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Notes -
I had a nice phonepost that got blasted. So this one will be more brief.
Last week we had discussion on the LA Times and Washington Post's decision to forgo an endorsement for the election.
Since then, Jeff Bezos has posted his reasonings in an opinion piece. It is fairly short, but the gist of it is: credibility, principles, and failings. It's a nice little letter that tickles my fancy.
There are some complications.
We know WaPo is hemorrhaging money. Some 80 million last year. Now on top of that, NPR reports up to 200k subscribers have cancelled. Which is an astounding number. 8 percent of their subscriber base. That's not a good way to make more money.
This is all for the Democracy Dies in Darkness paper. Many years have been spent cultivating a image and brand that appeals to progressive liberals. If there was a newspaper of the #resistance it was WaPo. So, why now?
Jeff doesn't think there's a future in the brand. He bought the paper in 2013. He oversaw the building of this identity. Seemingly, he was fine with it. Now, he sees the numbers and wants to see if there's a different future. I won't make a strict judgment of his sincerity, but the paper's record does make one wonder just what happened if not the whole this memory of an industry is dead deal.
As much as it tickles my fancy to see media outlets struggle with concepts credibility, trust, and take some (minor) responsibility-- I think he is wrong. There is space for one NYT. There is space for a NY Post. There is a small space for a Free Press, and there's space for a leaner probably meaner WaPo. It's going to take much more for me to believe there's even demand for a less righteous, more journalistic WaPo. I'd find value in that, but I'm pretty sure I'd find better value elsewhere.
If the attempt to make a more viable business lines up with his vision of a more trusted media, and Bezos is committed to reform, I wish him the best of luck.
The decline of the journalism and its ability to support itself is a long term trend, so it's hard to judge the value of a more centrist WaPo. Especially if combined with a shift of a lot of educated voters to the Democrats.
But having another Democrat-aligned outlet with a slightly more prestigious name also has dubious benefits for Bezos. It's arguably a more certain road to irrelevance.
The people who want that (and are cancelling as a result) are operating on a cargo cult mentality about what makes an institution prestigious and valuable themselves. They seem to imagine that these outlets simply saying things while being who they are makes those things consensus. This is just a justification for entryists to seize these orgs and draw down any credibility they have for what are often silly causes.
Maybe this would be fine if it guaranteed victory at the cost of the business. But it clearly does not in certain cases. Whatever the power of elite journalist consensus to hobble Trump, we've long hit diminishing returns (and they've only been so destructive because Trump can't help himself). You're paying a premium for an influence operation that's just doing what everyone else is doing to no avail if you're Bezos.
It might even harm the party's chances by putting their elites in a bubble. This might not matter to the freeloaders who believe the organization is there to serve their interests but I imagine it matters to the person funding the enterprise.
So I can see why Bezos just ducked beneath the endorsement issue and is pushing back.
It’s news. The value to the average news consumer is that the news is accurate. If I’m reading about the election, the best source is the one that’s accurate and thus allows me to guess at the future. One thing that will help with respectability is that the news source in question is at least pretending to be fair to all sides. Of course as a mainstream news outlet it’s not going to actually endorse Trump because that’s too jarring a change from Narrative. Everyone knows that real news endorses democrats.
Even before you consider the fact that the "average news consumer" is the product, not the customer (legacy media always made more money from advertising than subscriptions), this unfortunately doesn't appear to be true outside the business/financial media niche where FT/WSJ/BBG/Reuters operate.
The first requirement for is that the news is new and exciting. "Exciting" causes most of the common media biases - crime is always out of control because crime stories are lurid and easy to report, particularly if the victim is a moderately attractive woman. (The Guardian does the same thing, but they call it "violence against women" rather than "crime".) Political scandals are almost always over-egged. School shootings get more coverage than gun suicides. "New" causes stories to be rushed out with inadequate fact-checking - none of the New York journalists who broke the story that the Titanic had been crippled by an iceberg strike and was being towed into New York Harbor suffered professional consequences for getting it wrong.
The second requirement is that at least on the big partisan questions, people want media that flatters their preconceptions. The easiest recent example to pick over because it got exposed in a defamation lawsuit was the Fox News coverage of the 2020 election - senior figures at Fox (including Tucker Carlson) knew that they were pushing specific sensational fraud allegations that were not supported by the facts, but also understood that if they stopped they would lose MAGA-aligned viewers to places like OANN who were willing to keep going. The left-wing "mainstream" media are, of course, just as bad, but aren't stupid enough to make discoverable tapes saying how awful they are.
News being accessed by social media filter makes this much worse, because it makes the incentives stronger. And it means that even if you want to read news from writers with a reputation for trustworthiness, what the algorithm shows you is what people like you click "like" on, which in practice is going to be the stuff that makes them feel good.
The replacement of professional journalism and legacy media business models with social media "citizen journalism" makes things even worse by removing all incentives other than social virality. Elon Musk doesn't give a damn whether the right-wing "citizen journalism" he is signal boosting on X is true or not because he knows his target audience don't either.
Have you looked at e.g. datahazard's graphs, which are the most widely seen example of citizen journalism (no scare quotes) that musk has re-xeeted?
Do you see any inaccuracies? Has anyone pointed any inaccuracies out to you? Are you just going with a framing of "musk tweets malinformation" because it's convenient?
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