National Review senior writer Michael Brendan Dougherty, on today’s edition of The Editors, questioned whether Jeff Bezos’s desire for “an objective newspaper” can even be realized, following the pushback for his not allowing the Washington Post to endorse presidential candidates.

“Normally the owner gets to set the terms on how his institution run,” said Dougherty, “but his institution is so fully populated by those who would resist his religion, in a way — of an objective newspaper that appeals to the broadest possible audience — that I just don’t see how he can put Humpty Dumpty back together again, nor whether it’s desirable.”

Dougherty said, “[Bezos] talks about declining trust in the media, and the media’s trust now is below that of Congress. Well, maybe that’s good. I’m sorry, but when the media had really high trust in the society, they were covering up for a drug-addled sexual predator as president in JFK.”

The media, Dougherty said, have been and are “apologists for and corrupted by power,” and he doesn’t know “if [he] want[s] to return to that era.”

“The difficulty for him, too, is even if . . . he decided, ‘I’m gonna hire a whole team of conservative reporters to fill this newsroom,’ the paper’s voice would become schizophrenic. It would literally be one story built on a completely different set of facts than the story next to it.”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.