Jeff Bezos Doesn’t Understand That He Is the Problem
On Monday evening, Bezos made his second-dumbest decision of the week, publishing a bylined column on the Post’s website to explain why readers need not be concerned about a tech billionaire meddling in the coverage of a newspaper he owns just days before voters head to the polls. “I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of the Post since 2013 backs this up,” he writes. Bezos goes on to challenge readers to find “one instance” in which he has “prevailed upon anyone at the Post” in favor of his own interests—a sentence that raises the alarming possibility that Bezos has somehow already forgotten the incident that prompted him to defend himself in the first place.
Bezos’s column is, to use a term of art in the publishing industry, bad: a jumble of unsupported assertions, inapposite bromides, and circular reasoning. It is the product of a persistent, unearned confidence among this country’s corporate overlords that their success in business necessarily translates to every other task at which they might try their hand, up to and including persuasive writing for an audience of people who are furious with them. Throughout, Bezos appears to be under the impression that he is uniquely capable of assuaging his critics’ concerns, pacifying Post employees and readers through deft deployments of logic and reason. All he managed to do is give them several more reasons to be angry at him.
The thrust of Bezos’s piece is an argument hastily taken up in the hopes that it might backfill a rationale for the decision: Presidential endorsements, Bezos says, create a “perception of bias” on the part of the media, which now fares worse than Congress in opinion polling. “Something we are doing is clearly not working,” he writes. “We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.” Getting the Post out of the endorsement game will not solve this problem by itself, Bezos continues, but it is nonetheless a “principled decision” and “a meaningful step in the right direction.” How he squared the notion that ending the practice is a “meaningful step” with his prior assertion that endorsements “do nothing to tip the scales of an election” went notably unaddressed.
