Prime

Suffice to say, Jeff Bezos knows an awful lot about Prime. A few minutes ago, Mr. Bezos entered media's trust maelstrom. Publicly. He’s likely been emersed in it for a long, long while.

There aren’t caps, font sizes, or column inches big enough to underscore the import of his open letter. At least for me, this is as big a deal as there is.

Jeff Bezos is infinitely smarter than me. Knows MUCH more about media. Has given this FAR more thought. Spoken with MANY MORE people who understand everything better than me. You should start by reading his letter. But, you probably won’t.

Bezos opens with fact. Trust in media is not just at an all-time low. It’s worse than trust in congress. And it’s sinking. But his point isn’t about trust. It’s about trust prime. That’s a term I do understand. It’s a math term. Prime. As in derived from something that functions. And, that’s his point. News stopped functioning a long time ago.

“We must be accurate,
and we must be BELIEVED to be accurate.”
Jeff Bezos.
(the emphasis is mine)

Accurate is trust. Believed to be accurate is the prime part. Prime is the part that’s much, much more difficult to get back.

It doesn’t matter if media reports everything accurately… it doesn’t matter if media believes they report everything accurately… it doesn’t even matter if they fix every inaccuracy… they still need to fix the trust prime issue. Making us — all of us — believe that we should trust them.

Bezos said media. We all do. I just did. We really all mean “news.” We don’t care about the accuracy of Marvel universes and the superheroes who fill them. We care about the accuracy of news. Or, at least, we used to. When news was news.

Increasingly, when my friends and family share news with me, it’s to rail about the inaccuracies or the angles or the takes or the lack of logic or thought or, frankly, the intellectual dishonesty baked in from the get-go.

I find myself screaming at news stories… long ones… in the most reputable news outlets… that reek of agenda… on every side of every political topic. For me, this election can’t come soon enough. The level of absolute inanity is off the charts.

Bezos didn’t tiptoe into the trust prime issue. Nope. In the midst of an ionic electrical storm, Bezos climbed on the roof of a very tall building and took down the lightning rod. Kudos. His Washington Post won’t publish a presidential endorsement this year. The same goes for the Los Angeles Times and, as of this afternoon, The USA Today. Horrors.

A week out from yet another most-consequential-election-of-our-time, how could we possibly know who to vote for? I feel for all those business travelers getting smarter by staying at a Holiday Inn yet still undecided who grab a USA Today on their way out hoping for an endorsement to show them the way.

Fortunately for all of us, unshirkingly, the New York Times stepped up. Their editorial board says there’s only one choice for president in 2024. Would you like to guess who?

If you need help, here’s the list of presidential candidates endorsed by the New York Times since 1960: Kennedy (D), Johnson (D), Humphrey (D), McGovern (D), Carter (D), Carter (D), Mondale (D), Dukakis (D), B. Clinton (D), B. Clinton (D), Gore (D), Kerry (D), Obama (D), Obama (D), H. Clinton (D), and Biden (D). The Washington Post started endorsing pres picks in 1976. Other than 1988, when they sat it out, their list is identical.

Of Walter “one-state” Mondale, the New York Times said, “Walter Mondale has all the dramatic flair of a trigonometry teacher. His Nordic upbringing makes it hard for him to brag. The first debate may have been the high point of his political personality. But there's power in his plainness.”

Journalists at the LA Times and Post have quit over not being able to publish these kinds of words this election cycle. That includes Mariel Garza the now former editorials editor as the LA Times. Usually, I’d link a story about the resignations here. But, really, why?

We’re at the point where we don’t need to see the italicized typography of the masthead. We know the news outlet by its slant.

The New York Post version of the Garza story sided with management. Of course. The Columbia Journalism Review basically published Garza’s op-ed for her. In it, Garza was quoted as saying this, “I didn’t think we were going to change our readers’ minds. We’re a very liberal paper. I didn’t think we were going to change the outcome of the election in California.”

You’re going to ask, “Then, why all the fuss?” But, don’t. Don’t go to the dark side. That’s where democracy dies. There’s hope. And it’s this. Bezos said pretty much the same thing as Garza, “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election.”

OMG! Common ground. Maybe this is what Katherine Mayer was TED Talk-ing about in 2021 when she said truth gets in the way of common ground. No, really. Here’s her quote, “In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground.” At the same time, she introduced the concept of a “minimum viable truth” that calls for us to put aside our belief system and “not be so fussy.” Since March, Mayer has been the CEO of NPR.

NPR. NPR said that the Post’s non-endorsement cost them 200,000 subscribers. That’s about 10% of the Post’s base. The headline is business. The stories are personal. Journalists are asking people not to cancel their subscriptions because they’ll lose the resources to cover the big stories. One one mom who canceled WaPo when they didn’t help her choose a president this year won’t be able to hear her daughter’s podcast anymore.

This is personal. Very personal. Garza says she has deep respect for LA Times owner, Dr. Pat Soon-Shiong. He asked for facts about both candidates, good and bad, that he would publish and he says his Editorial Board gave him nothing. Garza said, that [publishing facts] is not an “endorsement or even an editorial.”

And, now we’re getting to the heart of a problem much bigger than presidential endorsements. Where do facts end and opinions start?

Kathleen Kingsbury, the Opinion Editor of the New York Times weighed in with a TikTok today saying “News and opinion are separate. The teams do not coordinate at all.”

The thing is news and opinion stopped being separate a long time ago. I want facts and I get opinions. I want logic and I get agenda. I want objectivity and I can’t find any. It’s a root cause problem. If two things start from the same place and follow the same path, they end in similar places. They don’t need to be connected to be highly correlated.

Newsrooms are homogenous. In his open letter (which you still likely haven’t read), Bezos said it like this, “The Washington Post and the New York Times… talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves.”

A person who knows words might say we need more heterogeneity. I’m not that guy. In math, prime is a derivative. The deconstruction of something. And, that’s what needs to happen here. We need to deconstruct the organizations that produce news to get to trust prime. In a small way, Jeff Bezos started that process with his open letter this evening.

When opinion seeps into the news,
the news stops being news.
It’s news prime.
I’d like news back.
Please.