Platformer - Jeff Bezos’ view from nowhere

Jeff Bezos’ view from nowhere

The Washington Post owner says the media must stay neutral to maintain its credibility — but misunderstands how trust is built today

By Casey Newton • 29 Oct 2024

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A man seated on a bench reading a newspaper.

(Roman Kraft / Unsplash)

Here's your second free Platformer of the week — a look at Jeff Bezos' tortured response to the fallout from his decision not to let the Washington Post endorse a candidate in this election. We're making it free because in the run-up to this election, we want to share what we do with as many as people as we can — in preparation for significant tumult in the weeks ahead.

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I.

Yesterday, I explored how billionaires are thinking about their relationships with Donald Trump on the eve of the election. Just before I hit send, Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos responded to criticism that he had prevented his editorial board from publishing its endorsement of Kamala Harris. It’s a piece of writing notable for how dated its thinking is for a famously forward-thinking entrepreneur. And to borrow a phrase from Amazon, it’s a recipe for a media industry that remains stuck squarely in Day 2.

The crux of Bezos’s argument is that trust in journalists is at an all-time low, and therefore, newspapers should not endorse candidates in elections. He writes:

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.

This is an old idea in media criticism. Jay Rosen, our finest critic of the press in academia, first identified what he called “the view from nowhere” in 2003. (The name comes from a 1986 book by Thomas Nagel.) The view from nowhere has three characteristics, Rosen wrote in 2010:

In pro journalism, American style, the View from Nowhere is a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position “impartial.” Second, it’s a means of defense against a style of criticism that is fully anticipated: charges of bias originating in partisan politics and the two-party system. Third: it’s an attempt to secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view. American journalists have almost a lust for the View from Nowhere because they think it has more authority than any other possible stance.

The problem with the view from nowhere, Rosen explains is that it requires journalists to share less than they know — to do all the work of understanding an issue on your behalf, and then stop short of drawing a conclusion. He goes on:

If in doing the serious work of journalism – digging, reporting, verification, mastering a beat – you develop a view, expressing that view does not diminish your authority. It may even add to it. The View from Nowhere doesn’t know from this. It also encourages journalists to develop bad habits. Like: criticism from both sides is a sign that you’re doing something right, when you could be doing everything wrong. [...] In fact, American journalism is dumber than most journalists, who often share my sense of absurdity about these practices. A major reason we have a practice less intelligent than its practitioners is the prestige that the View from Nowhere still claims in American newsrooms. You asked me why I am derisive toward it. That’s why.

To be clear, I’m not particularly invested in whether a newspaper endorsed a candidate. But I am invested in how captains of industry view their own business, and what strictures they do or don’t put on the platforms they control. This week we saw the debut of Jeff Bezos, content moderator, and like many novice moderators, he appears to have stumbled out of the gate.

II.

Rosen chronicled the oppressive influence of the View from Nowhere first during the 2000s, which also saw the rise of blogging. Bloggers were often dismissed as hacks and cranks by newspaper reporters in those days, even as their more plainspoken, emotional style drew them increasingly large audiences and influences. But they were onto something important: when writers share their point of view with audiences, including their own values and biases, they build trust more effectively than writers who default to the View from Nowhere.

This is why, as a student of Rosen’s work, I send Platformer’s ethics policy to everyone who subscribes, as well as a longer document that lays out my worldview. Readers often send me critical responses to newsletters, but they rarely accuse me of “bias” the way so many mainstream press outlets continue to be accused of. A key reason, I believe, is that I try to tell you my biases upfront. It’s impossible to cover a beat for over a decade and not have drawn conclusions about it; to pretend otherwise is not credible. Bezos’s insistence that the Post not publish an endorsement is a way of pretending its editorial writers have not drawn conclusions, even when everyone knows that they have. That’s trust-destroying, not trust-building.

Ultimately, the View from Nowhere reflects a desire to stay above it all. But in the modern media — in the places where it remains Day 1 — everyone is getting their hands dirty. I’ll give you three examples.

One, newsmakers now go directly to news consumers, and they usually do what the bloggers started doing 20 years ago: leading with emotion, and expressing strong points of view. They build community and start conversations. They create bespoke realities where news (real or otherwise) is shared only if it reinforces the community’s pre-existing beliefs. It’s often a much more intoxicating brew than anything served up by Associated Press-style, inverted-pyramid journalism. (No disrespect to the AP, whose work remains essential.)

Take Trump, who created his own social network to do all this at scale. In an analysis of Trump’s posts on Truth Social today, the New York Times finds a vast, disturbing web of paranoid conspiracies shared by the former president each day. Here are Neil Bedi, Lazaro Gamio, Ishaan Jhaveri, Devon Lum, Haley Willis and Karen Yourish:

The Times analyzed thousands of Mr. Trump’s posts and reposts over a six-month period in 2024 and found that at least 330 of them met two tightly defined and striking criteria: They each described both a false, secretive plot against Mr. Trump or the American people and a specific entity supposedly responsible for it. The unfounded theories ranged from suggestions that the F.B.I. had ordered his assassination to accusations that government officials had orchestrated the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

About 75 percent of the conspiracy-theory posts came directly from Mr. Trump’s account. The rest Mr. Trump reposted from other social media accounts. The Times also analyzed hundreds more of his posts and reposts that didn’t strictly meet both criteria but still invoked the theories with slogans and subtle references.

This sort of thing has completely reshaped the relationship between many Americans and the news. Trump’s version might not be true, but to his followers it often feels true, and in any case it’s far more exciting to read. In no way can its appeal be countered by a publication that holds as a principle not telling you what its most senior writers believe about their own work.

Two, media is now an audience participation game. It’s not only candidates like Trump getting their hands dirty, pushing conspiracies from the top down. It’s also average people spreading them from the bottom up. (The Times notes that many of the conspiracies shared by Trump appear to have come from random, low-follower accounts who tagged the president.)

In this way, social media turns journalism into a game anyone can play — and reach huge audiences doing so. And what we have learned for this game is that there is a huge demand for misinformation, conspiracy theories, and anything else that reinforces the user’s existing worldview. Social networks respond to that demand much as newspaper front pages and TV newscasts once did — with an “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality that privileges content that makes you angry, or makes your political enemies look bad, or tells you what you already wanted to believe.

For many Republicans, there is no narrative more appealing than the idea that they can only lose if Democrats cheat. And so in a preemptive bid to delegitimize the results of the election, key figures like Trump and Elon Musk have invested huge sums of money in building networks of actors who will advance any remotely plausible theory of voter fraud. The audience plays along, contributing theories of their own, and social networks amplify those theories to large audiences — particularly on X, which is now an active participant in the delegitimization of the election.

Surveying the most recent nonsense at Wired, David Gilbert writes:

Election workers in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, are not destroying mail-in ballots cast for former president Donald Trump. The Department of Defense did not issue a directive last month giving US soldiers unprecedented authority to use lethal force against Trump supporters who riot if the former president loses next week. And no, 180,000 Amish people did not register to vote in Pennsylvania—given there are only 92,600 Amish living in the state, including minors. Ron DeSantis never said that Florida would not use Dominion Voting machines in next week’s election. And municipalities in California are not allowing noncitizens to vote in this year’s presidential elections.

These are just a small sample of the flood of voting-related disinformation narratives that are being seeded and spread on social media platforms like X, Instagram, and Facebook in the build up to November 5.

That the former president is once again sowing doubt in the results of the election, even after the last one led to the death and destruction of January 6, is a hard and disqualifying truth. But it is one that readers of the Post were counting on its editorial writers to deliver. In an era where absolutely everyone is sharing their opinion online, a “sorry, we can’t share ours” — from the opinion writers, no less — looks absurd.

Finally, right-wing partisans and think tanks are getting their hands dirty — and have been for decades now. Ever since Vice President Spiro Agnew dismissed the press as out-of-touch elites during the Watergate scandal, conservatives have relentlessly promoted the idea that the press is hopelessly biased and untrustworthy. An explicit goal of this campaign was to bully the mainstream media into the View from Nowhere — working the refs to the point where they were afraid to call fouls.

Modern newsrooms have understood this for a long time. Bezos, it seems, is still getting up to speed.

To be sure, the press does have blind spots and biases worth calling out. They (and I) make mistakes all the time. Many journalistic formats, particularly daily news stories, benefit from presenting the facts straightforwardly and without editorial embellishment.

But at a time when news consumers have a near infinite variety of subscription products to choose from, Bezos cannot insist that the Post retreat to a posture of willful ignorance. The reported 250,000 people who have already canceled their Post subscriptions have made that loud and clear.

None of this, I suspect, is news to the many excellent reporters, editors, columnists, and other journalists at the Post, who are blameless here. The much-derided Trump era slogan “democracy dies in darkness,” while overly dramatic for some tastes, gave the Post’s brand much-needed definition. It told you what the journalists there stand for. It gave the audience a cause to rally around.

Now, as a cutting headline in Semafor put it: “The Washington Post sold Democracy. Now it needs a new line of business.” It’s almost certainly too late for the Post to endorse a candidate in the election now. But it’s not too late for Bezos to shed the View from Nowhere that most other media moguls gave up a decade ago. For the Post to thrive again, he must.

Elsewhere in the social network election: Elon Musk’s super PAC is funding ads that impersonate Democrats to spread a phony “Project 2028.” The X algorithm now feeds you political content whether you asked for it or not. Republicans are consistently going more viral on X than Democrats, a new analysis found. And militia organizing is taking off Facebook