Editors at National Review Online praise a billionaire who’s not considered even remotely conservative.
The Washington Post’s decision to avoid an endorsement in next week’s presidential election has been greeted with the sort of indignant squealing and self-righteous disappointment that one would more typically associate with the confession of a crime of high moral turpitude. As a practical matter, there is not much evidence to suggest that the advice of famous newspapers swings the behavior of even a single voter, but, to a certain sort of person, it performs a crucial function nevertheless. Like Harvard or the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Washington Post enjoys a certain cachet among the bien pensant class, and its imprimatur provides an affirmation that its readers are prone to seek. In essence, its endorsement plays a role as a sorting mechanism, which, when switched on, serves to separate People Like Us from People Like Them. When it is forthcoming, the Post’s subscribers feel that they can read its coverage in the knowledge that its authors are of sound political mind. If it is not, an ineffable fear begins to creep in: that someone, somewhere, might be struggling with heretical thoughts. And we can’t have that from a newspaper.
In a missive explaining his decision, the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, explained that the shift was not the product of intimidation, of a conflict of interest, or of a dirty quid pro quo, but of the American public’s catastrophic lack of trust in journalists as a group. “Our profession,” Bezos writes, “is now the least trusted of all,” and, in his view, this cannot be fixed while the members of that profession are seen openly siding with the politicians they have been asked to cover. Ending political endorsements, Bezos concluded, “is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.” Henceforth, it will be the paper’s routine approach.
This, to put it mildly, was not the view of a majority of the newspaper’s staff and contributors, a handful of whom quit.
