On Monday night, we covered the embarrassing spectacle that arose from The Washington Post's decision to refrain from endorsing either Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump for the 2024 election. Although the Post's editors had predictably prepared an editorial directing its readers to vote for Harris, the decision not to issue such an endorsement came directly from the Post's owner since 2013, Jeff Bezos. 

All of this led to a storm of melodramatic and self-righteous posturing from corporate media personalities and various liberal activists: two categories of people who have effectively merged. To hear them tell it, The Washington Post and outlets like it have enormous credibility with the public and perform an irreplaceable and noble function for all Americans. It is Bezos' directive not to endorse – rather than the endorsement itself – that will irreparably and tragically harm this august newspaper's credibility with the public.

In what dream world are these people living? This is utterly self-serving dreck, a self-flattering fairy tale, that is completely unhinged from any objective reality. Like virtually all corporate media outlets, the Washington Post has no “credibility” to squander. The opposite is true: the mass media is now held in the lowest esteem of any major American institution, somehow even lower than Congress. And the major reason why is that the public perceives – accurately – that large media outlets do not try to tell the truth, but instead lie on purpose to advance their political, ideological, and partisan preferences. 

This media uproar – combined with the non-trivial number of cancellations by subscribers to the Post: reportedly 250,000 individual subscriptions, or 8% of its overall subscription base – caused Bezos himself to write an op-ed explaining his rationale. In doing so, he began with a set of facts that are inarguable, yet ones that most people in corporate media simply refuse to acknowledge: namely, that they cannot continue to do things as they have been doing them because they have fully lost the trust of the public. Entitled "The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media," Bezos wrote:

In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.

 

Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.

 

Likewise with newspapers. 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, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. 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.

 

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. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. 

These are the indisputable facts that corporate journalists refuse to admit. Acting like spoiled and entitled children, they care only about what they want, but not about the realities that constrain those desires. They become infuriated

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It's Friday, October 25. 

Tonight: On Wednesday, the Los Angeles Times announced that it would refrain from issuing an endorsement in the presidential election, meaning it would not instruct its readers to vote for Kamala Harris. Today, The Washington Post followed suit. In both papers, top editors were prepared to issue endorsements of Kamala. They had the draft written, but the owners of each paper, a family that runs the L.A. Times and Jeff Bezos of The Washington Post, decided that the paper should not explicitly choose sides in the 2024 election by telling people for whom they should vote. 

To say that liberal elites were enraged by this news and have gotten into a spiraling meltdown of hysteria and betrayal is to understate the case. Some of these journalists and editors actually resigned in protest, including one of the longest-time and most influential neocons, Robert Kagan, who resigned today from The Washington Post. If you don't know who he is, he has been Bill Kristol's writing partner for three decades. He's the co-founder with Kristol of the neocon advocacy group in the 1990s called Project for a New America, where they architected and advocated countless U.S. wars in the Middle East and he is also the husband of the United States’ effective ruler of Ukraine, Victoria Nuland. Unsurprisingly, yet notably, it is these kinds of warmongers – Dick Cheneys, Bill Kristols and Robert Kagans – who are the most passionate about electing Kamala and defeating Donald Trump and Kagan rage quit today over what he viewed as The Post's supreme betrayal in not endorsing his candidate, Kamala Harris. 

But in these events and the reactions to them, one finds many important revelations about the state of our corporate media, the real function they are expected to perform, and the genuine mania and hysteria now consuming the elite liberal class as polls become increasingly discouraging for them. Yes, I will confess there is great entertainment value in taking a look at all of this hysterical media reaction – and we will not deny that to ourselves, nor to you – but the events of the last couple of days are really a very clear mirror about how these people think and what they expect and what they believe the media is now for. So, we will hold that mirror up to them and to these events for educational purposes as well as entertainment. 

Then: It receives way too little attention that the United States, virtually alone in the democratic world, is utterly incapable of counting all the votes cast on Election Day and releasing a full, complete, reliable tally that night. Increasingly, in fact, it takes the United States and various states within the country not just days, but even weeks and sometimes months to count all of the ballots cast, all while most countries in the democratic world, including ones far less rich and far less technologically advanced than the United States, reliably count all votes and announce the results on Election Day just a few hours after the polls close. It's an expectation nobody would even think it would be a different way now, as American officials in various states again warn this year that they will be unable to count all votes for many days after what is called Election Day. The question again arises: what explains this unique inability in the United States, especially given how much distrust and doubt in the integrity of the electoral process this failure understandably engendered? 

And then finally: Niall Harbison is a fascinating and I think inspiring figure. The Irish-born 44-year-old had a difficult life of a lot of childhood trauma that led to alcoholism and addiction in his later life: an increasingly common story in the modern Western world. But then he found a mission, a reason to live, a spiritual connection, rescuing, caring for and saving as many street dogs as he possibly can in Thailand, the country where he now lives. As is usually true of people devoted to animal rescue, the dogs he's saved have done at least as much to save Harbison as he's done to save them. He has built an impressive and growing project, and we'll speak to him about what led him to this noble mission, the role it played in saving him from various demons, and some of the inspiring stories that he's encountered: not just an interesting but uplifting way to end the week.

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now. 

Another week, another… week!

And we start with some bad news: Brazilian candy will not yet be awarded. It’s a tragic development, we know, but our supplier hasn’t System Updated us on our most recent order. In this indefinite interim, know that your comments last week were greatly appreciated as we started off this revamped newsletter!

For those of you who didn’t have the pleasure of reading last week’s edition, we’ve got some information for you. For those of you who did, feel free to jump down to the individual show breakdowns—and there’ll be no reading recommendations this week, by the way!

As you might’ve surmised, this is a new thing: our Locals newsletter is being reworked with a new flair to accompany all of the journalism we’ve been publishing here. We want this to feel even more like a real community that rewards our supporters, where you look forward to hearing from us and we try to share the spotlight. Part of that starts with this revamped weekly newsletter.

Let’s break down what exactly you can expect from us with this thing — our first of many new (or renewed) Locals-exclusive goodies…

First, let’s talk shop:

System Update may be beautiful on the outside, but in order to get everything out on time, our grittier work behind the scenes is equally important. So, we’re going to be showing our Locals subscribers more of that: more of our prep process, more of our studio, and more of the stuff that makes System Update special.

Second, a reinvigorated weekly roundup:

Let’s be real: we cover a lot of ground in a given week. When we started, the shows were supposed to be 60 minutes long. Now, they're running closer to 90 or even longer.

We also understand that you’re all very busy — and so are we. Some of you live in California and can’t see the full show before you get away from work, while others are in the United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil, and myriad other places. Maybe we air too late for you, or maybe we’re on a little earlier than you’d like. That’s fine!

Introducing our revamped Weekly Roundup, within which you’ll find some of our key clips and moments. That being said, we always encourage our loyal viewers and listeners to watch our full show on Rumble or listen to it on all of your favorite podcasting platforms 12 hours after airing.

Daily Updates

MONDAY: Exposing Free Speech and Pro-Democracy Frauds

In this episode, we looked back on…

1. System Update’s reporting on the hypocrisy of various American politicians and pundits who chose to abandon their once-espoused principles as soon as they became politically inconvenient;

TUESDAY: FEMA in Asheville & the Bamboozling RFK:

In this episode, Guest Host Michael Tracey talked about…

2. How RFK Jr. Could Be a Fraud;

3. The Likelihood of Trump Crushing the Deep State;

4. The State of Alternative Media w/Lee Fang;

5. Kamala and Her Other Running Mate, Liz Cheney;

WEDNESDAY: Watching the West Embrace Online Censorship

In this episode, we looked back on…

6. How Governments and the Governing Class Have Quickly Abandoned Free Speech;

THURSDAY: Kamala’s Disaster Town Hall & Her Race Against ‘Hitler’

In this episode, we talked about…

7. 60 Minutes Editing Out Kamala’s 60 Seconds of Nonsense;

8. Kamala’s Town Hall on CNN;

9. How Trump is Apparently Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, and Many More:

FRIDAY: Media Meltdowns, Counting Votes, and ‘System Pupdate’

In this episode, we talked about…

10. No Endorsements from the Washington Post or Los Angeles Times;

11. The Embarrassment of American Vote Counting;

12. Saving Street Dogs in Thailand.

Third, live question submissions:

Stay tuned — and tune in LIVE! We’re working on a feature that allows you, should you choose, to send videos or call in live to the team for our Locals After-Show. 

We’ll see you next week…

“Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow

That I shall say, ‘Watch System Update,’ till it be morrow.”

— Shakespeare, probably