Can billionaire media moguls be trusted in America?

If we want to know what news organisations will look like under the second Trump administration in America, well, we are beginning to get an idea.

- Emily Bell

At the Dealbook conference in New York last week, Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post and multi-billionaire founder of Amazon, gave a very favourable assessment of Donald Trump's upcoming second term. "I am very hopeful... he seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation," beamed Bezos.

It was surprising, then, that the Washington Post did not endorse Trump in its pre-election editorial. Instead the writers crafted an endorsement of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris which Bezos killed, in his first act of blatant editorial interference since he bought the title in 2013. In a Post article Bezos rationalised his decision as being an attempt to restore trust in the press with what he called "independence" - a type of independence which clearly does not extend to damping down public flattery. The headline, run with Bezos's approval, was 'The Hard Truth: Why Americans Don't Trust the News Media'. Bezos invoked the past of the American press, its historic non-endorsement of candidates and a return to some past notion of "objectivity" as being a fix for his news organisation's woes.

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, had already emulated Bezos by stopping the LA Times editorial board from running a presidential endorsement. Soon-Shiong, appearing on the Republican commentator Scott Jennings' radio show, said that he had been working on an AI-powered "bias meter" which will appear on LA Times articles from January. The motivation was that the medical tech billionaire said he had begun to see his own news title as "an echo chamber and not a trusted source".