The billionaires who own the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have both recently cited the “loss of trust” as a cudgel with which to attack their own news organizations.
They argue that the papers have lost the trust of readers because of left-wing political bias. And they say the way to earn back trust is to be more “balanced.”
The first indication that this argument is manifestly specious is that the two of them trotted it out as a lame, post-facto excuse for their hugely controversial decisions to kill Kamala Harris endorsements that had already been prepared by their editorial boards. In each case, they took action for an obvious and ignoble reason – to kiss up to Donald Trump – not as some sort of act of journalistic courage.
So they’re basically full of bull.
But the argument still deserves to be rebutted on its merits, in part because they’re not the only ones making it.
The Argument
In an essay in his newspaper headlined “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media,” Washington Post owner and walking conflict of interest Jeff Bezos argued that “Most people believe the media is biased.”
The industry’s “long and continuing fall in credibility” is therefore its own fault, he wrote.
“Declining to endorse presidential candidates” – which is the way he pitched his act of obeisance to Trump – “is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction,” he wrote.
And more is apparently to come. “I have a bunch of ideas, and I am working on that right now,” Bezos said at the recent New York Times’s Dealbook summit. “We saved The Washington Post once,” he said, referring to his purchase of the Post in 2013, back when it was in a financial death spiral. “This will be the second time. It needs to be put back on a good footing again.”
Patrick Soon-Shiong, the biomedical mogul who bought the Los Angeles Times in 2018, is even more into this argument than Bezos.
In Soon-Shiong’s case, killing his editorial board’s Harris endorsement was only the first of several MAGA-friendly acts.
Soon-Shiong even for a short while said he planned to put a “bias meter” atop news articles, with a “button” that would provide AI-generated both-sides versions. (He still plans to do so for opinion content.)
In an interview with LA Times reporter James Rainey, Soon-Shiong “depicted himself as an unflinching protector of journalistic balance,” Rainey wrote.
“We need to be that middle-of-the-road, trustworthy source,” Soon-Shiong told Rainey, suggesting it would boost circulation. “The only way you can survive is not be an echo chamber of one side.”