Three ways the Washington Post can restore its credibility

Amid outrage from subscribers to journalists to Uniparty fixtures over the Washington Post’s decision to shelve its endorsement of Kamala Harris for president – treated as tantamount to endorsing Donald Trump, how scandalous – owner Jeff Bezos took to the paper with a column explaining his side of the story.

This was not, he argues, contrary to his critics, essentially an exercise in hedging his bets – a bid to curry favor with a potential President Trump since Bezos’ business interests rely on good relations with the government.

Rather, he wrote that this really was about endorsements, which he believes accomplish little, but “create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”

The Amazon founder did not make this decision in a vacuum.

He did so, he claims, because he wants to change the prevailing sentiment among the public that The Post is biased, which has led to a precipitous decline in trust among readers.

“We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility,” Bezos said, so as to prevent the paper from “fad[ing] into irrelevance,” and declining to endorse presidential candidates in his view constitutes “a meaningful step in the right direction.”

Still, Bezos admits it “is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale.” 

In that spirit, if Bezos is serious about restoring the credibility of the paper, and if that intent goes beyond his reported desire for the paper to hire more conservatives for its opinion section, I would offer three recommendations:

First, The Post can jettison its “democracy dies in darkness” slogan. That slogan, codified shortly after the election of Donald Trump, drips with partisan contempt rooted in the cynical and hysterical view that Trump’s election was somehow illegitimate and an assault on democracy rather than an an expression of democracy – a populist-national rejection of our ruling elites – a class of people who Bezos laments the Post “increasingly…talk[s] only to.” 

The republic actually dies when newspapers like The Post become mouthpieces for the powerful – for the Ruling Class – rather than interrogators of it. That Ruling Class has lied, censored, smeared, and targeted dissenters – often hand-in-glove with corporate media, running roughshod over liberty and justice in pursuit of total power. The Washington Post was Ground Zero for one of the most nefarious such efforts.

This brings us to my second recommendation, which is that the Post should return its Pulitzer for Russiagate reporting. The effort to frame Trump as some kind of Putin puppet – a traitor – was one of the most corrosive and fraudulent information operations the U.S. security state has run against the American people, sabotaging and subverting a presidency, again undermining the consent of the governed, and dividing us while poisoning our body politic. 

The Post and the New York Times, which also received a Russiagate Pulitzer, led the charge in credulously reporting a conspiracy theory they were spoon-fed often by “anonymous” government sources in furtherance of this narrative, and were rewarded for printing lies, falsehoods, and deceptions.

Third, the Washington Post can run a series of stories explaining in gory detail what its reporters got wrong on Russiagate, how and why its reporters got it wrong, and what the Washington Post will do to ensure it won’t be a Deep State accomplice again. 

These actions would demonstrate that Bezos is serious about reforming his publication by admitting its mistakes openly and honestly – mistakes rooted in a predisposition towards the Ruling Class and a seeming hatred and lack of understanding of its political opponents.

Bezos’ op-ed it should be noted raises questions about the seriousness of his concerns. 

On the one hand he laments that the Post has become something of an echo chamber of elites talking to elites, and that its work has created a perception of bias. But he does not state outright that there is a bias and that it has corrupted the paper’s reporting. 

The reporting is still treated as unimpeachable.

Conversely, Bezos maligns “off-the-cuff podcasts,” and “unresearched podcasts,” or inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions,” stating that “the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice,” and that the Post’s journalists “work painstakingly every day to get to the truth. They deserve to be believed.”

Belief is earned though.

And the broader statement reflects a condescending view of alternative media – specifically independent and conservative media – despite the fact that these sources have broken or corrected the most critical stories botched or disingenuously printed by corporate media – from Russian collusion, to the corruption and weaponization of the national security apparatus, to COVID-19s origins and mitigation measures, Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation, “very fine people” in Charlottesville, and on and on.

Bezos should be credited for directing his paper to get out of the endorsement game, to perhaps hire more ideologically diverse personnel – more reflective of the country the paper is to cover – and to doing so at significant cost with reportedly 10% of subscribers cancelling, journalists leaving, and panning the move alongside prominent D.C.-ites.

But Bezos’ letter falls short when he says newspapers “must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate,” only to concede that the Post is “failing on the second requirement.”

If the paper wants to fundamentally change, it should recognize that its credibility has crashed not due to a perception of bias, but due to the paper’s demonstrated biases and associated journalistic failings – to being Washington’s mouthpiece rather than Washington’s greatest interrogator – and work to correct them accordingly.