YOU’RE never too old to be wrong. All those years that I spent writing leaders for The Guardian, I didn’t suppose that they could ever change anything; but now one of the richest men in the world has gone out of his way to show that sometimes, and to some people, leader columns matter.

Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, and, shortly after, emblazoned the masthead with the motto “Democracy dies in Darkness.” But, last Friday, the Post, which is indelibly associated with its campaign to bring down Richard Nixon over the Watergate scandal, announced that it would not be endorsing either candidate in this year’s presidential election for the first time in decades.

It emerged, almost at once, that this decision was Mr Bezos’s own, and that the paper had had prepared and ready to go, for a week before he killed it, an endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Obviously, the journalists on the paper were outraged. One member of the editorial board, Robert Kagan, an anti-Trump conservative, resigned at once. The others looked around a shrinking industry, considered their mortgages, and decided that they could do more good by staying on.

What I don’t think was foreseen was the reaction of the readers. Within three days, 200,000 of them had cancelled their subscriptions — eight per cent of the circulation. This is an astonishing figure. Most people, if they want to lose that many readers, have to publish something offensive. Mr Bezos managed it with an article that the paper didn’t print and never will.

It is not as if this were a hit to an otherwise profitable paper. The readership of the Post has dropped by 50 per cent since 2020, and, last year, the paper made a loss of about £60 million. For Mr Bezos, the paper has always been a vanity project: it cost him less than one of his yachts. But his profitable companies, whether Amazon or his space operation, make vast sums from government contracts. Donald Trump has made it clear that he will go after them, if he wins, as a punishment for the Post’s accurate and unsparing coverage of his campaign and his own business affairs.

THAT news coverage is, for the moment, unaffected by the owner’s difficulties. But one of the things that this scandal illustrates is that hardly anyone buys the paper for news. What they want is reassurance and self-righteousness. This the editorials supply, for anyone who can be bothered to read them, and for the very much larger number who feel that they can rely on what the leader would have said if they had read it.

Bagehot’s wonderful quote is relevant here: “Our typical reader . . . does not desire an article that is too profound, but one which he can lay down and say ‘an excellent article, very excellent, exactly my own sentiments.’” Like so many Victorian insights, this has not been bettered since, only obscured by changing fashions in high-mindedness and humbug.

This brings me to the second illumination of the story, which is the extraordinary belief of American journalists that they perform a public service, one for which the public should be grateful. The Washington Post itself is important in this mythology, because it really did provide the ammunition that enabled parts of the government and the judiciary to bring down President Nixon, almost immediately after he had won an overwhelming election victory.

Obviously, we would all like to work for an institution that could override the results of a democratic election when these are wrong, and some of us think we still do; but, if the past eight years should have taught reporters anything, it is that we don’t. The press has lost the economic base that allowed the proprietors of the ’70s to defy politicians; on top of that, the American political system is now almost entirely dysfunctional.

I HAVE just been reviewing a biography of Claud Cockburn, a superb journalist who found the self-importance of the American press risible. He defined the trade as a cross between entertainment and advertising — all you have to do, he said, is to decide whom you are going to entertain and what cause you wish to advertise. The problem with this definition is not the entertainment aspect, since, if journalism is not rewarding to read, it goes unread. It is the word “advertising”. Partly, as cannot be said too often, this is because the money in advertising things for sale has moved online, where it is cheaper and appears to be more effective.

Cockburn also used “advertising” to mean the promotion of any cause, not just things that can be sold for money. And here, too, the newspapers have been outflanked and cut off from their supplies by the internet. What could be more drearily 20th-century than the written word? As I write this, a clip comes up on my Twitter feed of the Revd Calvin Robinson dancing to the song “Y.M.C.A.” as he tries to attract the attention of Donald Trump.

Who needs the Post to tell them how to vote after watching that?