It is not persuasive.
Bezos' core theme is that the media has a trust problem. This problem is not about actual impropriety or bias -- Bezos firmly rejects the notion that the Post is and has been anything but professional in its coverage. Rather, the problem is the appearance of bias. Editorial endorsements, even if they do not actually evince bias on behalf of the paper's news coverage, make people believe that there is. And that's why presidential endorsements need to be axed.
There's much that can be said here, including the fact that this in no way explains why presidential endorsements, alone, have this problematic effect. But I want to focus on a different problem about the concentration on an "appearance" of bias, because this is an area where in many cases the cure will be worse than disease. Where the "appearance" is based on falsehoods or absurdities, as it is here, attempts to "correct" the appearance (a) will never work and (b) will simply make other stakeholders (rightly!) second-guess whether bias is present.
The "voter fraud" panic is a great example of this, because it is also an arena where courts have justified severe limits on voting rights to combat the "appearance" of fraud even in circumstances where there is concededly no evidence of actual fraud. The logic is that the state still has a valid interest in its elections being perceived as legitimate. The problem is that if people are inclined to believe "fraud" is a problem notwithstanding evidence that it essentially doesn't exist, there's no reason to believe that any interventions will disabuse them of their delusions. Why would it -- the whole premise is that the people in question believe things in contradiction to the objective evidence! Meanwhile, the "appearance" justification conveniently overlooks other stakeholders whose faith in free and fair elections starts to decay precisely because they're witnessing a slew of voter suppression measures justified on (admitted!) fantasies. Why doesn't their assessment of "appearances" matter? At least it's based on something that's really happening.
The same is true in the Post's situation. The notion that an opinion page publishing an opinion is reflective of impermissible bias is beyond parody. Nobody actually believes this (including Bezos, as evidenced by the fact that the paper will continue to endorse in every other election). So there's no reason to think that abandoning endorsements will have any effect on those who make irrational and frivolous accusations of bias. Even if you buy Bezos' "logic", the entire problem is by stipulation illogical. And even as this move tries-and-fails to appease the unappeasable, it generates a far more serious "appearance of bias" in its own right. It will appear to many that Bezos is trying to coddle up to Donald Trump. It will appear that the Post's editorial independence is being compromised by the arbitrary whims of its billionaire owner. It will appear that the Post no longer is capable of fearlessly speaking truth even where powerful interests find it awkward or inconvenient.
These appearances are why I and 200,000(!) other subscribers have hit the cancellation button. But of course, what Bezos' choices "appear" to represent to us doesn't matter, just as what spurious "anti-fraud" measures "appear" to represent to minority and marginalized voters doesn't matter. When it comes to avoid the "appearance" of impropriety, invented concoctions by the dominant caste will always trump objective failings endured by the less powerful.
10 comments:
I agree with your decision to cancel your WaPo subscription, as the decision's nature (by fiat and two weeks before an election) clearly show it was done in service only of Bezos' bank account.
I'm pretty baffled by your take on media perception on bias, right down to agreement on core concepts. Specifically when you state
"So there's no reason to think that abandoning endorsements will have any effect on those who make irrational and frivolous accusations of bias."
Do you really believe that accusations that the WaPo/ NYT / NPR is biased to Democratic Party-leaning perspectives are irrational and frivolous (a take pretty hard to justify with the data on subscriber and journalist party affiliations), or that some level of political leaning is expected and acceptable for Newpapers to have (my personal opinion).
Or are you trying to imply that perception of bias is somehow irrational and frivolous if it came from a Presidential endorsement in an opinion section? That's a pretty harsh standard of evaluation you are imposing on others; frankly I imagine you and I would both immediately unsubscribe from a publication that endorses Trump regardless of whether their other work was acceptable.
It seems to me that the core utility argument Bezos presented is not illogical if you ignore the extensive context of bad faith around it: most of the more factual, quality news media is percieved by non-Democrats as heavily left-leaning, that some portion, though not all, of these people would read higher quality news if it moderated more overt shows of it's political leanings, and that these presumably centrists reading higher quality news media would be of much higher utility than the Washington Post telling it's 90% Kamala-voting subscriber base to vote for Kamala.
The Wall St. Journal seems like the obvious test case here, since it's a well-known example of a well-regarded news outfit paired with an editorial board that's infamously loony-tunes right-wing. For my part, I don't think the latter infects the former with bias. And while I might not subscribe to an outfit that endorsed Trump, it wouldn't be because it was "biased" (again, what a weird charge to make against an opinion page!), it'd be because its opinions are bad and they should feel bad.
In the case of the WSJ, my appraisal would be "is the good news coverage worth it weighed against the terrible editorials", which I can imagine going either way (this is similar to the calculus for the Post right now -- is the still-good news coverage worth it weighed against the sudden loss of credibility on their editorial page). But while I think the WSJ's editorials are embarrassing for their news team, I don't think it warrants a view that the news is biased too.
The mainstream media has always been inhabited by educated liberals. But for the last half century, at least, it’s been keenly aware of the charge that this makes it biased toward liberals. The result has been a very keen self awareness that keeps them from reporting objectively in those (rather frequent) cases where reality, to paraphrase Stephen Colbert, has a well known liberal bias.
So what you got were things like failure to investigate the Bush administration’s fabrications ahead of the Iraq war. When that blew up, instead of getting better, they got worse. The Times and the Post spent weeks and weeks breathlessly reporting on Hillary Clinton occasionally using her personal email for work stuff, while normalizing and both sidesing a highly abnormal hate troll who lied twice for every breath he took on the Republican side. Objectively the two candidates were not in the same universe. You wouldn’t have known that if you read the Times and the Post. It hasn’t improved. Joe Biden’s aging drew breathless coverage until he had to drop out of the race. His opponent ranting incoherently about Hannibal Lecter and sharks and batteries was relegated to the back page. The now former candidate stuttering over calling the racist rants of a “comic” at Trump’s rally “garbage” for wall to wall coverage. The current candidate calling his political enemies “vermin” and the “enemy within” who are “poisoning the blood” of the country is mostly ignored.
The list goes on and on.
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