The hard truth: why you shouldn't trust billionaires of the Bezos kind ...

 

Do the maths. It isn't hard, it isn't complicated, it's more 2 + 2 = no endorsement.

In the Bezos world, WaPo is just a trinket, an indulgence, a chance to sound righteous and be on the side of the angels.

Just as notably, in the Bezos world, what matters is what might happen if Trump scores a win. Huge government contracts suddenly made tricky. And who knows what else a vindictive, thoroughly nasty Mango Mussolini (hereinafter MM) might do. 

The Post v. a hostile MM? An easy peasy choice. Put aside garbage island and watermelon jokes. Put aside News of 200,000 or so subscribers cancelling because of the recent kerfuffle. 

They're just water off a billionaire ducky's back. 

If Harris squeaks a win, they're not supposed to play that way, and anyway, likely all will be eventually forgiven and forgotten, and never mind, the rag's never going to be a profit centre. 

But if the MM gets back in, think of the damage, shed a tear in sympathy, think of the moola that might go missing from the Bezos hip pocket.

Don't take the pond's word for it. Read  Jeff Stein, Jacqueline Alemany and Josh Dawsey in WaPo scribbling this story (sorry the pond doesn't link to a wretched rag deep in despondency):

Some billionaires, CEOs hedge bets as Trump vows retribution
With the race tight, some business elites are toning down past criticism of the former president.

Updated October 28, 2024 at 9:23 p.m. EDT|Published October 28, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

At a five-star resort in California last week, Wall Street executives, fast-food CEOs, a few dozen other industry titans and two former presidents gathered for off-the-record conversations. One subject that inevitably came up, according to two people familiar with the matter: the possibility that former president Donald Trump could return to the White House.

The gathering of the Business Council — an invitation-only association of chief executives — at the Waldorf Astoria Monarch Beach in Dana Point was not supposed to be about the election, but some attendees wound up discussing how to protect themselves and their companies if Trump wins the presidency next week and tries to use the power of the Oval Office against his perceived enemies, said the people, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations...

And so on and a little further down:

...Two Trump campaign advisers, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private conversations, said numerous executives have been trying to reach out to the former president’s team late in the race.

“I’ve told CEOs to engage as fast as possible because the clock is ticking. … If you’re somebody who has endorsed Harris, and we’ve never heard from you at any point until after the election, you’ve got an uphill battle,” the Trump adviser said. “People are back-channeling, looking at their networks — they’re talking to lobbyists to see what they can do to connect with the president and his team.”

Trump allies hailed what they say are signs of neutrality from other billionaires. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, decided that The Post would no longer endorse presidential candidates, a change announced last week. The Post had an endorsement of Harris in the works. That came just days after Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns the Los Angeles Times, blocked that paper’s endorsement of Harris.

Both moves sparked an uproar, with critics saying they reflected concerns about the owners’ financial interests — Amazon has billions of dollars in cloud computing contracts with the federal government, and Blue Origin, Bezos’s rocket company, has contracts with the Space Force and NASA. Soon-Shiong, a biotech investor, could have future business before federal regulators.

The Post has said the discussion to cease endorsing in presidential elections was made internally and was a return to a prior policy. Soon-Shiong told the Los Angeles Times that he thought picking one candidate over another would be divisive.

In an op-ed for The Post published Monday night, Bezos said he regretted the timing of the announcement about not endorsing anymore, but that his decision had nothing to do with any of his business interests.

Trump allies have cheered these developments as evidence that these elites agree with them that the former president will soon be returning to the White House.

“The elites and the money — they sense Trump is going to win. You don’t think Jeff Bezos looks at Polymarket?” said Bill White, a Trump fundraiser, referring to the political gambling site that tracks the odds of the race and has seen more betting on Trump to win lately. (Experts have questioned whether Trump’s rise in the betting markets has been manipulated by a few large accounts.) “Bezos not endorsing Kamala Harris — I think that’s a $50 million endorsement for Trump. Not picking a horse is picking a horse.”

Trump campaign spokesman Brian Hughes said in a statement that industry support for the former president reflects the strength of Trump’s economic agenda.

At the Al Smith dinner in New York earlier this month, a number of top business officials had a special VIP reception for Trump so they could talk to him before he took the stage, according to people who attended.

And so to the hard truth. Jeff Bezos is just another dissembling American billionaire, full of bullshit. 

Here's his pathetic, self-pitying rambling self-justification in full, published by the hapless WaPo while subscribers cancel and staff impotently rage at being done over (sorry the pond doesn't link to a rag that's been sent to the deeply sorry corner):

The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media
A note from our owner.
October 28, 2024 at 7:26 p.m. EDT
Jeff Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post.

By Jeff Bezos

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.

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.

Update: he shoots, he scores:

Stay out of Baltimore, but carry on regardless:

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. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. 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. 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.

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. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand. Even Limp didn’t know about it in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning. There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.

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.

You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. 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. 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.

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

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. 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. 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.

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

Maybe those wayward 200,000 or so subscribers hit the old hip pocket nerve, at least to the point of paying some hack to hack out some dissembling crap. 

What if Bezos managed to do an X, Uncle Leon style? Why that might affect other profit centres, and it's to the pond's regret that it never uses Amazon or Prime, so it can't make an ineffectual gesture.

“He who protests the loudest, it has been said, is often the guiltiest.”

Update with an update: He shoots, he scores with his valiant defence:

And so to another regret. 

The pond hasn't missed reptile wrangling in the slightest, but it has missed US cartoons, including Mike Luckovich, and this one struck a chord on the matter of migrants poisoning the United States:

Here's a couple of others, still relevant: