Everyone expected the Washington Post to endorse Kamala Harris for U.S. president. They waited… and waited:

And then last Friday the Post declined to endorse a candidate for president. Three editorial board members and 200,000 digital subscribers left, outraged.

Yesterday, owner Jeff Bezos suggested they all chill out and accept a reality: “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media”:

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.

Open access. October 28, 2024

Indeed. The next step in some countries, like Canada, has been government funding, just to stay in business, with all that that entails.

Bezos: Endorsing a candidate is part of our trust problem

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy. Open access.

He’s not wrong. This may be a good beginning to a conversation with readers. But the problem is deeper than he is letting on. New technology is creating a situation where, as Elon Musk puts it, using platforms like X, readers can themselves become the media.

Any revival of media like the Washington Post must take that into account. John West of the Discovery Institute sketched out an idea last night for a Post-sized venue that might survive in today’s environment. But it would need to be much closer to the grass roots than many current Posties would like.