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‘Americans Don’t Trust The News Media’: Bezos Speaks Out After WaPo Chose Not To Endorse Harris

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4 minute read

From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

 

By Mariane Angela

Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos said Monday that the Post’s decision not to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris is in response to a larger issue of media credibility being eroded.

Bezos pointed to the recent surveys on trust and public reputation, with media institutions consistently ranking near the bottom, in the article titled “The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media,” published in the opinion section of the Post. This year, however, Gallup reports an even more dire verdict that journalism now holds the lowest spot in American trust, with Bezos arguing media credibility has eroded not only because of perceived biases but also due to an industry tendency to ignore public perception.

Bezos further explained that the most recent backlash surrounding the Post’s decision not to endorse Harris only highlights a growing issue that trust in the press depends on two pillars — the coverage being accurate, and it must be broadly trusted to be accurate. The choice not to endorse provoked outrage across liberal circles, but as Bezos stated in a rare public response, the decision is rooted not in partisanship but in a commitment to genuine independence.

“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one,” Bezos wrote.

Bezos acknowledged that this choice might appear strategically timed to favor one candidate over another, especially given a coincidental meeting between a top executive from Blue Origin, a company which Bezos also owns, and former President Donald Trump on the same day.

“I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision,” he wrote to clarify that the decision was made internally.

Even so, Bezos is acutely aware of the larger challenges facing his newspaper and the industry at large, as the media’s credibility problem is neither isolated nor new. “Increasingly, we talk only to a certain elite,” Bezos reflected, contrasting today’s diminished public reach to the 80% household penetration WaPo achieved in the D.C. metro area during the 1990s.

“Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world? To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles,” Bezos added.

WaPo reportedly saw a drop of over 200,000 subscriptions after CEO and Publisher William Lewis announced that, for the first time in decades, the paper’s editorial board will not endorse a presidential candidate, NPR reported. Following the decision, several staff members who supported Harris reportedly resigned in protest.

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COVID-19

Trump DOJ seeks to quash Pfizer whistleblower’s lawsuit over COVID shots

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From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The Justice Department attorney did not mention the Trump FDA’s recent admission linking the COVID shots to at least 10 child deaths so far.

The Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) is attempting to dismiss a whistleblower case against Pfizer over its COVID-19 shots, even as the Trump Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is beginning to admit their culpability in children’ s deaths.

As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, in 2021 the BMJ published a report on insider information from a former regional director of the medical research company Ventavia, which Pfizer hired in 2020 to conduct research for the company’s mRNA-based COVID-19 shot.

The regional director, Brook Jackson, sent BMJ “dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails,” which “revealed a host of poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia that could impact data integrity and patient safety […] We also discovered that, despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia’s trial sites.”

According to the report, Ventavia “falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial.” Overwhelmed by numerous problems with the trial data, Jackson filed an official complaint with the FDA.

Jackson was fired the same day, and Ventavia later claimed that Jackson did not work on the Pfizer COVID-19 shot trial; but Jackson produced documents proving she had been invited to the Pfizer trial team and given access codes to software relating to the trial. Jackson filed a lawsuit against Pfizer for violating the federal False Claims Act and other regulations in January 2021, which was sealed until February 2022. That case has been ongoing ever since.

Last August, U.S. District Judge Michael Truncale dismissed most of Jackson’s claims with prejudice, meaning they could not be refiled. Jackson challenged the decision, but the Trump DOJ has argued in court to uphold it, Just the News reports, with DOJ attorney Nicole Smith arguing that the case concerns preserving the government’s unfettered power to dismiss whistleblower cases.

The rationale echoes a recurring trend in DOJ strategy that Politico described in May as “preserving executive power and preventing courts from second-guessing agency decisions,” even in cases that involve “backing policies favored by Democrats.”

Jackson’s attorney Warner Mendenhall responded that the administration “really sort of made our case for us” in effectively admitting that DOJ is taking the Fair Claims Act’s “good cause” standard for state intervention to mean “mere desire to dismiss,” which infringes on his client’s “First Amendment right to access the courts, to vindicate what she learned.”

Mendenhall added that in a refiled case, Jackson “may be able to bring a very different case along the same lines, but with the additional information” to prove fraud, whereas rejection would send the message that “if fraud involves government complicity, don’t bother reporting it.”

“The truth is we do not know if we saved lives on balance,” admitted FDA Chief Medical Officer Vinay Prasad in a recent leaked email. “It is horrifying to consider that the U.S. vaccine regulation, including our actions, may have harmed more children than we saved. This requires humility and introspection.”

The COVID shots have been highly controversial ever since the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative prepared and released them in a fraction of the time any previous vaccine had ever been developed and tested. As LifeSiteNews has extensively covered, a large body of evidence has steadily accumulated over the past five years indicating that the COVID jabs failed to prevent transmission and, more importantly, carried severe risks of their own.

Ever since, many have intently watched and hotly debated what President Donald Trump would do about the situation upon his return to office. Though he never backed mandates like former President Joe Biden did, for years Trump refused to disavow the shots to the chagrin of his base, seeing Operation Warp Speed as one of his crowning achievements. At the same time, during his latest run he embraced the “Make America Healthy Again” movement and its suspicion of the medical establishment more broadly.

So far, Trump’s second administration has rolled back several recommendations for the shots but not yet pulled them from the market, despite hiring several vocal critics of the COVID establishment and putting the Department of Health & Human Services under the leadership of America’s most prominent anti-vaccine advocate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Most recently, the administration has settled on leaving the current jabs optional but not supporting work to develop successors.

In a July interview, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary asked for patience from those unsatisfied by the administration’s handling of the shots, insisting more time was needed for comprehensive trials to get more definitive data.

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International

Trump admin wants to help Canadian woman rethink euthanasia, Glenn Beck says

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Jolene Van Alstine, approved for state-sanctioned euthanasia after enduring long wait times to receive care for a rare parathyroid disease, is in need of a passport to enter the U.S.

Well-known American media personality Glenn Beck says he has been in touch with the U.S. State Department to help a Canadian woman in Saskatchewan reconsider euthanasia after she sought assisted suicide due to long medical wait times to address her health problems.

As reported by LifeSiteNews on Tuesday, Canadian woman Jolene Van Alstine was approved to die by state-sanctioned euthanasia because she has had to endure long wait times to get what she considers to be proper care for a rare parathyroid disease.

Van Alstine’s condition, normocalcemic primary hyperparathyroidism (nPHPT), causes her to experience vomiting, nausea, and bone pain.

Her cause caught the attention of Beck and many other prominent Americans and Canadians on X.

In an update today on X, Beck said, “Jolene does not have a passport to gain legal entry into the U.S., but my team has been in touch with President (Donald) Trump’s State Department.”

“All I can say for now is they are aware of the urgent life-saving need, and we had a very positive call,” he added.

Beck had said before that he was in “contact with Jolene and her husband” and that he had “surgeons who emailed us standing by to help her.”

As of press time, neither the State Department nor other officials have not yet confirmed Beck’s claim that he has been in touch with them.

As a result of Van Alstine’s frustrations with the healthcare system, she applied for Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) and was approved for January 7.

A new Euthanasia Prevention Coalition report revealed that Canada has euthanized 90,000 people since 2016, the year it was legalized.

As reported by LifeSiteNews recently, a Conservative MP’s private member’s bill that, if passed, would ban euthanasia for people with mental illness received the full support of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.

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