Jeff Bezos fuels the real victim mentality

The media’s loss of trust was primarily the result of a conservative persecution complex.

Yesterday Jeff Bezos wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, which he owns, explaining his decision to prevent the paper from publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris. His argument is spurious: superficially reasonable to those not paying attention, but founded on bogus assumptions that are every bit as politically biased as the Harris endorsement he deplatformed. By legitimizing misleading narratives about the causes of the media’s trust gap, Bezos did more to discredit the Post than the endorsement—or even the decision to withhold an endorsement—would have done on their own.

Bezos begins his post with 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.”

This is an excellent analogy. It cuts the exact opposite way that Bezos intends. If a voting machine counts the vote accurately, but for some reason, people do not believe it counts accurately, it is patently absurd to blame this on the voting machine! Accuracy is all you can expect a voting machine to deliver.

If accuracy is delivered, but does not result in public faith, there must be another explanation for people’s inaccurate beliefs about the voting machine. Perhaps someone has been spreading lies or rumors about the voting machine! Perhaps a losing candidate was too proud or evil to admit defeat, and instead whipped his disgruntled, sulking, gullible supporters into a frenzy over baldfaced lies that they really wanted to believe.

Now, I know this may seem like a far-fetched example. Surely, it could never happen with real-life voting machines. And surely, any effort to map this analogy back onto the media would have to involve a completely different cast of characters, with different motivations, tactics, and temperaments. Otherwise, it would all be too obvious, and the very smart CEO of an important corporation couldn’t possibly invoke it as a reason why journalists charged with amplifying truth should not endorse that candidate’s opponent.

Jeff Bezos does not need to convince the readership of the Washington Post that public trust in the mainstream media has plummeted in recent decades. As someone who lives and works among this readership, I can assure you they are very well aware. In fact, they’re probably the most aware of this problem of any readership in the country, to the point of being fixated—deeply emotionally invested—in the causes and spiraling consequences of this problem. It is such a smarmy conceit for him to frame this universally acknowledged issue as a “hard truth” and “bitter pill to swallow,” as if he were enlightening the people who’ve been raising the alarm about this since Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes.

Far from speaking hard truths, Bezos is just begging the question of how this reality came to pass. The core of his argument reads as follows:

“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.”

As Bezos surely knows, the media’s “long and continuing fall in credibility” is of disputed origin, and the competing explanations are overtly partisan. Conservatives blame the media for alleged left-wing bias. Liberals blame conservatives for denigrating responsible journalism for cynical political gain. Reality lies somewhere in between, and reasonable people can disagree on exactly where. But assuming that “something we are doing is clearly not working,” and dismissing external explanations as a “victim mentality,” is siding with conservatives in a way every bit as biased as what his Editorial Board would likely write.

It is also siding with the less accurate theory of the two, as his own hyperlinked polling data makes clear.

In 1997, 41% of Republicans and 64% of Democrats trusted the mainstream media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. In 2015, it was 32% of Republicans and 55% of Democrats: a 9% drop for both parties over 18 years. And then suddenly, in 2016, the Republican figure plummeted to 14%. It dropped twice as much in a single year as it had over the prior two decades.

Why on Earth do you think that might be?

Did the media suddenly, all at once, become three times as biased as it was a year prior? Or did a certain dishonest someone suddenly enter the scene, and make their entire campaign a war against media institutions?

Yes, Trump tapped into organic frustration with a disconnected media elite, and some of this frustration was valid. Yes, journalists skew left, not from some grand conspiracy, but because college-educated people who are more interested in the public good than in money skew left. And yes, too often and with increasing frequency in the age of performative social media, left-leaning journalists subconsciously allowed those values to color their perception of the public interest, to the detriment of their impartiality. Their values colored the stories they wrote and how they wrote them.

Media fragmentation also made readers self-select into echo chambers, increasing the market pressure toward bias. Outside of journalism, experts in government, academia, and public health at times conflated their expertise with their subjective value judgments. It was very fair to call this out. There is nuance here. The conservative narrative has some truth to it.

But since 2016 especially, that truth has been dwarfed by an overwhelming onslaught of lies that simply demand public correction. To avoid attributing those lies for the sake of neutrality is a journalistic failing 100x more severe than the mild, accidental, and partially unavoidable bias from which the Washington Post suffers.

Also, nine years into the Trump experience, thoughtful liberals and media professionals have done 100x more introspection and course correction on their bias than conservatives have acknowledged culpability for their decades-long effort to discredit the most reliable sources of information in the country; for lying constantly and extravagantly, then strategically undermining the fact checks; for promoting “alternative facts,” and encouraging Americans to “do their own research” on the same “off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources” that Bezos claims to be fighting.

The reason today’s Post talks “only to a certain elite” has nothing to do with its issuance of presidential endorsements. It has only a little to do with its bias. Both of those things were there in the 1990s too, which Bezos cites as the paper’s glory days. The main difference between then and now is that one side of the political aisle spent the intervening decades waging war against stories that were 95% true—a war which their deranged egomaniac of a candidate has exponentially escalated in defense of his delicate pride.

At every step of this war’s escalation, the conservatives responsible justified it to themselves with exactly what Bezos criticizes: a victim mentality. They convinced themselves that they were a deeply persecuted class on account of most smart people disagreeing with them. They felt insecure that their kids got more liberal when they went off to college. They got defensive at the faintest suggestion that they might carry prejudice, and preposterously recast the occasional excesses of social justice movements as an actual inversion of the real injustices those movements were trying to fix. The nursed petty grievances, and confused them with actual oppression.

And then around 2015—slowly at first, but then all at once as they found social cover—they wildly, wildly exaggerated the kernel of truth behind their frustrations with liberal media as a pathetic excuse to dismiss any facts inconvenient to their comfortingly oversimplified worldview. They stopped pretending to care about rational debate in the first place. Those too smart or decent to take that plunge either became Never Trumpers, or quietly constructed sheepish, post-facto justifications for their fellow travelers’ journey to La La Land. That’s why we’re here. You know that’s why we’re here.

I don’t really care about the Washington Post Editorial Board’s endorsement. Bezos is right that it won’t tip the scales. Everyone who would have read it, and everyone upset about it, has already made up their mind. Withholding it is a defensible business decision.

But he shouldn’t pretend it’s a principled one, because he’s out of his depth discussing principle. Major newspapers can go back to both-sides-ism when both sides have a roughly equal relationship with the truth. While the truth itself is biased against one side, journalists will sometimes have to choose between impartiality and doing their duty.

Bezos sneers that “reality is an undefeated champion.” I wish that were true, but it isn’t. Delusions sometimes win. This year, the Washington Post Editorial Board hoped to help ensure that “those who fight reality lose.” Please go make it so.