WASHINGTON — Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos sent a wake-up call to Big Media Wednesday when he announced on X “a change coming to our opinion pages.”
“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos explained. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
Folks on the left may want to believe the billionaire acted out of fear of President Donald Trump. Former Post editor Marty Baron called the Bezos announcement “craven” and proof the ultra-rich founder of Amazon is “fearful of Trump.”
The same charge was thrown at Bezos when The Washington Post declined to make an endorsement in the 2024 presidential election — an endorsement the Post’s liberal editorial board wanted to give to then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
But I wonder if Bezos has watched his newspaper slowly commit suicide by using a once-respected platform to lecture the public about how people should think and not think, finally noticing that the public isn’t buying it any more.
Ditto Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who also pulled an expected endorsement of Harris last year in favor of a presidential non-endorsement, then pledged to add more conservative voices to try to balance the liberal newspaper.
You could say both owners engaged in an intervention.
Their staffs had been operating in a bubble that burst on Nov. 5. Even their liberal readers had lost trust and weren’t buying what they read anymore. Maybe it was time to shake things up.
Americans know the D.C. press corps effectively covered up for President Joe Biden — first with the Hunter Biden laptop story, which they ignored, then with their years-long failure to report on the now-former president’s diminished cognitive abilities.
Many liberals are especially unhappy because they now believe the media’s cover-up helped Trump win a second term.
It’s not just the bias, however. It’s also the utter lack of self-knowledge that screams at readers every time they see stories that dismiss Team Trump’s claims as being “without evidence.”
Whenever I read those two words in a story, I wonder where these self-styled tellers of “truth to power” were for the past four-plus years.
So this is a rant.
It follows years of working in a business in which like-minded editors hired like-minded reporters who knew what to investigate and what to ignore. Other news organizations reported the same narrative, so they found comfort in uniformity.
When they talked about the value of diversity, it never occurred to them to look for diversity of thought.
Worse, they left their curiosity at the curbside. They forgot their job was to tell stories, not parables.
As I write this, Penguin Books is touting the upcoming release of “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”
Authors Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, according to Penguin Books, “take us behind closed doors and into private conversations between the heaviest of hitters, revealing how big the problem was and how many people knew about it.”
And how many people knew about it? That is an admission of journalistic failure.
They should have named the book “Too Late.” Or maybe Tapper and Thompson could borrow from The Washington Post’s virtue-signaling slogan and call their book “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.
