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Samizdata quote of the day – the decline of the MSM is impossible to plausibly denyIn 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. – Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post October 29th, 2024 |
 25 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – the decline of the MSM is impossible to plausibly denyLeave a Reply |
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American journalists are 96% Democrat supporters, and they don’t bother to hide the fact.
“Something we are doing is clearly not working.” Yeah, it’s the constant pushing of narratives and lies and distortions instead of, you know, just reporting the news.
The MSM are not journalists, and frankly never were. There was no golden era of journalism.
The public need to start understanding that there a newswires services, and anything that isn’t a newswire is a propaganda media machine by definition.
Even the newswire services are collapsing though.
Well at least they’ve noticed. It’s a start, but probably much too late.
– Failed Rocket Guy
Read the comments to the letter. Clearly the paper’s customers don’t want what Mr. Bezos thinks they should get.
Bezos clearly doesn’t get it. He seems to think that by declining to explicitly endorse Harris, somehow people will
be unaware that the paper is favoring her. It seems odd to me that anyone is resigning or cancelling their subscriptions
over this decision, since there isn’t even a hint that he plans on doing anything to counter the bias, or indeed even acknowledge that it exists, but I guess we don’t all live in the same world.
“Many reporters, when they go to work in the nation’s capital, begin thinking of themselves as participants in the political process instead of glorified stenographers.”
– P.J. O’Rourke
I love this part as evidence they ‘once were warriors’ for the common man:
“increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. ………….we talk to ourselves”
“…………… (It wasn’t always this way — in the 1990s we achieved 80 percent household penetration in the D.C. metro area.).
Fair play for trying to fix it, I mean, protect his investment.
It’s ‘cos you is reporting so fearlessly on Congress and the Government that everyone sees you as too close to them, so you’ve sunk to their level and kept going.
You need to get closer in with the politicos and bureaucrats.
Always curious that for a country with constitutionally protected free speech, and, at least compared to many other countries, a relatively weak state controlled media, that American journalists by and large have such ideological homogeneity and political conformity. On top of that, on paper at least America supposedly has the world’s best universities, yet the hordes of university educated journalists are almost entirely intellectually mediocre.
My theory is that the lefties have always been better at the long control game than the right.
They reasoned early that control of certain sectors would give them control of all sectors, and they did the work required to take that control. They actively worked to populate areas to which conservatives normally don’t aspire (out of short-sightedness) such as education, journalism, and gov bureaucracy.
They enforced conformity of thought in those areas by always hiring from their own side, and excluding people who didn’t fit in politically. They have no qualms about this because the left inherently has a revolutionary outlook, and so they always have a war footing that the rest of us lack. You can justify much if you are in a war footing.
And so now they fill most spots in those segments.
We need to improve our long game.
I read the Bezos letter. As a statement of intent and description of the situation at the Post, it’s accurate and perceptive.
A question is whether it’s too little, too late. I hope he succeeds.
Martin makes a valid point about the mediocrity of much US supposed high level journalism. I wonder if it’s always been a bit like this. Was there ever really a golden age? Come to that, was it very much better in the U.K. for more than a brief period?
About 130 years ago, America had “muckraker” writers such as Tarbell, who hated J D Rockefeller so much that she appeared unhinged. Her writings and attacks fuelled hatred of big business, to questionable effect.
Mencken famously had a low view of much writing in his time.
What’s telly changed, I think, is technology. It’s now easier to get around traditional gatekeepers of news. The purveyors of conventional wisdom aren’t happy about this.
Even so, I don’t fully buy the idea that things used to be marvellous. I mean, was Walter Cronkite a force for good, or complacency?
I read the Bezos letter. As a statement of intent and description of the situation at the Post, it’s accurate and perceptive.
A question is whether it’s too little, too late. I hope he succeeds.
Martin makes a valid point about the mediocrity of much US supposed high level journalism. I wonder if it’s always been a bit like this. Was there ever really a golden age? Come to that, was it very much better in the U.K. for more than a brief period?
About 130 years ago, America had “muckraker” writers such as Tarbell, who hated J D Rockefeller so much that she appeared unhinged. Her writings and attacks fuelled hatred of big business, to questionable effect.
Mencken famously had a low view of much writing in his time.
What’s changed, I think, is technology. It’s now easier to get around traditional gatekeepers of news. The purveyors of conventional wisdom aren’t happy about this.
Even so, I don’t fully buy the idea that things used to be marvellous. I mean, was Walter Cronkite a force for good, or complacency?
Id like to see the movement of X on that trusted scale since Lord Elon the Destroyer of Worlds took it over.
Be ironic if the platform everyone is screaming about for hosting disinformation turned out to be the most trusted media platform by a million miles.
There is some discussion here about why the left attempt to dominate these sort of political or semi-political institutions. Why does the left focus on education and government and media and so forth. I think the answer is largely mediocrity. When we attempt to make money to earn a living we have really two ways to do it: either convince people that you bring valuable goods and services and they will freely exchange money for them, or alternatively force people to give you money in exchange for what you think they should have.
This former approach is the way of mediocrity, the way in which mediocre people can get rich. Through the use of force and intimidation. Smart and capable people don’t need to use force and intimidation, they bring enough value that they can work cooperatively.
This is why the mediocre head toward left wing policies which empower this type of enablement, and libertarians and conservatives tend toward free markets of free exchange.
To be clear, mediocre doesn’t mean stupid or having few academic qualifications. Rather it is a measure of how much value you can actually bring to other people’s lives. Left wing people are often smart in some ways, they just don’t bring much value to the table, so have to use force and intimidation and tell you it is for your own good to make a buck.
I agree with most everything that you said above, and yet, here the left is, in all its mediocrity, on the cusp of world domination.
I can build a great, fast car from the ground up, but any mediocrity who holds government power can throttle me down to 20mph. Like you (I suspect), my reaction to that statement is, then gov has too much power – but, so what, here we are.
Really, what you’ve illustrated is that we need to pay attention to areas that don’t attract us if we hope for a good society. We have to handle the stupid boring nonproductive work of governing (and educating and writing) if we want the freedom and power to do what we really want to do.
We can’t just wish us a libertarian world.
At what point in history did the elite press come into being? I got the impression that the press were mostly if not entirely an underdog class when the Bill of Rights was drafted.
SkipperTony:
X is the number 1 platform for news.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1851089467081441790
At what point in history did the elite press come into being?
Answer: Since always, Benjamin Franklin was the publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette. The change wasn’t that the press has become Elite, the elite outsourced the work to so called journalists.
Jeff Bezos has allowed his employees at the Washington Post, and elsewhere, to lie for years – to viciously lie.
And to advocate policies that he, Jeff Bezos, knows cause terrible harm.
Is he developing a conscience – if so better late than never.
Or is he smelling a change in what the Chinese call “the winds of Heaven” – and wants to be on the winning side in the conflict.
As for the School of Journalism “mainstream media” types – yes Mr Bezos is correct, they are sickening.
The only thing I would say in defense of the “mainstream media” is that they are not the heart of the problem of dishonesty and just plain wickedness in the United States, and elsewhere.
The heart of the problem is the education system – the schools (including many of the private schools) and the universities. What they teach, both the “facts” (which are often false), and the attitudes and opinions, is designed to do harm – terrible harm.
Suspect the Amazon web services contracts they have with US government agencies make Bezos much much much more money than the WP ever will. Wouldn’t be an issue if the democrats were guaranteed to win, but they aren’t. The Washington Post and co, despite doing their best for 9 years, don’t seem to be able to bury Donald Trump. So Bezos has to suck up a bit now to Trump.
Or maybe Bezos has the greatest gift ever for understatement, “Something we are doing is clearly not working.”? Is he trolling us?
Martin – I believe the Washington Post makes a loss (although I could be mistaken) – I was told, by a several different people with knowledge of these matters, that Mr Bezos never really believed in the far left agitprop that the Washington Post, and the rest of the “mainstream” media, spits out every day – but bought the Washington Post to appease the left, so they would not come after him.
In short that Mr Bezos is not, and never was, a leftist – but, rather, that he was a coward trying to appease the left by paying for their agitprop. He even awarded a prize to an a Spanish person for showing hate for President Trump – that was about it, express hatred for President Trump and Mr Bezos gives you money.
If President Trump is allowed to win on Tuesday (i.e. if the election is not rigged as the 2020 election was) perhaps Mr Bezos will finally stop his appeasement policy of giving money to the left.