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The Post employees (including acquaintances of mine) are begging subscribers not to leave. They insist that Bezos doesn't interfere with the news reporting, onl

The Post employees (including acquaintances of mine) are begging subscribers not to leave. They insist that Bezos doesn't interfere with the news reporting, only with the op-ed pages. I feel for them, but I don't see how they can justify that. This was a big, obvious incident, but it's impossible to imagine that it won't spread out from there. Every editorial decision is suspect. I don't see how the paper survives this. The news business is marginal at best, at least for organizations that want to do actual journalism. The Post was one of the few remaining papers originating national-scale reporting. They eked out a living on a reputation of doing good work. All of that gets thrown away in one decision. It's an astonishing hail-mary. Trump and Bezos get exactly one shot at this. I suppose Bezos imagines that the odds are good enough that Trump will win and he'll avoid whatever negative consequences were promised to his other business. But he will have literally destroyed this business in the process. Not that it was ever going to be a major revenue source for him. But whatever goal he wanted from owning a newspaper, this is all he'll get. Too bad for the employees, though.

dahdum 2y ago
> The Post employees (including acquaintances of mine) are begging subscribers not to leave. They insist that Bezos doesn't interfere with the news reporting, only with the op-ed pages. Even if you plan to resubscribe in the future, cancelling is the only action subscribers can take that will make any difference in the future.
pushcx 2y ago
If one would like to subscribe to a national paper owned by a billionaire who supposedly only interferes with editorial and not reporting, the Wall Street Journal is cheaper.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Given that WSJ broke the Theranos thing (in which Murdoch was made to look very silly) one might even be inclined to think there’s more evidence for its independence at this point…
mike_hearn 2y ago
The employees are lying, then. Bezos has written a very clear article about his reasoning just yesterday, and he states as clear as day that it has nothing to do with Trump and is part of an entire mindset shift. The proximate decision was apparently made by their new editor and not Bezos, but clearly it was done with Bezo's full approval. He says it's part of a longer term strategy to try and fix the sub-zero trust in journalists. He doesn't care if it "destroys this business" because in his view it's already been destroyed and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. In this he is correct: their new editor told the staff back in June that "nobody is reading your stuff" and "we're losing a lot of money" [1]. Nor is he alone, Pierre Omidyar came to a similar conclusion recently and simply dumped The Intercept which he had been subsidizing for years. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezos-washington-post-trust/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezo... 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. Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first. Likewise with newspapers. We 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. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility. 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. I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally. Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement. I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand. Even Limp didn’t know about it in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning. There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false. ... While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. 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? To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course. This is the way of the world. None of this will be easy, but it will be worth it. I am so grateful to be part of this endeavor. Many of the finest journalists you’ll find anywhere work at The Washington Post, and they work painstakingly every day to get to the truth. They deserve to be believed. [1] https://www.foxnews.com/media/wapo-boss-sounds-alarm-over-dwindling-audience-heated-staff-meeting-people-reading-your-stuff https://www.foxnews.com/media/wapo-boss-sounds-alarm-over-dw...

dahdum 2y ago

> The Post employees (including acquaintances of mine) are begging subscribers not to leave. They insist that Bezos doesn't interfere with the news reporting, only with the op-ed pages. Even if you plan to resubscribe in the future, cancelling is the only action subscribers can take that will make any difference in the future.

pushcx 2y ago

If one would like to subscribe to a national paper owned by a billionaire who supposedly only interferes with editorial and not reporting, the Wall Street Journal is cheaper.

rsynnott 2y ago
Given that WSJ broke the Theranos thing (in which Murdoch was made to look very silly) one might even be inclined to think there’s more evidence for its independence at this point…

mike_hearn 2y ago

The employees are lying, then. Bezos has written a very clear article about his reasoning just yesterday, and he states as clear as day that it has nothing to do with Trump and is part of an entire mindset shift. The proximate decision was apparently made by their new editor and not Bezos, but clearly it was done with Bezo's full approval. He says it's part of a longer term strategy to try and fix the sub-zero trust in journalists. He doesn't care if it "destroys this business" because in his view it's already been destroyed and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. In this he is correct: their new editor told the staff back in June that "nobody is reading your stuff" and "we're losing a lot of money" [1]. Nor is he alone, Pierre Omidyar came to a similar conclusion recently and simply dumped The Intercept which he had been subsidizing for years. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezos-washington-post-trust/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezo... 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. Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first. Likewise with newspapers. We 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. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility. 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. I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally. Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement. I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand. Even Limp didn’t know about it in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning. There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false. ... While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. 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? To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course. This is the way of the world. None of this will be easy, but it will be worth it. I am so grateful to be part of this endeavor. Many of the finest journalists you’ll find anywhere work at The Washington Post, and they work painstakingly every day to get to the truth. They deserve to be believed. [1] https://www.foxnews.com/media/wapo-boss-sounds-alarm-over-dwindling-audience-heated-staff-meeting-people-reading-your-stuff https://www.foxnews.com/media/wapo-boss-sounds-alarm-over-dw...