Tl;dr – another installment of the media focusing on everyone’s business but their own
I cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post last week, along with lots of other people it seems. But I didn’t cancel because of owner Jeff Bezos’ last-minute decision that the Post would not endorse a Presidential candidate. The (lack of) endorsement brouhaha reminded me I’ve been meaning to cancel for a while.
I consume (and pay for) a lot of media. I’m a longtime Post subscriber and read it every day in college. But I’d been noticing over the last year or two that I get very little from the Post. And the newsroom’s proclivity for playing publicist for terrorists played poorly. So I appreciated the reminder to finally cancel.
Bezos’ piece on the decision was characteristically lucid, and led with the fundamental challenge for the media.
The decision and Bezos’s explanation spurred endless bloviating from the media. They like to talk about themselves, as they exalt their own importance and explain why everyone else is wrong (particularly Bezos). The Post alone got at least a dozen columns and stories out of it.
This media frenzy, slathered in self-congratulatory entitlement and a convenient vehicle for partisan outrage (because we’re so short on that at present), managed to ignore the essential media quandary.
The timing of Bezos’ decision was terrible. The Post should have announced they were getting out of the endorsements game six months ago or waited two weeks. Yet that timing has given the media the excuse it needed to ignore Bezos’ lead observation: the media is broken.
I have yet to see any coherent media response to the first three paragraphs of Bezos’ piece, where he points out media is “not working” and is now less trusted than Congress:
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.
When that Gallup poll came out, I asked:
I can’t stop thinking about the meetings where media discuss how to address their precipitous loss of trust. What gets said? Do they actually have those meetings?
To accelerate media self-reflection, here are some suggested agenda topics if/when they get around to having that meeting:
- Why has trust in the media plummeted? How can it be rebuilt? How is the media trust crisis similar to and different from the trust crises facing other institutions?
- How do you build a business selling non-rival, non-excludable “news” in a digital world with zero distribution costs? What is the impact of generative AI?
- Is there room for multiple national digital “newspapers”? Or will it be winner-take-all like many digital businesses? When will the New York Times face antitrust charges for monopolizing the newspaper industry?
- What are the implications of moving from a primarily ad-supported to a primarily subscription-supported revenue stream? Does that change the customer base and their product expectations?
- What is the appropriate line between journalism and advocacy? Bezos implies “a return to the past” of the mid-20th century model of journalism. Can this model function in the absence of a broad-based, ad-supported business model?
- Is the media entitled to a way of life that no longer exists because (as they repeatedly tell us) they are so self-evidently important to civilization? Who should fund that lifestyle?
I eagerly await the meeting recap!
There is also some delicious hypocrisy mixed into this commotion.
As recently as June, the Post’s problems were blamed in a lengthy Atlantic Monthly piece on Bezos being an absentee owner. Among my takeaways from that article were:
- Media decline is always someone else’s fault, in this case laid at the (absentee) doorstep of Jeff Bezos.
- The media suffers no doubts telling others how to run their businesses, but can’t begin to run their own.
Now the shrieking is about Bezos daring to make decisions at the newspaper he generously funds. I wonder to what degree that Atlantic article prodded Bezos to reengage at the Post and thereby realize its predicament. Be careful what you ask for…
Another major thread was the suggestion Bezos was proactively appeasing Trump with the decision to withhold an endorsement. Bezos denied this explicitly and in detail, but few seem to accept that.
Hopping on the appeasement argument, my local provincial newspaper touted its own great courage and independence with a righteous (and totally self-absorbed) editorial entitled “Hell yes! The Seattle Times edit board endorses Harris for president”.
We still have no word on how the Seattle Times is addressing the media trust deficit, but this is a newspaper whose strategy for survival is predicated on (a likely Democratic) Congress passing legislation forcing Google and Meta to subsidize their anachronistic way of life. But we should believe their endorsements could not possibly be political pandering…
Another week in the media circus!