why their fans kept coming back. Kmart bought them and ran them like every other retail chain in America, ruining the brand and store experience. It operated Borders for nearly two decades before it went bankrupt.
Amazon free-rided on brick and mortar stores then, just as it does now. Its market power now virtually forces small and large businesses to use it as a marketing arm.
Operating from rural and edge-of-town warehouses, Bezos easily undercut independent and retail store prices. Bezos’s timing was also impeccable. The rise of the Internet and package delivery companies made his fortune, as did his investment banking ruthlessness. Operating from warehouses made the latter easier to hide. Bezos’s business model is a lot like John D. Rockefeller’s.
How did Bezos work hard to create Amazon?
Oh, Badger. Amazon was a market behemoth and Bezos was a multi-billionaire long before Covid hit.
Regarding Trump’s comments on immigrants, while comparing immigrant Musk’s accomplishments to other immigrants, I offer up the following link to an article about an
exceptional immigrant who contributed to the knowledge and wealth of the country, as well as to the permanent display of great art from other cultures:
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/clark-art-institute-monumental-gift-new-wing-2560778
The late Aso O.Tavitian, (from the article):
“Tavitian’s biography reads like a truly American tale of the potential for immigrants to contribute to their adopted homes. A Cold War refugee, Tavitian was born in Bulgaria of Armenian descent and earned a master’s degree in nuclear engineering and at PhD in nuclear physics as a scholarship student at New York’s Columbia University.”
The Media should be reporting such news more widely to counter the false narrative of immigrants committing crimes. The more Trump says it, the more the Media report this falsehood, the more dominant the lie becomes as accepted “fact.” It should also be more widely reported that Trump’s grandfather was a German draft-dodger who was deported when he tried to return to Germany from the U.S. And, that he opened a gambling saloon and whorehouse in the West. Desertion from military service is a crime. Whorehouses are not legitimate businesses. Let us also remind Media that Trump hasn’t given any charitable organizations any contribution except unkept “promises.”
When they go low, we go high? Michelle is a fine woman, but if Media isn’t going to report these truths about a candidate who spews anti-immigrant bigotry, then the Democrats should take up the slack and “make it news.”
My doctors are immigrants, or at least were educated abroad. They’re far better humans than Donnie has ever been.
Mark Twain said there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Thank you for calling out the disaggregation on the media trust that is truly the elephant in the room. Several things jump out in addition to your great points:
1) “Independents” started out notably lower than even Republicans when this question was asked but still manage to end up more than twice as high, though we should likely be careful about independents post 2015 as studies have suggested that number may now have a notable of never-trumper GOP that tended to be on the more educated side of their party’s average.
2) Election years are nearly always mild to moderate downward spikes for Republicans starting in 2004. What’s interesting is that these polls are primarily offered in September of the given year. Actual October surprise and post-election coverage, to the extent it is remembered, is only accounted for 10 months later.
3) Conversely, Democrats have NEVER dropped below 50% on that metric in all the years it has been asked.
Media cowardice is certainly a problem. But having a third of our survey-eligible, voting-eligible population in essence step away from any media that isn’t a literal court-identified entertainment company is surely another lurking problem. The NYT could perform the expose of the century on Trump and it would do nothing to change that population. And if you add in the lurking parts of the independent camp, you start seeing a very dismal picture emerge of a media-resistant bloc so large it calls into question whether we can even identify them as interested in a democracy at all. I have this sense of dread that from this point on, every federal election now boils down less to candidates and more to “Do we feel like still keeping a vibrant debate-based democracy or not?”
The problem with WaPo these days didn’t start with Bezos, but it certainly ends with him. At the time Bezos acquired the paper in 2013, Marty Baron (previously of The Boston Globe, which broke the story of widespread sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, as depicted in the excellent film “Spotlight”) was the Editor In Chief of WaPo. And with Marty in charge, WaPo did some excellent reporting on Trump, particularly by investigative reporter David Farenthold.
All that changed when Marty retired at the end of February 2021, about a month after Biden’s inauguration. He was replaced by Sally Buzbee, and the political coverage shifted notably to the right. And then Buzbee was quit-fired when Bezos’ hand-picked CEO and publisher Will Lewis – who previously worked for Murdoch – came on board, ostensibly to address the issue of declining subscription rates.
As a business move, the hiring of Lewis has been an utter failure. I am one of the 250,000+ who canceled my subscription after the non-endorsement of Harris/Walz. But I doubt it matters much to Bezos, for which WaPo is another tax write-off, and worth far less than his other business ventures that have made him a multi-billionaire.
Still, I wish his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott would have gotten WaPo as part of the divorce settlement. It would undoubtedly be a much better news source.
Bezos has limited inductive reasoning skills. He’s never been as smart as he thinks he is.
His reference to Eugene Meyer as the shining example of a newspaper owner not allowing his paper to endorse a presidential candidate is naive.
Meyer was an incompetent disaster during the Great Depression. FDR figured that out.
Meyer’s daughter, Katherine, however, was brilliant; her father could never have filled her shoes as the heir/owner of a newspaper.
She knew how to run a newspaper and then sold it to Bezos—her father’s apparent wannabe no presidential endorsement owner.
Bezos is a mooch. He’s mooched off Federal, State and Local government and taxpayers for years.
He’s certainly no Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx. Smith didn’t need the US Post Office to deliver packages.
Bezos and Musk are both frauds and BS artists. They are no different than Trump.
To be fair to Katharine Graham, her incompetent heirs mismanaged the paper and then sold it to Bezos; she had long been gone by then. She is a wonderful example of someone rising to the occasion and achieving greatness.
Musk is also a mooch off the taxpayers.
Thanks for this, Ed.
If anyone should value the way that information flows through systems, it should be Bezos, whose fortune is built on logistics.
MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle (former banker, former Bloomberg reporter) points out that by implementing tariffs, Trump creates the ability for him to pick business winners and business losers. Bezos is acknowledging this extremely unsavory — and potentially suffocating — fact.
I have been acquainted with numerous Amazon employees who have come from other parts of the world to lend their talents to Bezos’ behemoth. Some grew up under dictatorships and other forms of misgovernance, and migrated to America specifically to live where they did not have to be suffocated by what might be called ‘constant ring kissing’. Part of Amazon’s appeal was that it enabled them to come to America (or the EU), live free of repressive governments, and live more fully. The word ‘freedom’ *really* resonates with these folks.
I am out of touch with them at present, but oh…. to be a fly on any of their walls!
I suspect that Bezos’ ring-kissing may have long term, unforeseen consequences.
(Kara Swisher lays some of the blame for this mess with the new, Rupert-trained WaPo publisher; she generally has a good inside track on such topics. The fact that Bezos hired a former NewsCorp exec suggested trouble a year ago, but this incident really makes one wonder about why WaPo management would announce such a policy change within days of a presidential election. It’s clumsy at best, and sinister at worst.)
That wasn’t his ring Bezos kissed. Just sayin…
British slang “ring”/“ringpiece” is your friend here
https:// [ ] www. urban dictionary. [ ] com/define.php?term=Ringpiece
Close, though—Bezos kissed Trump’s “ringpiece,” as the Brits would call it.
Ya beat me to it, SteveBev!
“Ring” is more common than “ringpiece” in my experience, but there are probably regional variations.
But I would expect most adults to recognise “ring” as a double entendre
Ivanka and Jared Kushner are neighbors of Bezos in Indian Creek Village, FL. They also party together. Coincidentally, Bezos and Kushner have birthdays only a couple of days apart. The Jarvanka flew to CA to celebrate Bezos’ birthday this year.
Remember that dinner party Ivanka and Jared had on January 7, 2021 where nobody talked about the attempted coup the day before? I think I read that Bezos was there but I can’t find a citation for that (though there are plenty of articles about it, I can’t find the one with Bezos’ name.)
The WAPO has published little about the utter corruption of Javanka including that 2 billion from the Saudis — or the Chinese trademarks gained when Trump was in office and they worked in the WH. Jared got his 2 billion moments after walking out of the WH. Yet there was a breathless headline on the front page this week about the ‘conflict of interest’ Harris’s brother in law’s interests might pose to the WH if Harris is elected. The double standard would be funny if not a further sign of the corruption of the WAPO.
I trust what I read in the Post, except for some of the columnists. But I only trust it to be factually accurate. I don’t trust their selection or emphasis. That’s why I read The Guardian and AlJazeera and Haaretz. (Haaretz is pretty good on AlJazeera’s blind spot–what’s going through Israelis’ heads.)
Philip Bump is mostly good, and he has a weekly newsletter about statistics and graphing which is a lot of fun.
Too many folks talking about “trust in the media” treat it as some abstract thing, rather than as a part of the social landscape, shaped by all kinds of forces.
Looking at the graphs in the Gallop piece, a couple of things stand out to me.
1) 1972-76 – media trust went up slightly among Dems and strongly with Independents, but sharply down then slightly up with GOP. Can you say “Watergate” and “Vietnam”? (GOP in 72: “we would have won in Vietnam if it wasn’t for the media siding with the fng Hippies”) Sure you can.
2) 1980-92 – generally stable decline across the board. Folks could smell the lies over Iran-Contra, AIDS, etc., but the media never pushed it as eventually happened with Watergate.
3) 1996-98: GOP up, Dems down, I’s flat, as the Great Penis Hunt raged on and then collapsed under its own hot air.
4) 2000-08: Up and down, but generally down as the Iraq War dragged on and on. Scooter lied, Gitmo opened, Abu Ghraib photos came out, torture tapes, etc.. Dems viewed the media as too soft on Dubya & Co., and the GOP viewed them as insufficiently patriotically suppporting. Either way, respect went down.
5) 2008-16: GOP up and down through the Great Recession (down at passage of ObamaCare, up as economy recovers, etc.); Dems more down than up – maybe because they felt the media was not giving Obama sufficient respect for his achievements, or (among some) too much of a pass for his failures (i.e., no Medicare for All, giving too much back to the big banks, etc.)
6) 2016-24: GOP basically flat and sees media as untrustworthy (led there by Trump), Dems up big then back down to where they started, frustrated at the inability of the media to report honestly about Trump.
New at SFGate (no paywall):
Drew Magary’s opinion
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/billionaire-owners-wapo-la-times-19877875.php
Best headline this year, I think.