The Hard Truth — Americans Don’t Trust the News Media

The Washington Post, October 28, 2024, by Jeff Bezos, identified in the piece as the owner of the Post. Written days after the paper declined to endorse a presidential candidate, and recovered from a Wayback snapshot.

The opening claim, which is the reason to keep it

“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.”

Why it belongs on Media Trust

Two things make it unusual as a source.

First, the datum is specific and checkable — the media falling below Congress in Gallup’s trust ranking is a hard marker, not a vibe, and it is the kind of number a page on media trust should be anchored to.

Second, the author is the owner, which makes the piece both more and less useful than it looks. More, because a proprietor conceding that his own profession is the least trusted in America is a real admission. Less, because the argument was deployed to justify a specific decision — ending presidential endorsements — at a moment when that decision was under heavy criticism. ⚠️ The diagnosis and the remedy are separable, and the draft should separate them: it can accept the trust data without accepting that non-endorsement follows from it.

Connections

• Feeds Media Trust alongside the James Hennessy piece on post-election blowback for legacy publishers.
• The sharpest tension in the corpus sits between this and The Group Chats That Changed America: Bezos argues the media has lost trust and must retreat from opinion, while Ben Smith documents opinion migrating into private channels with no accountability at all. If institutional media withdraws from stating positions, the positions do not disappear — they move upstream, out of view. That is the essay.