By Neenah Payne
The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media is the October 28 op-ed by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post. It purports to explain why the Post is not endorsing either presidential candidate – for the first time in 36 years.
Bezos points out:
In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above 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….
Lack of credibility isn’t unique to The Post. Our brethren newspapers have the same issue. And it’s a problem not only for media, but also for the nation. Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions. The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves.
See The Washington Post for the rest of the article.
Reactions To Bezos’ Op-Ed
‘Real threat of autocracy’: Washington Post editorial staffers resign in forceful letters 10/28/24
Fallout continues over newspaper’s decision not to support Harris for president as over 200,000 cancel subscriptions. More Washington Post staffers have stepped down and more than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by Monday after the newspaper’s decision not to support Kamala Harris for president.
Editorial board members David Hoffman and Molly Roberts both resigned on Monday with forceful letters indicating their reasons. “I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump,” Hoffman, who took home the Pulitzer Prize just last week, wrote in his resignation letter. “I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice at this perilous moment.”
Roberts said she was resigning “because the imperative to endorse Kamala Harris over Donald Trump is as morally clear as it gets”.
Death of The Legacy Media
In the video below, Megan Kelly discusses Jeff Bezos’ article. Kelly explains why the era of the legacy media is now over. She points out that Rogan’s interview of Trump had 36 million views. Yet, the Washington Post has only 136,000 print subscriptions and 2.5 million digital subscribers. Kelly says her YouTube channel has more than that. She interviews Glenn Beck and mentions his October 2024 book Propaganda Wars: How the Global Elite Control What You See, Think, and Feel
Jeff Bezos Calls Out His Own Newsroom Without Addressing the REAL Problem, with Glenn Beck 10/29/24
Megyn Kelly is joined by Glenn Beck, author of “Propaganda Wars,” to talk about Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos calling out his own newsroom, his inability to address the actual root problem, the Washington Post and other corporate media outlets torpedoing their credibility, the rise of independent media while trust in the “mainstream” has declined, and more.
Does Bezos Believe Trump Will Win?
Jeff Bezos Trying To ‘Curry Favor’ With Donald Trump: Megyn Kelly 10/30/24
Jeff Bezos’ desire to get on Donald Trump’s good side explains his paper’s decision to refrain from endorsing Kamala Harris, according to former Fox News host Megyn Kelly.
Last week, The Washington Post announced that it would be endorsing neither candidate in the U.S. presidential election for the first time in 36 years. While the move led to many criticizing the paper and cancelling their subscriptions, Post owner and Amazon founder Bezos defended the decision in a Monday column for the paper, arguing that presidential endorsements only “create a perception of bias” for an already distrusted media.
However, Kelly suggested that other factors were at play and the decision revealed the paper’s belief that Trump will defeat Kamala Harris. “They believe [Trump] is going to win,” Kelly told conservative commentator Glenn Beck during her most recent Spotify podcast. “And they’re, I think, trying to curry favor with him.”
The 2024 presidential race remains tight, the results likely hinging on only thousands of votes in the seven key swing states. However, recent momentum gathered by Trump has seen him grab a minor lead over Harris in Pennsylvania, according to FiveThirtyEight’s latest polling aggregate, while also overtaking the Democrat in the pollster’s election simulator for the first time since August.
For Kelly, Trump’s recent rally has led to the Post reconsidering its historic practice, as well as other major national newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and USA Today, which have also opted to forego presidential endorsements this year.
“It’s become a last-minute trend. They say it’s because they’re finding their spines and realizing that it’s not good to be partisan,” Kelly said, adding that the real reason was their reluctance to support a “lost cause” candidate like Kamala Harris.
Kelly also criticized the explanation given by Bezos for the decision, which emphasized the need for maintaining the paper’s credibility against a rising tide of “off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources.”
Joe Rogan’s Historic Trump Interview
Trump interviewed with Rogan for three hours although that made him over two hours late for a rally in Michigan. Rogan said he would like to interview Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, but he refused the conditions set by her team to limit the interview to an hour and to travel to Harris. All presidential candidates will probably be vetted via this new format that allows people to get to know them in ways not possible in debates, rallies, or legacy media interviews.
Joe Rogan’s Trump Interview: Historic Media Shift! reports that Trump Rogan Interview BREAKS THE INTERNET And Kamala!
Joe Rogan Showed Donald Trump ‘Unedited’. Millions Adored It 10/29/24
Donald Trump’s highly anticipated interview with Joe Rogan has taken the internet by storm, racking up tens of millions of views on YouTube within the first 48 hours since going live. Not only is the sit-down podcast a far cry from the standard media interviews we are used to from presidential candidates, but the full three-hour episode has shown an “unedited” interview with Trump that has sparked widespread praise from viewers.
Trump’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, the world’s biggest podcast, has viewing figures and engagement that traditional news networks can only dream of. It has been viewed more than 33 million times on YouTube, has been liked 1.7 million times and received over 400,000 comments. That is just one part of Rogan’s podcast audience, with the episode also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. These platforms do not display listenership data for individual episodes but Rogan’s podcast has previously been estimated to have 11 million Spotify listeners per episode.
The episode also was viewed more times than all the prime-time news broadcasts for all the major cable and network television stations combined. According to AdWeek, which cited Nielsen data, in the week starting September 23, 2024, ABC News received an average of 7.4 million viewers per broadcast, NBC 5.9 million, and CBS 4.6 million. AdWeek also recorded the Nielsen ratings for the major cable networks’ news broadcasts in September. Fox News received an average of 2.5 million viewers for its prime-time news broadcast, MSNBC 1.4 million, and CNN 853,000. The combined primetime viewership of the six networks would therefore total 22.65 million viewers per broadcast.
Why The Dinosaur Media Are Dying
The Collapse of the Mainstream Media (Part 1) Russiagate explains,
The dinosaurs are dying. Investigative journalism….is disappearing. The Washington Post and CNN are cutting hundreds of jobs. Condé Nast, owner of The New Yorker and Vogue, is laying off 5% of its workforce…. The Los Angeles Times is poised to eliminate 20% of its employees. Sports Illustrated just fired its entire staff. And Vice Media, once much hyped, declared bankruptcy last year and last month laid off 100 reporters. According to Pew Research, both print media and digital circulation are significantly down across the industry. The American mainstream media is in a state of free fall. Perhaps no one is surprised to hear this news. But how did we get here?
The Collapse of the Mainstream Media (Part 2) 2020 Election explains that it covers. “How a freefall of public trust in the face of spin and censorship has led to the rise of new and independent media. It will investigate how Russiagate, the 2020 presidential election, and COVID specifically have eroded trust in legacy media and then analyze the growth of other sources”.
The Collapse of Mainstream Media (Part 3) COVID-19 The legacy media also lost trust because it failed to report accurately on the assassination attempts on Trump, the Biden laptop, January 6, the open southern border, and injuries and deaths caused by the COVID shots. That failure woke up a lot of folks who now use the Alt Media for more reliable information.
Neenah Payne writes for Activist Post
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