WThis is what happens when the owner of one of the country's most important news organizations decides that journalists are the problem? That's the question I keep asking myself when I respond to Jeff Bezos' comment explaining his decision to run his own newspaper: The Washington Postto stop making presidential endorsements just days before reportedly officially endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.

Bezos argued that the press must accept the reality of its unpopularity and suggested that journalists were responsible for our declining reputation. He didn't even acknowledge the concerted, multi-year campaign – most recently led by Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel – to convince Americans that the free press is, to borrow a phrase, “the enemy of the people.” is. Bezos writes: “We must be correct, and we must believe that we are correct.” It's a bitter pill to swallow, but we fail on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased… It would be easy to blame others for our long and sustained loss of credibility (and therefore decline in impact), but a victim mentality won't help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.”

Not once did Bezos attempt to explain why “most people believe the media is biased.”

The decision to drop out of the presidential support game is not a problem for me. In fact, I've always felt bad for any working journalist who has to cover a candidate's campaign on a daily basis after His opinion page speaks out against this candidate. As NBC's political director, I've had to deal with similar situations over the years when campaigns refused to grant interviews or even interact with NBC journalists because they didn't like an opinion expressed on the more ideological or partisan broadcasts was voiced by MSNBC. For reporters who are simply trying to do their job — covering a campaign, covering what's happening, and producing the most factually accurate report of the day that they can confirm on time — this is not a pleasant situation.

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For years I have pushed NBC to invest in a conservative talk show program on CNBC. I wanted to be able to say: We have a red cable channel at night and a blue cable channel at night, but here at NBC we stick to covering politics as it is, not as we wish it were. My mantra continues to be to report on politics as it is. Anyone who wants to advance their own politics should give up reporting and become activists; There are many places where they can do that.

The real problem with what Bezos did was not the decision he made, but its timing and implementation – implemented on the eve of an election without much explanation. And then when he actually released a statement, he somehow made things worse. There are many valid criticisms of contemporary journalism, but Bezos has not rebuked any of them. Instead, he wrote that the media suffers from a “lack of credibility” because it “only speaks to a certain elite.” He failed to let on that he was parroting an argument from the right and revealed his ignorance of the 50-year campaign to delegitimize the mainstream press – which arguably began when conservative supporters of President Richard Nixon sought revenge for the exposure of the Watergate Crimes sworn through the media.

What Bezos failed to acknowledge is that a legion of right-wing critics — most notably longtime Fox News CEO Roger Ailes — have for decades attacked media companies, repeating the charge that they are irredeemably biased. For Ailes and others, this approach proved lucrative—when you hear something over and over again, you tend to believe it. Trump and his team have used the same strategy, building their appeal by attacking the press. Social media algorithms have only made this repetitive robotic attack on the press worse.

But instead of defending his reporters against such attacks, Bezos chose to blame the victim in his extremely defensive commentary. He is right when he states that “complaining is not a strategy.” But surrender is also not possible. Six years ago I argued The Atlantic that the media had made a mistake by not responding to their critics. Many journalists feared that resisting malicious attacks on our work would make us appear biased. Instead, we chose not to engage when partisan actors at Fox News or campaign officials raised allegations of media bias against working journalists. And I wrote that that has to change.

I thought that if journalists defended their work, at least the owners of media institutions would support us. Boy, was that naive? It turns out that Bezos himself has fallen victim to the campaign to convince the world that all media should be considered politically biased unless proven otherwise. His comment must have felt like a punch in the gut to the reporters post. Only in the last few lines did he say that the journalists he employed deserved to be believed.

To Bezos' credithe at least mentioned his name in an editorial and tried to defend his actions. The executives of the publicly traded companies that happen to own major news outlets have not had the courage to publicly explain—either to the employees they fired or those they retained—why they chose to either “Trump -“ to prove their companies or limit their involvement in the news and information business.

And if you haven't been paying attention to the accelerating shrinkage of major news organizations, just wait until the first quarter of next year, when many publicly traded companies may decide that news departments aren't worth the headaches they cause their CEOs. These companies have plenty of cash to sustain their news divisions as they gain a foothold in the new media landscape. The fact that they choose not to do so says a lot.

Part of me understands the logic of much of corporate America. The idea that Trump could use the power of government to punish companies for journalism he dislikes is not hypothetical. Amazon claims it has done this before, interfering in the awarding of a $10 billion defense contract postBecause of the harsh reporting, the president saw Bezos as his “political enemy.” Executives have a fiduciary responsibility to protect their shareholders' investments. If that means accepting the terms of Trump's coercion, then apparently so be it.

bEzos could have made the case like this The Washington post is not a partisan institution, but instead argued that journalists must accept the perception of media bias as our reality. If we have to do that, maybe Bezos should either sell that post or entrust it to a kind of blind trust. Because he created it perception— both publicly and among his own employees — that his other business interests influenced his decision not to incur Trump's ire with a Harris endorsement.

Bezos, who owns the space company Blue Origin, is engaged in a rich-guy race with Elon Musk, the owner of SpaceX, for leadership in commercial space exploration. The fact that Musk has become Trump's main surrogate and a leading donor to his campaign must certainly have made people at Blue Origin nervous. Perhaps that's why Blue Origin executives arranged a meeting with Trump before the election. The time of their meeting – on the same day post announced that it would no longer make any further endorsements – only exacerbating the perception problem Bezos faces. Yet in the same editorial in which he told his journalists that they must accept perceptions as reality, he insisted that the perception of a quid pro quo was false and that he had not known about the meeting beforehand.

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How are the journalists doing according to Bezos' own logic? post is it possible to escape the perception that Bezos is hopelessly biased? What about the readers? Do you now have to assume that the… postAre Bezos' politics Bezos' politics?

I'm sorry that Bezos didn't bring the same energy, focus and innovation post that he brought to Amazon. The man who built the “everything store” could have developed it post into an “everything portal”, a model for information exchange. If he wanted to promote ideological diversity, he could have purchased several publications, each with its own editorial team. Instead, he apparently decided he wanted a trophy. And now that trophy stands in the way of another goal – pioneering commercial space travel.

What chance do journalists have of regaining the public's trust if the person who owns one of the world's most important media institutions has no first inkling of the long-running campaign to delegitimize the publication she owns?

Regardless of public perception, the reality is that most journalists across the country show up to work every day determined to be fair, honest and direct. That's what their readers expect from each other, and they should expect the same from the people who report on the news they consume.

If only Jeff Bezos would understand this.