Let's read WaPo's "note from our owner": "The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media."

I need to force myself to read this — by Jeff Bezos. He kept WaPo from publishing an explicit endorsement of Kamala Harris, who is all too obviously implicitly endorsed by WaPo every day. So I'll live-blog my reading of it. Let's go....

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.

He's calling it a "profession," so it should have a system of ethical principles that must be followed, even if the polls don't go your way. 

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.

He's making it sound as though it's the second requirement that's more important.

Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate.

So, there's telling the truth — being professionally ethical — and there's getting people to believe you are telling the truth — not necessarily done by telling the truth. If you were not ethical, you could ditch telling the truth, say what you want people to believe, and con them into thinking it's the truth. That's propaganda. 

It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement.

He doesn't want to talk about the first requirement. He just wants people to believe the newspaper is following principles of professional journalism. Or does he just want people to like The Washington Post and keep subscribing to it and reading it? 

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.

Reality — what a concept! It was the theme of the day on this blog 2 days ago. But back to Jeff. The reality he's talking about isn't the real events out there in the world that journalists are supposedly reporting. It's the reality of whether people believe those reports, and he's saying the reports of the nonexistence of that belief are clear.

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.

Control what we can control... that sounds ominous! He's talking about controlling our belief that his organization is telling the truth. 

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None.

Bezos is arguing that the newspaper doesn't really have a strong interest in the actual explicit endorsement. It's not effective to just tell people how to vote... or so he says. A well-written endorsement might marshal the arguments in favor of the candidate and influence some readers.  

What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence.

With an endorsement, the bias is clear, he's saying. But I would say that the bias in the news reporting, which is not so clear, is more effective and thus more of a problem. The endorsement is on the editorial page, where explicit opinion is published. What's unethical about opinion on the opinion page?

Ending [presidential endorsements] is a principled decision...

What principle bars opinion on the opinion page? If you really cared about principle, you'd worry about the non-explicit bias that permeates the news reporting. 

... and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right.

Who cares what Eugene Meyer thought? 

By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction.

It's a showy step, but it's not the meaningful step. I feel as though it's designed to appease those of us who have a problem with the professionalism of the news reporting, but it doesn't demonstrate any plan to do anything about that. It's a weak and irrelevant appeasement.

I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.

But what you are doing now is intentional. Why was this the moment chosen to take action? You're saying you wish you'd noticed before? Or you meant to do it before, but you just didn't get around to it?  

I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally. Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement. I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision.

Jeff sighed!

Come on, there's no way anyone can believe it was a 100% "principled decision." Assertions like this stir suspicion. It's a business decision of some kind. Bezos comes to journalism from the world of business, not philosophy. He was just telling us we need to face what he called "reality." If you want us to believe you're all about truth-telling, tell more truth, and don't claim to have hit the 100% mark. And don't blame other people for not believing everything you say as if we're just looking for "ammunition" to attack poor you. Do better, throughout the newspaper, and impress us with your diligence over the full range of the news, and in every word, sentence, and paragraph. And then I will empathize with your sighs.

But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand.

If we don't already believe you, we're not susceptible to the insistence of what "the fact is."

Even Limp didn’t know about it in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning.

That's a limp excuse. 

There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.

This made me think of Nixon's "I am not a crook." 

When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.

Sigh. 

You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests.

Net worth: $200+ billion.  

Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled...

I like this argument. Elon Musk makes it too. He's so rich he has no motivation to do something for the money. He's up in the stratosphere where only the highest values survive. How's the "reality" up there?

... and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up. You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.

I will make my own determination, but I will make it going forward, as you prove that The Washington Post has embraced the highest professionalism in news reporting.  

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...

Like this one? 

... 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.

Yeah, all this competition is complexifying. 

(It wasn’t always this way — in the 1990s we achieved 80 percent household penetration in the D.C. metro area.)

And after the 1990s came the deluge, the wonderful deluge of social media, and you've lost control. 

While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight.

Cool. Good luck. Get better. 

It’s too important. The stakes are too high. Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world? To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions.

I'll be monitoring. Do more. Not just this one thing. I'm not accepting appeasement. You have a lot to do. 

Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course. This is the way of the world. None of this will be easy, but it will be worth it. I am so grateful to be part of this endeavor. Many of the finest journalists you’ll find anywhere work at The Washington Post, and they work painstakingly every day to get to the truth. They deserve to be believed.

They deserve it when they deserve it. Nothing more.