Jeff Bezos explains himself.

He wants to restore trust in the news media. Good luck.

Jeff Bezos intruded on his paper’s op-ed page today to explain why the Washington Post did not endorse either presidential candidate this year. It’s about earning back trust in his paper and the news media generally, he said.

That Americans no longer trust the news media is indisputable. Bezos notes that, according to the latest Gallup poll, they trust it less than they trust Congress.

Why? Bezos offers this take:

We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality.

Bezos is too smart to say that his paper is also failing the first requirement — accuracy without bias. But unless he’s an out-and-out liberal and is hostile to Israel, he must realize that the Post fails this requirement, too. A glance at the front page of any edition would confirm this reality.

In fact, Bezos goes on, diplomatically, to hint at it:

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.

But what is Bezos’ plan to restore faith in the Post’s credibility? So far, it consists of not endorsing Kamala Harris for president.

This is a futile gesture. The Post’s lack of credibility has nothing to do with endorsing Democrats for presidents. No fair-minded person would begrudge a newspaper the right to endorse its preferred candidates. Editorials are opinions and editorial boards are entitled to express them. But fair-minded people insist that opinions belong in opinion pages, not in news reports.

Bezos reportedly also wants to bring more balance to the Post’s op-ed pages which for years has been dominated by left-liberals. I would applaud such a move.

But like the editorial page, the op-ed section is for opinions. While I would prefer more balance in the Post’ op-ed pages, I don’t infer that the paper’s reporting is biased and/or inaccurate because there aren’t enough conservatives writing op-eds.

It’s in the news sections where accurate, non-biased reporting is a must. The Post cannot reverse the (correct) perception that it isn’t a credible source of news unless it reverses the (correct) perception that it isn’t reporting the news fairly.

Declining to endorse Kamala Harris (and future Democratic presidential nominees) and hiring a few more conservatives to write op-eds won’t do the trick.

Unfortunately, the chances that Bezos will root out the severe (dare I say “systemic”) bias in the Post’s reporting are mighty slim. Is he going to fire the cadre of left-liberals who write news stories? Is he going to bring on new editors to purge the bias from their stories?

If these questions don’t answer themselves, the final lines of Bezos’ op-ed probably do:

Many of the finest journalists you’ll find anywhere work at The Washington Post, and they work painstakingly every day to get to the truth. They deserve to be believed.

No, they don’t, in far too many cases. To pretend otherwise is, if I may deploy Bezos’ words, to “pay scant attention to reality.”

I agree with Heather Mac Donald. She predicts that the reaction to the non-endorsement of Harris from the Post’s reporters, editors, and editorial writers will be a “trebling” of partisan volume.

The Post reportedly has already lost around 250,000 subscribers. If Bezos tries to lower the volume from his reporters, editors, and editorial writers, that number might treble.