International
‘Americans Don’t Trust The News Media’: Bezos Speaks Out After WaPo Chose Not To Endorse Harris
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
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.
🚨BREAKING: Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos speaks out after his paper refused to endorse Kamala Harris for President
“The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media” pic.twitter.com/3Dl8OaY4kj
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) October 29, 2024
“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.
Business
Biden-Harris Admin Reportedly Backs Off On Major Emissions Initiative At UN Climate Summit
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Nick Pope
The Biden-Harris administration is quietly backing away from a plan to use the ongoing U.N. climate conference to announce an international call for emissions reductions, according to Politico.
It is not clear whether it is because President-elect Donald Trump decisively won last week’s presidential election, but Biden-Harris officials reportedly intended to partner with several other countries in announcing “ambitious” carbon emissions reduction goals for 2035 before the announcement fell through, according to Politico, which cited a draft press release it obtained and several unnamed officials. Had it not fallen through, the announcement could have gone live as early as Monday, the first day of the conference — commonly referred to as COP29 — in Azerbaijan, a Caucasian petrostate with a questionable human rights record.
The aborted call to action would not have been legally binding, though it would have served as a signal to corporations to invest in emissions reduction initiatives and pave the way for other nations to get on board, according to Politico. The countries that would have been named in the announcement would have committed to slashing emissions across nearly every sector of their respective economies, and they would have taken aim at specific chemicals like carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.
The press release announcing the commitments “clearly won’t be published” at this point, one senior foreign diplomat told Politico, which granted the source anonymity to speak freely on the matter. Beyond Trump’s victory, other potential factors that may have interfered with the plan to roll out the 2035 targets include ambivalence from potential partners or bureaucratic logjam in the European Union, an American ally that typically collaborates on similar climate targets.
The U.S. circulated the idea of putting out a statement ahead of COP29 with “a lot of parties but never pushed for it to become something more,” a European official involved in climate negotiations told Politico.
Trump’s pending return to the White House is looming large at COP29, given the president-elect’s pledges to roll back green spending, regulations and initiatives and jack up fossil fuel production, according to CBS News. Moreover, Trump has also promised to withdraw again from the U.N.’s Paris Climate Accords, which he did in his first term before the Biden-Harris administration rejoined the deal.
The White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
COVID-19
Easy Day 1 victory for Trump: Take COVID shots off schedule for kids
From LifeSiteNews
By Matt Lamb
While Americans may be divided on a variety of issues, including abortion, guns, and parts of the LGBT agenda, a topic they seem to unite around is not injecting six-month-olds with the COVID shot.
President Donald Trump has the opportunity for an easy Day 1 in office victory — remove the COVID jabs from the childhood schedule.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention added the shots to the recommended pediatric schedule despite children, especially babies, never being at any real danger of dying from COVID. The shots have been on the recommended schedule for almost two years now – but the widespread push has been a massive failure for the pharmaceutical industry.
Despite the medical establishment getting behind the push for pediatric COVID shots, and millions of taxpayer dollars spent on boosting them, a vast majority of parents are rejecting them. In fact, while Americans may be divided on a variety of issues, including abortion, guns, and parts of the LGBT agenda, a topic they seem to unite around is not injecting six-month-olds with the COVID shot.
According to the pro-vaccine Kaiser Family Foundation, only “15% of eligible children in the U.S. got a shot.”
This means that removing the shots from the recommended schedule would generate minimal pushback from parents.
While public health “experts” would likely complain, the parents have already spoken – they don’t want two or three more jabs for their six-month-old. The CDC currently recommends around 28 different jabs in the first two years of life.
Removal of the shots would be a way for Trump to show he is serious about taking on Big Pharma while also acknowledging the problems with the jabs he pushed through with Operation Warp Speed. It would also fit in with his pledge along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “Make America Healthy Again,” since the COVID jabs are linked to numerous problems, including serious heart problems and death.
“That will be one of my priorities, to make sure that Americans – of course, we’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody,” RFK Jr. told National Public Radio recently. “We are going to make sure that Americans have good information right now. The science on vaccine safety particularly has huge deficits, and we’re going to make sure those scientific studies are done and that people can make informed choices about their vaccinations and their children’s vaccinations.”
Evidence also supports removing the shots from the recommended schedule. Presumably, removal would discourage more parents from injecting their kids, as the shots would no longer have the CDC’s stamp of approval.
Medical experts have warned against the COVID shots for kids, as documented by LifeSiteNews.
“The Florida Department of Health is going to be the first state to officially recommend against the COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children,” Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced in 2022. “We’re kind of scraping at the bottom of the barrel, particularly with healthy kids, in terms of actually being able to quantify with any accuracy and any confidence the even potential of benefit,” Ladapo, a Harvard University-trained doctor, said in 2022.
READ: COVID vaccine-related death estimates suggest millions could have died from the shots
Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough also called on Trump last week to pull all COVID shots from the market.
“They have not had the safety track record America wanted to see,” he said recently.
“The viral infection [from COVID itself] is like the common cold now,” he said, as reported by Just the News. “So they’re not clinically indicated. They’re not medically necessary. They should be removed from the market.”
President Trump pledged to take on the Deep State. He also wants to make America healthy again and restore actual science to federal policy and not let big corporations write our regulations. He can do so by ensuring that the CDC does not needlessly push injections for a disease that does not really affect children.
Members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices are appointed by the Department of Health and Human Services, so Trump’s HHS secretary could appoint vaccine science realists to the committee.
He could find ways to withhold funding until the shots are removed, or he could issue executive orders formally opposing the shots. He has some shrewd entrepreneurs like Elon Musk around him. Plus, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an experienced litigator – someone can figure it out if they have the will. It is an easy Day 1 victory, and he should take the opportunity.
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