JEFF BEZOS GOES OUT ON A LIMB: The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media.

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.

Good luck with that, Jeff. Four years before Bezos bought the Post, it claimed on the cover of its then-subsidiary weekly publication Newsweek that, with the Obama entering office, “We Are All Socialists Now.”

A few months prior to that, the late Deborah Howell, then the Post’s ombudswoman wrote:

Thousands of conservatives and even some moderates have complained during my more than three-year term that The Post is too liberal; many have stopped subscribing, including more than 900 in the past four weeks.

It pains me to see lost subscribers and revenue, especially when newspapers are shrinking. Conservative complaints can be wrong: The mainstream media were not to blame for John McCain’s loss; Barack Obama’s more effective campaign and the financial crisis were.

But some of the conservatives’ complaints about a liberal tilt are valid. Journalism naturally draws liberals; we like to change the world. I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.

Back in 1992, the late Ginny Carroll, bureau chief in first Detroit and then Houston of the then-Washington Post-owned Newsweek, appeared on C-Span after admitting she wore a button labeled “Yeah, I’m In The Media, Screw You!” at the 1992 Republican convention, and defended it:

“My reaction to that button [‘Rather Biased’] and others, in part, is a button I bought yesterday that says `Yeah, I’m In The Media, Screw You!’….I do understand why a lot of people are upset with us, why we rank somewhere between terrorists and bank robbers on the approval scale. We do criticize. That’s part of our role. Our role is not just to parrot what people say, it’s to make people think. I think that sometimes I want to say to the electorate `Grow up!’”

Only now, with 200,000 subscriber cancellations and counting, is the Post forced to say “Grow up!” to its own leftist readers, and Bezos is forced to pretend he cares about balancing the paper’s coverage. But then, these sorts of mea culpas happen at the end, or shortly after every presidential election from the DNC-MSM, but curiously, their coverage only seems to get worse when the next election rolls around.