Uh, and then also on top of that, people are quitting and they’re saying they’re outraged that they can’t endorse Kamala Harris publicly as a Washington Post reporter, so on and so forth. Now what you do on your own time and in your own spaces, that’s on you, but you can’t then leverage the job in a position that you have in order to endorse it just because that’s what y’all always been doing. One of the things that people have always been complaining about is the fact that people have been getting involved and these publications are swayed and they’ve been getting involved and what’s going on as far as influence and elections and so on and so forth.

Maybe not as much anymore because nobody cares about newspapers, but I think that it’s different when you actually have a billionaire that is owning the publication because you’re not depending on subscriptions in order to survive, he just wants to own the paper. But here’s what’s being said and the fallout from the Washington Post decision to end presidential endorsements. Fallout continues after the Washington Post announced it would not endorse a candidate for president. At least two members are coming from MSNBC and then maybe we’ll spend a block and get Fox News perspective because we want to get it on both sides.

Eining from its editorial board and the Post publisher defended the decision saying the paper was returning to its roots of not making presidential endorsements. But according to reports, it was owner Jeff Bezos who made the call and tonight Bezos wrote an op-ed in the Post saying Americans don’t trust the media and that presidential endorsements actually create a perception of bias. He says ending them is a principled decision. Bezos went on to write this, quote, 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 an adequate 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. Okay, wait a minute. So I want to know what Jeff Bezos said in his own words. I didn’t even know that he actually had wrote an op-ed but that would be great to read it ourselves. I don’t need anybody to summarize it for us. We are readers. We can read it for ourselves inside of our own and form our own opinions of what’s going on. All right.

So they said that Jeff Bezos wrote an op-ed. Okay, let me get that up on the screen really quickly and then I’ll share that with you guys. So this is Jeff Bezos and he put it in the opinion section of the Washington Post but a paper that he actually owns. He says 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 managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted at all.

Something we are doing is clearly not working. He’s basically saying that don’t nobody trust these journalists and the media no more. They don’t even trust them. They trust them less than Congress. Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately and people must believe that they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from the first just as important as the first. Likewise, with newspapers, we must be accurate and we must, what is this? What is this? Is that an advertisement? Get that up out of here.

Likewise, we must be accurate and we must be believed to be accurate. It is 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 as paying, anyone who doesn’t see this as 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 and impact. But a victim mentality will not help Jesus Christ. Even Jeff Bezos is saying, don’t be victims.

Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility. He goes on to say presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania is 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 is 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 is 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. He basically saying that the newspaper dropped the ball or the people that were running the newspaper. 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 Lent, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on a day of our announcement. I sighed when I found out, but I knew that 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 it in advance. The meeting was scheduled quickly that morning. There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements of any suggestion 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 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 the 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 on the post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened. He’s saying, listen, since I own a post in 2013, you ain’t seen it where I influence anything that happens at it. And even though I have a lot of money and power, it shows that I can be a complexifier or I can conflict what is happening over here in the media.

But in reality, I let them do what they do. He goes on to say, lack of credibility isn’t unique to the post. Our brother in newspapers have the same issue. All media has the same issue as what he’s saying. And it’s a problem, not only for the media, but also for the nation. Many people are turning to off the cup podcasts and accurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation. I don’t like that. And deep in divisions, but he’s right. There’s a lot of these podcasts and a lot of these people are swayed because they’re bought by the media and they’re bought by the establishment.

Not over here at the Millionaire Morning Show. The Washington Post and the New York Time won prizes, but increasingly we talked only to a certain elite. More and more we talked to ourselves. It wasn’t always this way. In the 1990s, we achieved 80% household penetration in a DC metro area. While I do not and will not push my personal interests, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into a relevance overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs. He’s saying that the newspaper should be more credible than over here, over here at Anton from Anton Daniels dot com.

Not without a fight. He says it’s too important. The stakes are too high. And now more than ever, the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice. And we’re 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 to return to the past. Some will be new innovations. Criticism will be a 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’m so grateful to be a part of this endeavor. And many of the finest journalists you find anywhere work at the Washington Post, and they work painstakingly every day to get the truth. They deserve to be believed. That is Jeff Bezos’ op-ed inside of the Washington Post to then bring credibility back to the organization, as well as credibility back to newspapers in general. He is saying, listen, I am not going to tell you what my personal interests are, but they do not conflict and they do not bleed into what’s happening over at the Washington Post.

We need to have more credibility. We need to be working hard to be a trusted source. And we are no longer going to be endorsing presidential candidates for the United States of America. And I agree with the move 100%. I agree. And as a business move, it also helps and bring credibility, because I’ve never actually really looked at the Washington Post as credible, but I am considering it now. Bezos published that op-ed. I spoke with Marty Barron, the former executive editor for the paper. He’s also the author of Collision of Power, Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post.

Marty, so good to see you. I wish it was on a day when you weren’t this upset, angry. You’ve described this decision as a betrayal and you’ve called it spineless. Tell us why. Well, look, for the entire time that I was executive editor of the Post, Jeff Bezos stood behind us. He supported our independence with a lot of integrity, with a lot of spine, despite enormous pressure from Donald Trump. But that doesn’t appear to be the case today. That’s the way it was, but it’s not the way it is. And look, the Post has a history and a heritage of standing up to power, to holding powerful individuals and institutions accountable, particularly the President of the United States, who is unquestionably the most powerful person in the world.

And so this decision was not made for years. This dude has already lost his credibility, and I could sell because he’s on MSNBC. But he’s lost his credibility because he’s already saying that the President is the most powerful person in the world. No, they’re not. And anybody in their right mind understands and knows that the President is not the most powerful person in the world. That is lies. That is false. That is false propaganda. It is not true. We all know that the President is controlled. And most of the time, they’re just puppets, which is one of the reasons why we want Donald Trump in there, because we want him to drain the swamp.

Two years ago, a year ago, outside of the election cycle, it was made right within a couple of weeks of the election itself without any substantive discussion with the editorial board itself. So there are a lot of questions about how this was done and why this was done and why it was done right now. And it looks to be that it was because of concern over Jeff Bezos’ other commercial interests, Amazon and his space company Blue Origin. So let’s talk about that, because you wrote in your book specifically that in 2016, when Astor approached about a presidential endorsement, Jeff Bezos said, sure, why not talk to us about how things are so different.

I mean, specifically Blue Origin, they’re practically on the eve of getting contracts with NASA. And we know the biggest private space company that gets those contracts is Elon Musk’s SpaceX. And obviously, Elon Musk is very close with Donald Trump. Sure. Well, look, things are a little bit different than during the first four years for Trump and the White House. So if he gets in again, look, he has talked about exacting vengeance on his perceived political enemy. He’s always considered Jeff Bezos to be a political enemy solely because of the coverage of the Washington Post, particularly its investigative work.

You know, toward the end of the first four years, he was clearly putting Trump was putting loyalists in top positions. And he was running the government the way that I would expect that he will run the government if he gets back into the White House. So you’re telling me that they are mad because Jeff Bezos declined to enjoy to endorse or he prevented the Washington Post in order to bring credibility back to the organization. He declined and he he did not allow for them and is no longer going to have them endorse a presidential candidate, which I’ve largely said that they need to opt out of it.

And when they do that, they need to put it as an opinion and not necessarily as the endorsement of the actual organization itself. I don’t think that the UAW is endorsing Kamala Harris for president just because Sean Fain the president of UAW send and they back at him. It’s a lot of UAW members that don’t back Kamala Harris for president of the United States of America, but they will say the UAW backs it, but the membership in the UAW absolutely all are not backing Kamala Harris for the United States of America. So I think that it’s a lot of organizations that need to opt out of endorsing a president because it doesn’t move the needle a and then it shows that you’re biased.

And if you do decide that you want to endorse the president, then you need to endorse it as an individual and not force your company to do so. Let me get another perspective. I want to get the opposite perspective of MSNBC on there. And I want to get Fox News on there. Let’s see what they got to say. And welcome back here to live now from Fox. I’m Andrew Kraft. Thanks so much for being with us here. Well, the race for the White House is on. We are eight days away from the presidential election.

Want to follow up on a story we brought you last week in the wake of some of these major newspapers nationwide opting out of endorsing any candidate. This cycle, it all kind of started with the L.A. Times deciding not to endorse. Then the Washington Post following suit as well. Well, in the wake of that decision, NPR is reporting this. Take a look at this David full conflict there at NPR with this saying more than two hundred thousand subscribers have canceled their digital subscriptions to the Washington Post. They got over. So wait a minute.

If that’s eight percent, do they have that many subscribers to the Washington Post? Let me go to this stupid way of these newspapers. These newspapers is dying entities and they got that level of subscriptions. Got a lot. We got a lot more work to do. That just motivates me. If these trash organizations have this level of coverage, look how old this stuff looks. This is so old. People actually go on here and they subscribe to this crap. Seriously. Seriously. Do y’all actually go and y’all go to the websites of these stuff like that.

We talk about that inside of the Patreon. Seriously. Y’all look at this crap. Jesus Christ. Anyways, moving on. So they’re saying over like two hundred thousand people move their subscription because they refuse to endorse Harris. Y’all saying that it’s like two point two thousand. I don’t even know who reads this crap anymore. [tr:trw].

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