Washington Post endorsement debacle exposes our ‘zombie elites’

Billionaire oligarch Jeff Bezos, who acquired his wealth by ensuring you could get random stuff ordered off the internet delivered within mere hours, took to the pages of his passion project this week with a message: My newspaper is a failure.

“Most people believe the media is biased," he wrote in a lengthy opinion column. "Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.”

“Our profession is now the least trusted of all," he wrote. "Something we are doing is clearly not working.” He wrote this as if he’s somehow part of “our” profession which he is critiquing. Bezos is not a journalist, or even masquerading as one. While he enjoys life on his mega-yacht, he is far removed from the debacle that has unfolded inside his publication in the final week before the 2024 presidential election.

And yet he has inserted himself directly into the perfect little microcosm of the problems not just with crusty old journalistic institutions, but with the entire idea of institutions more broadly. Last week the Washington Post announced it would not be endorsing a candidate in 2024. And not just that, it would never endorse a president again. We subsequently learned that this decision was made by Bezos after the Post had prepared an entirely unsurprising endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris.

The decision received immediate pushback from Post staffers. Columnist Ruth Marcus called it “the wrong choice at the worst possible time.” Another columnist, Karen Attiah, wrote it was “an insult to those of us who have literally put our careers and lives on the line, to call out threats to human rights and democracy.”

The Post’s subscribers were equally outraged. As of Tuesday, NPR reported that more than 250,000 people have canceled their subscription, approximately 10 percent of all paid circulation.

The Post meltdown is both a series of very specific crises playing out in one newsroom, and an existential crisis of epic proportions. Bezos is right, as he continued in his column, that “presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” and that “what presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias.” But while he leans on his “principled decision,” he ignores the obvious question of “why now?”

It’s hard to see any other explanation for the timing than Bezos making a calculation that former President Donald Trump is likely to win. Why unnecessarily back the losing candidate? At the same time, Bezos’s decision is not going to suddenly win the Post any new conservative readers, nor even independents or moderates, who have witnessed the output of the paper for the nearly decade-long Trump Era. A non-endorsement doesn’t look refreshing or principled — it looks craven and irrelevant.

Bezos writes about being worried that the Post and other media outlets are increasingly talking “only to a certain elite.” But choosing to suddenly acknowledge how counterproductive editorial endorsements are misses the reality of the current landscape.

The Washington Post is a “Zombie Elite” — a formerly important institution that doesn’t know it is already dead. It is stiffly wandering around with a smug facade of elitism, not realizing the power and influence it formerly possessed have been deeply — and likely irreparably — eroded.

The Post is not alone in today’s culture. There are examples of Zombie Elites throughout the media landscape, as legacy mainstays like CBS News and ABC News have been drained of their elite status. Zombie Elites exist in government, the scientific community and the foreign policy world. During the Trump Era, but particularly in the past four years since the COVID pandemic and the rise of independent media overcoming the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” more Zombie Elites than ever are walking among us.

But at the same time, the Washington Post is a particularly notable kind of media Zombie Elite. What major story has the outlet broken in the past few years? The New York Times has essential new media properties, like “The Daily” podcast (and Wordle!). What inroads into the future has the Post made? When the rest of the establishment press temporarily rediscovered their interest in telling the truth about President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline between the debate disaster and his eventual withdrawal from the race, the Post barely contributed to the conversation.

And in a sign of failure even among insider-y journalistic elitism, it hasn’t even won a Pulitzer Prize in two years.

Bezos has a noble stated goal of no longer talking “to ourselves,” and both being, and appearing to be, less biased. But a skeptical audience’s trust can’t be reestablished through the billionaire boss torpedoing an endorsement at the last minute. It requires full-scale reinvention.

The Post built a niche base of Trump-addicted #Resistance readers during its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” phase. It has been unable to evolve into an actual journalistic entity ever since.

Money can buy a lot for Bezos. But no amount can revive a Zombie Elite back to relevance and credibility with a newsroom that subscribes to the notion that a Harris endorsement isn’t just a foregone conclusion, but a necessary step toward saving democracy.

That is a hopeless endeavor.

The entire ordeal only illuminates the core, existential, issue. Right now, the Washington Post is not simply flawed, but it is already nothing, whether it knows it or not.

Steve Krakauer, a NewsNation contributor, is the author of “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People” and editor and host of the Fourth Watch newsletter and podcast.