Posted on 11/02/2024 6:54:19 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
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.
,,,
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
This is no longer behind the paywall for my browser and I hope you have the same access that my browser does.
Half must be. How else could one explain an idiot and a pedo polling anywhere above 10%?
How ironic that Bezos uses elections and voting machines as the example for trust. Our confidence in them might be WORSE than congress and the media.
IMHO, at least 50% of those idiots believe EVERYTHING they see and hear on TV and read in the papers.
“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.”
You’re failing on both!
Exactly—in fact Bezos comments are full of contradictions.
Either—the reporting is accurate and the bulk of the American people are stupid garbage deplorables
Or—the reporters are liars and propagandists and he needs to fire every last one of them.
There is no middle ground here.
This from a man who bought a paper to do what? Push his own political views? And now he’s worried that no one believes his ‘product’?
He could’ve established WaPo as an unbiased, factual paper of record years ago. If he’d really wanted to.
Judging by the poll numbers, that is still a lot of people you're paying to influence.
Bezos is not quite in reality yet. He cheapens his own critique by pointing at “podcasts” and the like as not as good, honest and accurate as he wants everyone to believe his newspaper is. There he misses the point. His paper has not been as unbiased, correct, honest and accurate as he’d like to pretend. Thus his fight has to be not in trying to go out and “prove” “the podcasts” are “misinformed” “misinformation”. No, his real struggle, if he takes it on, will be to internally admit the WaPo own errors, misinformation, bias and dishonesty.
A requirement he does NOT place on the paper.
To be trusted, one must be able to keep their opinion to themselves, at least some of the time.
An opinion rag just needs an echo chamber.
Well, that's something brand new in American history. < /eyeroll>
“the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.” - Thomas Jefferson
He's probably being somewhat diplomatic to his employees. He can't exactly say, "You're a bunch of liars."
That said, he is taking steps to move the paper toward the center while recognizing that it cannot be done over night. In fact, he's already lost a ton of people (good riddance) and 200,000 subscribers just since last week by refusing to endorse Kamala.
I don't particularly care for Bezos, but he is trying to bring some common business sense to the paper.
“create a perception of bias.” Create? You don’t even have to read the endorsement to know who they are going to endorse.
Or at least confine their opinions to the opinion/editorial page.
We’ll see about that on Tuesday, because the only reason Kamala does win is because too many people still believe corporate media.
“Something we are doing is clearly not working.”
something? ... yep, it’s just one gigantic unfathomable mystery as to what’s not working ... oh, wait! ... no it’s not! ... for WaPo, that “something” that’s not working are the daily streams of vituperative lies spewed by Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot, Eugene Robinson, D.J. Dionne Jr., et. al. ...
[i really wonder if Bezos even reads his own newspaper if he can’t figure it out.]
Jeff, use AI. Half your WP staff want to or threatening to leave, let them go. Feed in the facts of a story, ask AI to write a left slant, a straight up and a right slant perspective on the subject and print all three. Only use the facts and clearly mark them a news report or opinion.
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