JONATHAN TURLEY: Defiant billionaire Bezos could radically change journalism as we know it
The encouraging aspect of Bezos's op-ed column was that he not only recognized the corrosive effect of endorsements on maintaining neutrality as a media organization.
It is not every day that you go from being Obi-Wan Kenobi to Sheev Palpatine in twenty-four hours. However, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos now has the distinction of having Luke (Mark Hamill) lead a boycott of his "democracy dies in darkness" newspaper as the daily of the darkside.
Figures like former Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney shared this week that she had canceled her subscription to the paper. NPR reported on Tuesday that 250,000 subscribers had cut ties with the news outlet. As of this writing, the Washington Post has not confirmed the number of canceled subscriptions. Some, like anti-Trump lawyer and activist George Conway, even appeared to wink at his followers and quietly target Bezos' Amazon.
It is a familiar pattern for many of us (on a smaller scale) who used to be associated with the left and faced canceled campaigns for questioning the orthodoxy in the media or academia.
Then something fascinating happened. Bezos stood his ground.
The left has made an art form of flash-mob politics, crushing opposition with the threat of economic or professional ruin. Most cave to the pressure, including business leaders like Meta's Mark Zuckerberg.
That record came to a screeching halt when the unstoppable force of the left met the immovable object of Elon Musk. The left continues to oppose his government contracts and pressure his advertisers over his refusal to restore the prior censorship system at X, formerly Twitter.
Now, the left may be creating another defiant billionaire. This week, Bezos penned an op-ed in the Washington Post that doubled down on his decision not to endorse a presidential candidate now or in the future. Some of us have argued for newpapers to stop all political endorsements for decades.
The encouraging aspect of Bezos's column was that he not only recognized the corrosive effect of endorsements on maintaining neutrality as a media organization, but he also recognized that the Post is facing plummeting revenues and readership due to its perceived bias and activism.
I used to write regularly for the Post, and I wrote in my new book about the decline of the newspaper as part of the "advocacy journalism" movement: "Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working."
Bezos previously brought in a publisher to save the Post from itself.
Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis promptly delivered a truth bomb in the middle of the newsroom by telling the staff, "Let’s not sugarcoat it…We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right? I can’t sugarcoat it anymore."
The response was that the entire staff seemed to go into vapors, and many called for Lewis to be canned. Bezos stood with Lewis.
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Now, resignations and recriminations are coming from reporters and columnists alike. In a public statement, Post columnists blasted the decision and said that while maybe endorsements should be ended, not now because everyone has to oppose Trump to save democracy and journalism. The statement produced some chuckles, given the signatories, including columnists Phillip Bump and Jennifer Rubin, who have been repeatedly accused of reckless rhetoric. (Rubin later denounced Bezos for his "Bulls**t explanation" and said that he was merely "bending a knee" to Trump.).
Bezos could do for the media what Musk did for free speech. He could create a bulwark against advocacy journalism in one of the premier newspapers in the world. Students in "J Schools" today are being told to abandon neutrality and objectivity since, as former New York Times writer (and now Howard University journalism professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones has explained, "all journalism is activism."
After a series of interviews with over 75 media leaders, Leonard Downie Jr., former Washington Post executive editor, and Andrew Heyward, former CBS News president, reaffirmed this shift in early 2023 in a report published by the Cronkite News Lab, called "Beyond Objectivity" As Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle, has stated: "Objectivity has got to go."
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Few can stand up to this movement other than a Bezos or a Musk. However, the left has long created their own monsters by demanding absolute fealty or unleashing absolute cancel campaigns. Simply because Bezos wants his newspaper to restore neutrality, the left is calling for a boycott of not just the Post but all of his companies. That is precisely what they did with Musk.
A Bezos/Musk alliance would be truly a thing to behold. They could give the push for the restoration of free speech and the free press a real chance to create a beachhead to regain the ground that we have lost in the last two decades.
The left will accept nothing short of total capitulation and Bezos does not appear willing to pay that price. Instead, he could not just save the Post but American journalism from itself.
For the rest of us, all I can say is welcome to the fight, Jeff.
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