[HN Gopher] Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Be...
___________________________________________________________________
Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial
ties
Author : ilamont
Score : 490 points
Date : 2025-10-28 14:16 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal
| owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or
| Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies
| and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government
| officials. I once wrote that The Post is a "complexifier" for me.
| It is, but it turns out I'm also a complexifier for The Post. -
| https://archive.is/flIDl
|
| It kind of shocks me how someone seemingly can understand those
| things, but then continue to try to helm the ship. You know
| you're having a negative impact, why stay at that point, unless
| you have some ulterior motive?
|
| I don't feel like Washington Post becoming a shadow of itself is
| any surprise, when even the owner is aware of the effect they
| have on the publication, yet do absolutely nothing to try to
| change it.
|
| Disclaimer: former subscriber, part of the exodus that left when
| the publication became explicitly "pro-capitalism" under the
| guise of "personal liberties" or something like that.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| It's part of the centi billionaire class power grab playbook.
| each one of them for the most part has some major media
| interests. if you can control and dictate the narrative, for a
| while no one can protest you, and maybe they won't notice for a
| while that their futures are being robbed to enrich a handful
| of extremely vain white men. by the time they do, it's likely
| too late.
| makr17 wrote:
| I feel like Bezos has well more than $10M, $1B/100 (centi).
| Perhaps you were looking for "hecto" (SI prefix for 100)?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| No:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_centibillionaires
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| This is called "managing the narrative"
|
| It's a classic hallmark technique of advanced psychopaths
| wherein you agree with reality but don't change it because as
| long as you acknowledge it, most people assume you'll "do your
| best."
|
| So all you have to do is acknowledge it, and as long as there's
| nobody who can force you to do anything then there's no obvious
| way to address it without escalation - that escalation being
| the reason then for claiming you're attacked and then you have
| carte blanche to "simply defend yourself"
|
| Do that long enough and people get tired and move on and you
| just cemented your place further
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's because even if he realizes the conflict of interest
| having a massive media outlet at your disposal is just too
| powerful a temptation to ignore for these fat cats.
| morkalork wrote:
| I think they took the wrong lesson from that Mark Twain quote
|
| >Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel
| flatline wrote:
| The Post is a plaything to him that has a disproportionate
| impact on the rest of the world. We've created systems that
| allow a few individuals to control resources beyond the wildest
| dreams of the monarchs of days past. Whether it is about power,
| control, self-aggrandizement, or simply a special interest to
| him, there is no accountability at the end of the day, and we
| are all excellent at justifying and rationalizing our decisions
| to ourselves. I don't think there has to be an ulterior motive
| per se, it's simply human nature.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| > We've created systems that allow a few individuals to
| control resources beyond the wildest dreams of the monarchs
| of days past.
|
| That didn't happen without vigorous help from the "servants
| of the people".
|
| > I don't think there has to be an ulterior motive per se,
| it's simply human nature.
|
| It's both, of course. Ulterior motives and human nature
| aren't mutually exclusive, in fact they overlap quite a lot
| _given the chance_.
| afavour wrote:
| Yeah, this was always the tell. If he truly cared about
| journalism and wanted to use his money to support it he could
| very easily place WaPo in some sort of trust he has no power
| over. And yet, despite publicly admitting the conflict of
| interest, he hasn't. Only one reason why you do that and it's
| because you intend to make the most of your control.
| nickff wrote:
| It seems like the problem with WaPo is that it's constantly
| losing money, and has been since well before Bezos bought it.
| This makes it difficult to be hands-off for (at least) two
| reasons: he can't just put it in a conventional trust,
| because he has to constantly give the organization money
| (which is abnormal for such a trust), and (secondly) in order
| to be sustainable, WaPo needs to be significantly changed so
| that it stops hemorrhaging money.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| It's almost like trying to run a newspaper the same way you
| run a for-profit online marketplace isn't the greatest of
| ideas. Who could've known...
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| Coming Soon: WaPo Marketplace. Search for a story and get
| 10000 results from writers in China like LIOPOSFO and
| XIGISNN that look almost like the genuine article!
| summa_tech wrote:
| Fortunately, they all come from the same LLM article
| factory as the western-branded ones. So, no loss.
| terminalshort wrote:
| No, they will come from Deepseek and have very different
| opinions on Taiwan
| platevoltage wrote:
| LIOPOSFO actually got banned from the platform
| unfortunately. They did get a new writer named LIOPOSFI
| who is very similar though.
| afavour wrote:
| I'd say the UK's Guardian newspaper is a useful example
| here. It's been owned by the Scott Trust since the 1930s:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/about/history
|
| And it has survived without continual extra investment.
| Possible that WaPo is just managed badly.
| notahacker wrote:
| In fairness, when it comes to surviving the modern media
| landscape the Guardian seems to be good at online, but
| has the distinct advantage of the UK having no other
| remotely left leaning broadsheets or even middle market
| tabloids. Since Lebvedev destroyed the Independent, it's
| basically the Guardian or the Mirror which is a trashy
| rag, and the nominal centrist papers are owned by Murdoch
| and the Daily Mail General Trust.
|
| Not sure how that translates into US media context.
|
| The second lesson from UK media is that the Daily Mail
| General Trust is usually assumed to be a vehicle for
| whatever the owning dynasty wants, despite encompassing
| multiple newspapers with different editorial stances
| (this is also certainly historically accurate: in the
| 1930s the man who set up the trust was writing letters to
| the PM offering editorial support in exchange for being
| allowed to veto any government appointments the PM wanted
| to make). So I don't think a trust structure alone will
| make people believe Bezos has no influence over it.
| metabagel wrote:
| Anecdotally, The Guardian has a lot of U.S. readers. I
| regularly read and donate to The Guardian. Their U.S. and
| California coverage is very good and seems to be
| continually improving.
|
| Axios has an article about The Guardian's success in the
| U.S., but I don't have access behind the paywall.
|
| https://www.axios.com/2025/05/06/the-guardian-us-
| expansion
|
| Better resource:
|
| https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2025/09/11/Guardian_Annual_Rep
| ort...
| platevoltage wrote:
| I'm one of them. I don't love that I have to overseas to
| find reliable news on my own country.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > And it has survived without continual extra investment.
|
| It has not. The Guardian loses millions every year. I
| think it made money one year in the late 90s iirc.
| metabagel wrote:
| Their revenue is growing though, and they are expanding.
|
| https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2025/09/11/Guardian_Annual_Rep
| ort...
| afavour wrote:
| If I have $10m in the bank and I live off the interest I
| am, in a sense, losing money while being able to stay
| solvent for the rest of my life. I don't see a reason why
| a newspaper couldn't apply the same principle.
| terminalshort wrote:
| You will still have $10 mil, but at an average inflation
| rate of 3% that will be worth half in 24 years, and 1/4th
| in 28. So you will have less and less of a newspaper. And
| that's if none of your investments go bad. This kind of
| logic doesn't work for long time horizons.
| Fluorescence wrote:
| I don't know about that.
|
| > It's been owned by the Scott Trust since the 1930s
|
| It's now The Scott Trust Ltd. In 2008 they wound up the
| original trust and transferred assets to a limited
| company which has gutted a lot of what it was. They sold
| off local papers to Maxwell's empire, their radio
| interests and Autotrader. They even sold off their
| properties to private equity.
|
| They sold off the Observer, essentially The Guardian's
| Sunday edition, which was condemned as a betrayal of the
| OG trust. The original trust was bound by deed to pursue
| it's mission but the limited company can sell off the
| Guardian or change it's purpose with a 75% board vote.
| clort wrote:
| Bezos has so much money that he could simply drop a billion
| or five into the trust and never need to see any return
| from it.
| uvaursi wrote:
| What's the relation between Journalism, Facts and Truth? I'd
| like a three-way Venn diagram to understand if there are any
| overlaps.
| GCA10 wrote:
| It's worth reading former WashPost editor Marty Baron's
| memoirs for a little more insight about Bezos's priorities.
| Back when Bezos was married to MacKenzie Scott, she was a
| surprisingly strong voice about how to do things. (The slogan
| "Democracy Dies in Darkness" got approved after her
| blessing.) Lately, my sense is that his new wife, Lauren
| Sanchez, has more of an interest in the Post than Bezos does.
|
| So he's basically the absentee owner of a property that's
| more interesting to the women in his life than to him.
| Current management at the paper is probably eager to make
| sure that the paper doesn't embarrass (or "complexify") his
| bigger business priorities. Their desire to mollify may be
| excessive. I've seen such things happen inside large
| organizations.
| terminalshort wrote:
| That doesn't solve the problem (because it can't be solved).
| Someone is in control, and the paper will be biased in their
| interest.
| heroprotagonist wrote:
| There was an ulterior motive and the impact was deliberate.
|
| Further down the article:
|
| > O'Neal was brought in by Bezos this summer after the
| corporate titan tore up his paper's opinion section.
|
| > Bezos said he wanted a tight focus on two priorities:
| personal liberties and free markets. The top opinion page
| editor resigned. A raft of prominent columnists and
| contributors resigned or departed as well. Some were let go.
| terminalshort wrote:
| It's not ulterior if he said it
| HPsquared wrote:
| Don't ask what you can do for your property; ask what your
| property can do for you.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Washington Post becoming a shadow of itself
|
| The Post was always terrible, always extremely conservative,
| and always blatantly mixed editorial in with its news reporting
| (unlike most other outlets in the past.) A bunch of anti-Trump
| people decided it was movement liberal because it didn't like
| Trump (like every other Republican and Republican outlet until
| people started voting them out over it.)
|
| WaPo was the most right-wing non-tabloid major paper in the
| country other than the WSJ before Bezos, the only thing that
| changed afterwards was that the headlines became more linkbait
| (5 minutes earlier than every other paper) and their coverage
| of Bezos properties became lighter.
|
| The idea that the WaPo was ever anything but rabidly capitalist
| is nonsense.
| senderista wrote:
| > always extremely conservative
|
| You have a pretty idiosyncratic definition of "conservative"
| platevoltage wrote:
| the definition of conservative has changed drastically over
| the last couple decades.
| jandrese wrote:
| In the past the articles were reasonably objective. The
| editorial section was always to the right of Attila the
| Hun.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Who knew that Attila the Hun was basically the ancient
| version of Elizabeth Warren?
| terminalshort wrote:
| The typical "we have two right wing parties." It's a stupid
| pedantic thing people on the left like to do.
| bpt3 wrote:
| It's really the people on the far left, who think that
| way, way more than 10% of the US is progressive or
| socialist/communist and wonder why they can't win any
| elections.
| senderista wrote:
| Because "left" and "right" only have meaning within a
| particular nation's politics.
| metabagel wrote:
| I would say that the Washington Post was pretty centrist
| before Bezos decided to target MAGA readers.
|
| They were planning to endorse Kamala Harris before Bezos
| quashed it.
| platevoltage wrote:
| Amazing that they have any paid subscribers after this
| happened.
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| the temptation is to take him at his word for what he wants and
| then ask why he doesn't do the obvious thing to get it. try
| something different: assume he wants what he gets and then ask
| yourself why he might want that. it's shocking how often that
| tends to make things very clear.
| davisr wrote:
| If you think this kind of reporting is cool, you should donate to
| https://fair.org.
|
| Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) has been exposing two-
| faced news for decades. They are worthy of your attention.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| And now that Zuck has nuked Facebook AI Research org, they get
| their acronymic exclusivity back.
| zargon wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAIR_(Mormon_apologetics_organ.
| ..
| BeetleB wrote:
| I second that. When I was a news junkie, I would love reading
| their (occasional) posts.
|
| Glad they're still around.
| jonas21 wrote:
| FAIR has its own biases, and these can be quite strong (have a
| glance at the studies on their website and judge for yourself).
|
| IMO, the Columbia Journalism Review (https://www.cjr.org) is a
| better source for media criticism.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Oof, took a glance. Pretty bad. Many of their study headlines
| scream bias and spin. Pretty wild given their name and
| declared mission.
| davisr wrote:
| Please, do explain to everyone what you think is biased
| about it, and why.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Their headlines include lines about marching against
| fascists and calling people toadies. This would indicate
| their bias is rather left.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| We don't even need to label their bias as right or left.
| Titles like those are blatantly opinionated. So it gives
| the appearance of "opinionated news is good, so long as
| the opinions are correct." Reminds me of Fox News' "fair
| and balanced" slogan. Which, hey, that's a view some may
| appreciate. But to then call yourself FAIR and claim
| you're some kind of neutral media watchdog seems
| misleading.
| agnokapathetic wrote:
| the institution of democracy should not require a neutral
| point of view.
| slg wrote:
| >So it gives the appearance of "opinionated news is good,
| so long as the opinions are correct."
|
| All news is opinionated news and some opinions are
| objectively better than others. For example, the simple
| act of choosing which story to cover is an opinionated
| choice and if a news outlet decided to cover a random
| high school teacher the same way they cover the POTUS,
| that would be an objectively incorrect editorial opinion.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Your understanding of the word objective differs markedly
| from my own.
|
| I don't disagree with the general spirit of what you
| mean. But I would love to see news outlets, and so called
| watch dogs, pursue the unobtainable dream of objectivity
| and neutrality over all others. Calling people toadies
| and democratically elected administrations "fascists"
| falls far, far short of that dream.
| slg wrote:
| Some people are of the opinion that the world is flat, I
| would say it's objectively round. That is the context in
| which I'm using that word. I'm not using it to describe
| 100% consensus, because there will always be someone who
| disagrees with something.
|
| News without opinion is objectively impossible because
| the act of reporting the news is inherently governed by
| an opinion on what is worthy to report. Pretending
| otherwise is just pulling the wool over your own eyes.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Except, the news calling, for example, Bush Jr a "War
| criminal" is exactly objective.
|
| His Casus Belli was false, and he knew that. We invaded
| sovereign countries illegally.
|
| Would you read news that openly called him a war
| criminal? Reality gets extreme all the time. If you
| police the language more than the reality, you are just
| making the problem worse. You are forcing people to
| pretend reality isn't so bad just so you do not have to
| fix reality.
|
| Guess what? Reality is bad right now. We are bombing
| boats off the coast of south America and posturing like
| we are going to war with them and bailing out Argentina
| because of political rhetoric and affiliations and
| corruption, and we wasted over $150 billion harassing
| brown people and sending American citizens to foreign
| prisons and _maybe_ catching a few people who overstayed
| their visas or walked over our border.
|
| And yet you tone police the people trying to inform you
| of that.
| bpt3 wrote:
| Was GW Bush convicted of any war crimes? If not, then he
| isn't a war criminal.
|
| You can argue that he should be, and I probably would
| agree with you, but an organization supposedly dedicated
| to unearthing biases in the media should not inject their
| opinions into their own reporting.
| slg wrote:
| That is a silly standard. Hitler was never convicted of
| war crimes, would you object to someone calling him a war
| criminal?
| bpt3 wrote:
| I would say that an organization that needs to be highly
| objective should not call him one.
|
| They can certainly point out that he was the leader of a
| group that was systematically killing millions of people
| with physical or cultural attributes he deemed
| undesirable and people will reach the same obvious
| conclusion about him.
| slg wrote:
| > They can certainly point out that he was the leader of
| a group that was systematically killing millions of
| people with physical or cultural attributes he deemed
| undesirable and people will reach the same obvious
| conclusion about him.
|
| How do you know this?
| bpt3 wrote:
| Because of thousands upon thousands of documented
| accounts from eyewitnesses and participants?
|
| I'm aware of what you're trying to do, but there is a
| difference between stating a generally accepted fact that
| has a tiny faction of dissenters (e.g. the earth is
| round) and something that is not and is therefore
| considered an opinion.
| slg wrote:
| >Because of thousands upon thousands of documented
| accounts from eyewitnesses and participants?
|
| Then why can't you accept the "thousands upon thousands
| of documented accounts from eyewitnesses and
| participants" of him committing war crimes?
|
| >I'm aware of what you're trying to do, but there is a
| difference between stating a generally accepted fact that
| has a tiny faction of dissenters (e.g. the earth is
| round) and something that is not and is therefore
| considered an opinion.
|
| I think war crimes are bad. There is no "fact" involved
| in that statement, it is purely a value judgment and
| therefore an opinion. Yet I think it is inarguably a
| better opinion than believing that war crimes are good.
| Would you disagree?
| goatlover wrote:
| Or they could just say Hitler committed war crimes but
| killed himself before he could be put on trail. Because
| that's what he did. It's not an opinion.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Was GW Bush convicted of any war crimes? If not, then
| he isn't a war criminal.
|
| No, if he wasn't convicted, he is not a convict and a
| government grounded in the rule of law cannot treat him
| as a criminal.
|
| Conviction doesn't retroactively create the crime.
| davisr wrote:
| How do you believe their reporting differs from reality?
| They're writing about rising authoritarianism and those
| who submit to it, which is a fact of the world happening
| today. They use the term "toady" in its literal
| definition. FAIR has anti-bias and counter-spin, aka "a
| bias towards reality."
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/toady (noun) :
| one who flatters in the hope of gaining favors :
| sycophant
| ecshafer wrote:
| I've never seen Manhattan Institute, Hudson Institute, or
| Cato Institute using the term Toady even if technically
| correct. It is a term almost exclusively used by the
| left, typically more anti-authoritarian. Maybe you have
| some libertarian types using it as well.
| efnx wrote:
| It would be used by the right too, if they weren't
| toadies.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Why would right-wing leaning think tanks be complaining
| about right wing authoritarianism they're in favor of?
| You'd expect them to trot out this verbiage if a populist
| left wing politician with authoritarian vibes came to
| power.
| bpt3 wrote:
| You can identify and complain about right wing (or left
| wing) authoritarianism without hurling insults.
|
| A publication failing to do so is a key indication of
| bias in a specific direction.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _It is a term almost exclusively used by the left_
|
| What a strange claim.
|
| If you search the sites you cite, all of them have at
| least one use of "toady" or "toadies" (which only gets a
| few hits on fair.org as well). Meanwhile go check the
| national review and they seem to love the word. Maybe
| recheck your priors.
| cjaybo wrote:
| Everyone thinks they have "a bias towards reality". I
| have yet to see this actually be true!
|
| Everyone has biases, whether conscious or unconscious,
| and trying to claim otherwise is a massive red flag on
| its own IMO.
| ares623 wrote:
| ok fine. i prefer a bias towards not enslaving and/or
| eliminating an entire population because of
| religious/racial/cultural differences.
| goatlover wrote:
| Is this an argument for sophistry or propaganda? Everyone
| having biases doesn't preclude people from rightly
| pointing out bad things in the world, like creeping
| authoritarianism and the undermining of democracies,
| anymore than it did in the lead up to WW2.
| hobs wrote:
| Really we're all just interested in what your line for
| calling a person a fascist is, and what you would call
| the folks who did this?
|
| "When the Pentagon announced that reporters would only be
| credentialed if they pledged not to report on documents
| not expressly released by official press handlers, free
| press advocates, including FAIR (9/23/25), denounced the
| directive as an assault on the First Amendment.
|
| The impact of this rule cannot be understated--any
| reporter agreeing to such terms is essentially a
| deputized public relations lackey."
|
| If you can't write with basic clarity because that makes
| your progressive, you might want to investigate your own
| bias.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Yeah, my line for calling someone fascist is not
| "restricting reporters access to the Pentagon". It
| cheapens the word and all that it represents.
|
| There is a wide gulf between writing with basic clarity
| and injecting opinions like "so and so is a toady". I
| would love to see media outlets attempt to describe just
| the facts with as little opinion as possible. FAIR
| clearly does not meet that bar.
| Larrikin wrote:
| In what scenario does a fascist not restrict freedom of
| the press as one of their steps?
| next_xibalba wrote:
| It is a necessary but not sufficient condition. But this
| is not that. This is, "you don't have unfettered access
| to personnel and facilities." Fascism would be "if you
| print that we will arrest you and maybe shut your
| operation down." And maybe a paramilitary squad of goons
| will fire bomb your offices in the meantime. This will
| read as snark, but I swear it is not: read about the
| truly fascist regimes of history. The difference is night
| and day.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| So you're admitting that the right is fascist.
|
| We already knew that, but it's so nice of you to admit
| it.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| I mean, if the ground truth was that fascism did not
| exist and no people were toadies, sure.
|
| OTOH, posting something that only makes sense in that
| context in 2025 would indicate a bias that is rather
| Right.
| goatlover wrote:
| Would you say the bias was rather left if this was the
| 1930s?
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| it makes him look bad
| metabagel wrote:
| Also, Poynter.
|
| https://www.poynter.org/
| pestat0m wrote:
| "Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view
| this site properly."
|
| it always makes me sad when i see this. you are not
| reaching your target audience. fyi this seems to be a
| cloudflare thing. i see it everywhere. The World Wide Web
| seems to be going down a dark path. perhaps i do need to
| update my browser, but why should that matter for just
| reading a news site. it's like someone wants you to not
| have access unless you buy a new macbook(or maybe a
| chromebook). maybe i should just install Chrome already? i
| just feel like this Big Tech has crossed the line with
| their customers a long time ago at this point.
|
| btw, fair.org looks interesting. i never heard of them
| before. Thanks!
| metabagel wrote:
| Works for me on Firefox / MacOS
| boston_clone wrote:
| does it similarly make you sad if your operating system
| tells you to update for new security patches or
| indicators?
|
| the sheer volume of browser exploits - including in-the-
| wild exploited zero-click zero days - is frankly insane.
| intentionally leaving yourself unprotected is a bad
| choice that should be shoved back in your face, often.
|
| > i see it everywhere.
|
| i see it nowhere. update your software! and don't use
| chrome.
| fsckboy wrote:
| they were not informing him of an insecurity.
|
| and software monoculture is widely considered a security
| threat, and so by pushing software monoculture, you
| yourself are pushing to weaken internet security. GP
| should potentially be applauded (if he's not using for
| example IE6)
| senderista wrote:
| FAIR has always been like this since the 80s. I don't really
| expect these media watchdogs to be "neutral" though; it's
| enough that they only call out bias against their favored
| positions. If there are enough such orgs across the spectrum
| then they serve their purpose.
| mmooss wrote:
| Also Nieman Lab: https://www.niemanlab.org/
|
| Press Gazette (UK): https://pressgazette.co.uk/
|
| A great daily aggregator (with links to more) is Mediagazer:
| https://mediagazer.com/
| 8ig8 wrote:
| Or NPR...
|
| https://www.npr.org/donations/support
| placardloop wrote:
| The title makes it seem like this is a major or systemic issue,
| but the article content essentially says this was a one-off,
| potentially a mistaken omission that was fixed within 24 hours.
| The article itself even states that the Post routinely discloses
| its ties to Bezos in its reporting and this was an anomaly. I
| used to read the Post (I'm not a subscriber anymore) but I do
| distinctly remember seeing such a disclosure all over the place.
| Is this an attempt at outrage clicks?
|
| Edit: people saying I didn't read the article apparently didn't
| read it themselves. From the article:
|
| > The Post has resolutely revealed such entanglements to readers
| of news coverage or commentary in the past ... since 2013, those
| of Bezos, who founded Amazon and Blue Origin. _Even now, the
| newspaper 's reporters do so as a matter of routine._
|
| So at minimum the article disagrees with itself, but it seems the
| outrage bait is working hook line and sinker.
|
| Edit 2: To try and be a little clearer here: the article is
| trying to (but in my opinion doing a really poor job of) make a
| distinction between the disclosures that the non-editorial WaPo
| authors do, and the disclosures that the editorial authors do,
| with the assertion that the editorial authors are worse at it.
| arusahni wrote:
| There are two additional recent ones mentioned in the article:
|
| > On Oct. 15, the Post heralded the military's push for a new
| generation of smaller nuclear reactors. "No 'microreactor'
| currently operates in the United States, but it's a worthy
| gamble that could provide benefits far beyond its military
| applications," the Post wrote in its editorial.
|
| > A year ago, Amazon bought a stake in X-energy to develop
| small nuclear reactors to power its data centers. And through
| his own private investment fund, Bezos has a stake in a
| Canadian venture seeking nuclear fusion technology.
|
| and
|
| > Three days after the nuclear power editorial, the Post
| weighed in on the need for local authorities in Washington,
| D.C., to speed the approval of the use of self-driving cars in
| the nation's capital. The editorial was headlined: "Why D.C. is
| stalling on self-driving cars: Safety is a phony excuse for
| slamming the brakes on autonomous vehicles."
|
| > Fewer than three weeks before, the Amazon-owned autonomous
| car company Zoox had announced D.C. was to be its next market.
|
| Edit to respond to your edit: these are the opinion pages, not
| reporting.
| afavour wrote:
| The article does not say this was a one-off:
|
| > On at least three occasions in the past two weeks
|
| Bezos announced a relaunch of the Opinion section earlier in
| the year, I don't think it's unreasonable to wonder if there
| has been a policy change. Three times in two weeks is a lot.
|
| > potentially a mistaken omission that was fixed within 24
| hours
|
| _potentially_ , yes. Responsible news organizations post
| correction notices when they make an omission like this, but
| WaPo did not (despite having a history of doing so, again, a
| notable change in practice)
| terminalshort wrote:
| In journalism you can safely assume that the truth is the
| absolute minimum claim that can possibly fit with the exact
| words used.
| tpmoney wrote:
| Do Editorial and Opinion sections of news papers do "conflict
| of interest" disclosures as a matter of course? It seems like
| it should be assumed that an Opinion article is expressly a
| biased article, written by someone with an interest in the
| topic at hand. If the NY Times wrote an editorial on schools
| or on medicaid, I wouldn't really expect to see a line
| disclosing the number of editorial staff members with
| children in the school systems or with family members
| receiving medicaid.
|
| And this is an honest question, I don't know what the WP
| standard for their Editorial and Opinion pages were prior to
| Bezos' ownership, nor what the broader industry standard was
| before say 2016.
| overfeed wrote:
| > And this is an honest question, I don't know what the WP
| standard for their Editorial and Opinion pages were prior
| to Bezos' ownership, nor what the broader industry standard
| was before say 2016.
|
| Fortunately, the NPR journalists _do_ know, as the article
| states:
|
| >> The Post has resolutely revealed such entanglements to
| readers of news coverage _or commentary_ in the past[...]
| tpmoney wrote:
| Great, and that's followed by > Even now, the newspaper's
| reporters do so as a matter of routine.
|
| So, we know they "resolutely revealed" this in the past
| (but that is of course not the same word as "unfailingly"
| or even "always"), and we know that they continue to do
| so even to this day "as a matter of routine". But neither
| of those tells us anything about the current frequency
| compared to the past frequency. Likewise it tells us
| nothing about whether the "matter of routine" changed
| since before Bezos took ownership.
|
| Similarly it says nothing about the wider industry. Oh
| sure, they tell us: > Newspapers typically manage the
| perception with transparency. And they tell us that
| viewing it as a conflict of interest is "conventional",
| but again no information about how the WPs frequency
| (either before or after Bezos took ownership) compares to
| the industry as a whole, nor whether that frequency has
| actually changed.
|
| Again some numbers would be instructive here. The article
| says "at least 3 times in the last 2 weeks" this has
| occurred (and apparently been subsequently corrected).
| But how many times was it necessary in the last 2 weeks?
| If the WP published 4 articles in the last 2 weeks that
| would have normally had one of these disclosures, missing
| 3 out of 4 is a different thing than if the WP published
| 200 such articles in the last 2 weeks.
|
| I know it's always been a lot to ask our news reporters
| to actually do some fact gathering, but it hardly seems
| unreasonable to ask for any sort of comparative
| information when asserting there is a change people
| should be concerned about.
| overfeed wrote:
| > Great, and that's followed by > Even now, the
| newspaper's reporters do so as a matter of routine.
|
| What's the issue with the follow up?
|
| The headline says "WaPo no longer does B". I quoted the
| bit that says "in the past, WaPo used to resolutely do A
| and B" to answer your question about whether we should
| expect B at all, and your riposte is "the NPR article
| continues to say WaPo still does A". The NPR article is
| about WaPo stopping B, and now you have a historical
| baseline for B.
|
| I'm not interested in the pivot to arguing about whether
| news articles ought to share raw data; the way it works
| now is via editors, editorial standards and fact-checkers
| that determine if the facts support the wording.
| Ultimately, news outfits like NPR and the Washington Post
| live and die by their reputations.
|
| edit: more thoughts on quantification
|
| "Resolutely" is a stout word, IMO, which to me is a word
| one might be talked down to using when they mean "always"
| but do not have the time to prove before the publishing
| deadline, or need to add linguistic error-bars. If it
| were an option in a survey, I'd place it higher than
| "almost always" and just below "always"
| tpmoney wrote:
| The issue is that the followup contradicts the idea that
| there has been a change of any note. If I tell you in one
| breath:
|
| "Bernie Sanders has reduced is fighting for civil rights
| in worrying ways"
|
| And in a second breath tell you that:
|
| "Bernie Sanders has resolutely fought for civil rights in
| the past and even now does so as a matter of routine"
|
| You would probably find those statements at odds with one
| another. You quite reasonably might want me to quantify
| what is different currently from recent and also prior
| past behavior. You might also reasonably want me to
| quantify his behavior in "fighting for civil rights"
| against his contemporaries, both past and current. What I
| would not expect is for you to take and hold those two
| statements at face value, finding that a satisfactory
| report on the state of things.
|
| It's certainly possible that there is no contradiction.
| It might be true that he was resolute in the past, and
| routinely did do to date, but in the past month has
| missed 50 votes on civil rights legislation. But even
| then you'd probably want to know how many votes he misses
| as a regular course. You might want to know how many
| votes he did enter during that same time period. You
| might want to know whether or not he was sick or
| otherwise absent for health reasons.
|
| And that's my issue at the moment. The article says "3
| times in the last 2 weeks an event happened". It also
| tells you that the WP "resolutely" (but again notably not
| "always") does not allow the specific event to happen. It
| also tells you that the WP "routinely" (but again not
| "always" and without any relative comparison to
| "resolutely") does not allow the specific event to happen
| even to this very day. So why are we supposed to be
| worried that it happened 3 times in this last 2 weeks? By
| their own words, it must have happened at other times in
| the past, or they would have used words like "always" and
| "unfailingly" to describe both past and current behavior.
| So what makes these particular 3 times worrying? Have
| they never failed to do so 3 times in 2 weeks ever in
| their history? What about 2 times? They don't say, we
| have no numbers and without numbers or any sort of
| relative comparison we have no way to gauge whether the
| current behavior is or is not worrisome.
| overfeed wrote:
| > Bernie Sanders has resolutely fought for civil rights
| in the past and even now does so as a matter of routine"
|
| I see where the disconnect is. Please read the sibling
| thread about the differences between Opinion (responsible
| for editorials, and subject of the NPR article) and news
| department (does reporting on actual news journalism).
| Opinion & News have different org charts under the WaPo
| banner. In my prior comment, A = disclosures in
| journalism, B = disclosures in editorials. They are not
| the same thing in a way that can be applied to a singular
| Bernie.
|
| > They don't say, we have no numbers and without numbers
| or any sort of relative comparison we have no way to
| gauge whether the current behavior is or is not
| worrisome.
|
| The number of op-eds are a small part on this article
| about the vibe-shift at the Washington Post: NPR provided
| additional context with the words of people who used to
| work there, mentioned thr waves of resignations and
| subscriber cancellations, noted WaPo declined to comment
| on this story. Make of that what you may.
| xrd wrote:
| It doesn't appear that you read the article at all. It states
| the first disclosure was added later, and without comment. And
| there are two other mentions of conflict of interest. Nothing
| you wrote is true other than that you aren't a subscriber to
| the Post.
| miltonlost wrote:
| The very second sentence of the article disproves your first
| sentence.
|
| "On at least three occasions in the past two weeks, an official
| Post editorial has taken on matters in which Bezos has a
| financial or corporate interest without noting his stake. In
| each case, the Post's official editorial line landed in sync
| with its owner's financial interests."
|
| So, no, this isn't one-off. You need to re-read the article
| more closely.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| It says the news section is more diligent and that the opinion
| pages/editorial are the ones omitting disclosures repeatedly.
|
| And it wasn't fixed entirely - usually fixes to an article are
| declared in the article, and they didn't do that when they
| inserted the disclosure after the fact.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > So at minimum the article disagrees with itself, but it seems
| the outrage bait is working hook line and sinker.
|
| No, because they _aren 't_ doing so for Amazon and Blue. That's
| the entire point. Find an Amazon article with a disclosure on
| it.
| HillRat wrote:
| _Even now, the newspaper 's reporters do so as a matter of
| routine._
|
| Reporting and editorial are separate units in newspapers; the
| point being made is that, while reporting continues to properly
| disclose potential ownership conflicts of interest, editorial
| and op-ed, following Bezos taking direct control of them, are
| not doing so.
|
| Of course, the Post is Bezos' toy, and there's no law that says
| he _can 't_ use editorial as a megaphone for his personal
| interests without disclosing them (or, in fact, even use the
| reporting side for the same purpose!), but you can't do that
| and still claim that the paper has any of the Grahams' pedigree
| left in it, and this is very much a change from Bezos' earlier
| ownership, in which he largely stayed hands-off on editorial
| decisions.
| overfeed wrote:
| Not only does gp seem to have a poor grasp on the differences
| between Opinion and news reporting, they also fail to
| correlate the problem with Bezos' ownership, so it seems to
| them like NPRs article is conflicting with itself when it
| isn't, in the slightest.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| Respectfully, you either skimmed this article to support your
| point or didn't pay proper attention. I see no ambiguity in
| this article - none - whatsoever. This is about Bezos's changes
| to the WaPo opinion pages (including their opinion editorial
| board), a shift to topics that matter to Bezos, and a clear
| loss of discipline or intent in conflict of interest
| disclosures when discussing such topics.
| metabagel wrote:
| > The Post has resolutely revealed such entanglements to
| readers of news coverage or commentary in the past ... since
| 2013, those of Bezos, who founded Amazon and Blue Origin. Even
| now, the newspaper's reporters do so as a matter of routine.
|
| What this is saying:
|
| - Previously, WaPo disclosed conflicts of interest.
|
| - They still disclose in their news articles (as opposed to in
| their editorials).
|
| > So at minimum the article disagrees with itself
|
| No.
|
| > Edit 2: To try and be a little clearer here: the article is
| trying to (but in my opinion doing a really poor job of) make a
| distinction between the disclosures that the non-editorial WaPo
| authors do, and the disclosures that the editorial authors do,
| with the assertion that the editorial authors are worse at it.
|
| Everyone else seems to understand but you. By the way, "non-
| editorial WaPo authors" are called reporters or journalists.
| skybrian wrote:
| My initial reaction to the White House ballroom was "the next
| president should tear it down and put it back the way it was,
| just on principle." I was surprised by that editorial and thought
| it made a good (or at least arguable) point that it's needed and
| the next president will be glad to have it, instead of doing
| large official gatherings in tents.
|
| I'm more neutral on it now. I don't really know what facilities
| the White House needs, but think the case should be made on
| practical grounds. Perhaps some other writer could go into that
| in more depth? But as editorials go, it didn't seem like a bad
| one, and I don't think adding a disclaimer about a conflict
| changes that much.
|
| Separately, raising money through corporate "donations" seems
| like a huge loophole for corruption.
| mey wrote:
| Is the Whitehouse fit for purpose in the modern age? Probably
| not. Is it a symbol of the country? Yes. Messing with that
| symbol on what seems to be a whim funded by corporate interests
| rather than doing something public and methodical is
| disgusting. Especially with a government shutdown.
|
| We aren't even getting bread and circuses, just Nero at this
| point.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Sorry you're getting downvoted, but you're commenting on an
| article about conflicts of interest, among the crowd with the
| conflicts of interest.
|
| Silicon Valley, Venture Capital: they're the sociopaths whose
| current project is "disrupting" democratic governance.
| mey wrote:
| Thank you for your concern, but there is thankfully more to
| life than fake internet points.
| eszed wrote:
| It's a much more fitting symbol now than it was before.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Correct ... they should leave the East Wing in rubble, just
| as a representative symbol for future generations.
| terminalshort wrote:
| > Is it a symbol of the country? Yes
|
| The actual White House, yes. Some out building of the
| compound, no. If you showed me a picture of it a month ago I
| would have no idea what it was. This whole thing is bribery,
| no doubt, but compared to all of the other Trump corruption
| this one is the least bad.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| The ballroom discussion isn't even part of the topic here, the
| point is that an article with clear conflict of interest didn't
| note the conflict of interest, and didn't do a correction until
| a 3rd party basically forced them to. And it isn't a one-off,
| it's now a pattern.
|
| This shows that the organization is getting rotten from the
| inside, otherwise stuff like this is flagged up front, if the
| journalists and editors there have any journalistic integrity
| left in them.
| burkaman wrote:
| The issue is not whether or not the White House needs a new
| room, it's that the private funding model is an incredibly
| obvious avenue for bribery. Every single "donor" has immediate
| business with the federal government, and they've seen how
| easily Trump will sell pardons or diplomatic favors or merger
| approvals to anyone who pays him enough. There is no other
| plausible explanation for the list of funders. If this were an
| important and practical addition to the building, then the
| government could pay for it without any corruption necessary.
|
| An honest editorial might say something like "this addition is
| a good idea, but why are these specific people (including my
| employer) paying for it"?
| skybrian wrote:
| Such an article would just be repeating what everyone else
| already said. The editorial actually said something new (new
| to me, anyway) that added to the discussion, which seems
| valuable.
| burkaman wrote:
| Imagine reading a thoughtful and substantive HN comment
| about the benefits of a new product, and then later
| realizing that the commenter failed to mention they are a
| major investor in the product. You would feel mildly
| annoyed or misled, right? Now you have to reevaluate the
| comment and figure out if it was primarily driven by
| "engineer evaluating a new tool" or "guy who wants to make
| money", and you'll probably want to find more unbiased
| reviews before paying for the product.
|
| Now scale your annoyance based on how important you think
| the White House and presidential power are relative to some
| random Launch HN post. In this case, knowing the financial
| motivations of the publisher, was the editorial actually
| valuable? They say: "this project would not have gotten
| done, certainly not during his term, if the president had
| gone through the traditional review process. The blueprints
| would have faced death by a thousand papercuts." Is this a
| misleading premise, was there actually a lot of process and
| red tape preventing a president from doing this renovation
| the "traditional" way? I have no idea, and since I can't
| trust this source I have to go find out some other way.
|
| Did they leave out any other important information? They
| say: "Privately, many alumni of the Biden and Obama White
| Houses acknowledge the long-overdue need for an event space
| like what Trump is creating. It is absurd that tents need
| to be erected on the South Lawn for state dinners, and VIPs
| are forced to use porta-potties." Is this true? Again I
| don't know and I can't trust the authors.
|
| Like the HN investor example, we can't tell if this
| editorial was primarily driven by "observer knowledgeable
| about the needs of the presidential office" or "guy who
| wants the president to eliminate the NLRB". It doesn't mean
| the editorial is wrong, but it does mean it isn't really
| valuable because you'll have to find other sources to
| verify its claims.
| skybrian wrote:
| A standard conflict-of-interest disclaimer wouldn't be
| enough to answer the questions I really have:
|
| - How much is the editorial board influenced by Bezos? Is
| he actually involved in writing each article?
|
| - What are the discussions like? How do they write these
| articles?
|
| Without knowing that, which would require insider
| journalism, not just a disclaimer, I don't really know
| the authors' point of view. It's basically anonymous. I
| assume Bezos has a hand in it somehow, if only by
| choosing the editorial staff. A disclaimer doesn't change
| that.
|
| Opinions written by strangers are always suspect, but
| they can still be interesting.
| terminalshort wrote:
| > later realizing that the commenter failed to mention
| they are a major investor in the product. You would feel
| mildly annoyed or misled, right?
|
| I wouldn't really care if the claims they made were
| correct. An opinion is an opinion (and we are talking
| about the opinion rather than news section here) and I
| find that peoples personal emotional and ideological
| biases are actually a lot stronger than commercial
| interests in most cases. So really every single editorial
| should have a disclaimer "this entire article is biased
| as hell" at the end, but if it applies everywhere do we
| really need it at all?
|
| disclaimer: this comment is biased as hell
| terminalshort wrote:
| It's absolutely bribery, but does it really even bear
| mentioning compared to the other flagrant forms of bribery
| going on perfectly legally? Even before Trump turned the
| corruption levels up to 11, paying retired politicians
| millions for speeches and massive super PAC donations seem
| much worse than a project like this where the public actually
| gets some benefit from it.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > it's needed and the next president will be glad to have it,
| instead of doing large official gatherings in tents.
|
| This may be true, it's simply the way that it's approached that
| has my hackles up. This is something that should have been
| provisioned and approved by congress.
|
| > Separately, raising money through corporate "donations" seems
| like a huge loophole for corruption.
|
| The US corruption laws are laughably bad. You don't even need
| this sort of loophole other than to avoid reporting on who's
| doing the donations.
|
| There's basically nothing that really prevents someone from
| giving a Justice, Senator, congress person, or the president a
| yacht, airplane, home, or a "loan" that gets forgiven. The only
| real limits is that's supposed to be reported (and that foreign
| governments can't do the same). Yes yes, the bribery law states
| that you can't pay someone to perform an official act. However,
| if you simply give them a gift that doesn't count. Even when
| that person is actively working on official acts that directly
| impact you.
| metabagel wrote:
| > You don't even need this sort of loophole other than to
| avoid reporting on who's doing the donations.
|
| There is no loophole. What Trump is doing is flatly illegal.
|
| https://www.gao.gov/legal/appropriations-law/resources
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| " The US corruption laws are laughably bad"
|
| The crazy thing is that if you are a low rank Congress
| staffer or other government employee, the anti corruption
| rules are actually quite strict. It only loosens up the
| higher you go.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Totally agree. For the average federal employee there are
| (or at least were) a huge amount of checks in place to weed
| out corruption. That was sort of the entire point of the
| inspectors general, to track down and weed out fraud and
| corruption.
|
| Even for the FBI and most of the other police agencies
| there was a decent amount of checks in place to make sure
| they weren't acting out of pocket. It's ICE and the CIA
| that have had much less restrictions.
| metabagel wrote:
| Trump doesn't have the right to tear down the White House. It
| doesn't belong to him. It needs to go through a design approval
| process.
|
| By law, any money spent by the executive needs to come from
| Congressional appropriation.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act
|
| > The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal employees from ...
| accepting voluntary services for the United States, or
| employing personal services not authorized by law, except in
| cases of emergency involving the safety of human life or the
| protection of property. 31 U.S.C. SS 1342.
|
| Trump said the project "won't interfere with the current
| building. ... It will be near it but not touching it. It pays
| total respect to the existing building, which I'm the biggest
| fan of. It's my favorite place. I love it." Then, he sent in
| bulldozers to bring the whole thing to the ground.
|
| Trump is also requesting the government, of which he is the
| head, to cut him a check for nearly a quarter of a billion
| dollars.
|
| Trump has engaged in illegal impoundment and rescission of
| funds and programs appropriated and authorized by Congress.
|
| Republicans in Congress and serving on the Supreme Court are
| failing to check Trump's lawlessness.
|
| Trump has stated that he would like to serve an
| unconstitutional third term as president. If this comes to
| pass, it would mark the end of the American democratic
| experiment.
| webdoodle wrote:
| Citizen's United destroyed journalism by making it for profit
| propaganda for the wealthy, but its always been under attack.
|
| Journalism has always been under attack from the wealthy robber
| barons of the time. Rockefeller famously bought out the
| magazine/newspaper that muckraker Ida Tarbell wrote for after she
| wrote a damning book about Standard Oil. However, it only
| hardened her and other muckrakers, who later led to the break up
| of Standard Oil, term limits, and other restrains on the abuse of
| power.
|
| I find the parallels between then and now quite striking. Except
| today's boogeymen have rebranded and call themselves tech
| billionaires. They got ahead of muckrakers by owning journalism,
| media, and social media, and have used there Pinkertons (Trust
| and Safety Teams) to censoring anyone who speaks out against
| them.
|
| There are good journalists out there though. I think a modern
| equivalent of Ida Tarbell may be Whitney Webb for writing One
| Nation under Blackmail about the Epstein Files.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_Tarbell
|
| https://unlimitedhangout.com/
| pessimizer wrote:
| Citizens United had nothing to do with journalism, and these
| newspapers, traditionally privately owned by extremely wealthy
| dynasties, have always been propaganda outlets. I'd argue that
| what made an outlet "mainstream" is the depth of its contacts
| with US intelligence agencies, and its willingness to put out
| false stories on their behalf, without any vetting, in return
| for getting scoops that are strategically leaked to them ahead
| of anyone else.
|
| Ida Tarbell was the first useless makework liberal, a model for
| the current generation of movement Democrats who consider
| themselves fighters for the underdog through the method of
| threatening to generate paperwork. The breakup of Standard Oil
| made the owners of Standard Oil _wealthier_ and _more_ powerful
| than they were before (they owned the resulting companies.) All
| of that effort went to naught. The breakup of Standard Oil was
| to the defeat of oligarchs as Obamacare was to the defeat of an
| extortionate US health care system: a useless distraction
| executed by people who were still somehow unbelievably proud of
| themselves.
|
| Ida Tarbell is a model for exactly what to avoid. The
| expenditure of massive effort on crusades of dubious benefit as
| a proxy for going after oligarchs, relieving the built-up
| energy of the public to _actually go after oligarchs._
|
| Like how the built up energy after the housing bubble scam was
| spent on passing an unconstitutional Heritage Foundation
| healthcare plan whose uselessness was masked by simultaneously
| passing an expansion to Medicaid and a massive subsidy for it.
| Nobody was punished for the housing bubble, for robosigning,
| for synthetic CDOs, for auction-rate municipal bonds; nobody
| went to jail; when people ask why, they're told that nobody
| committed a crime; when you show them the crimes, they say
| "what are you going to do, punish everyone?" Forget all that,
| now the important thing for the good liberal to do is to defend
| Romneycare.
|
| All the oligarchs have to do is run the clock down, and the
| middle-class people who noticed something unavoidable for a
| moment will totally forget that it happened. They'll even
| somehow forget that the Washington Post has always been a
| conservative paper, or maybe it's that they'll forget that they
| themselves used to be conservatives (because their beliefs
| haven't changed at all.)
| astrange wrote:
| You might have forgotten what US healthcare was like before
| the ACA. The ACA was good. It successfully bent the cost
| curve and now you don't immediately get banned from health
| insurance for life if you get cancer.
|
| > Romneycare
|
| It's called that because the Democratic legislature forced
| him to pass it, not because he liked it.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| It was modeled fairly directly on a proposal drafted as a
| federal alternative to the Clinton healthcare plan by
| lobbyists for the insurance industry and embraced by
| Republican national leadership in that context (which they
| then stopped talking about once the Clinton plan went down
| in flames.)
| terminalshort wrote:
| Citizens United has everything to do with journalism, but not
| in the way the comment you are replying to says. The CU case
| was over a film maker who released a political documentary
| and was banned from advertising it because those adds were
| political in nature and therefore banned by campaign finance
| laws. The court correctly ruled that the government had no
| power to regulate this because of freedom of the press.
| clircle wrote:
| Do we really hold _editorials_ to the same standard as the rest
| of the news? These are opinion pieces, you should expect bias,
| no?
| delfinom wrote:
| People are upset over the wrong bias lol
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Regardless if it's in the opinions sections, if the
| author/publisher has clear biases, especially financial ones,
| they're disclosed somewhere in/next to the piece.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| I just can't believe people even read editorials. In the news
| outlets I read, they are clearly marked and it makes an easy
| and instant "skip".
| balozi wrote:
| There is a reason they publish opeds right next to hard news.
| Its not by accident.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Because the editorial authors are employees of the news
| organization, they must disclose the conflict of interest
| between their employer and its owner or parent organization and
| the matter they are reporting on.
|
| Let's say an editorial piece says "AWS is the best cloud
| service" but fails to disclose that its owner also owns AWS,
| that would be a breach of journalistic ethics. Similar case
| here.
| tclancy wrote:
| An individual editorial? No. At the meta level when an outlet
| only allows a specific direction of bias, that doesn't feel
| like a good idea to accept.
| serial_dev wrote:
| Honest question, don't all newspapers do this? Sure there are
| subjects where they publish articles representing different
| opinions, but on core issues (to them) there is only so much
| wiggle room before they will pull an opinion piece.
| mmooss wrote:
| You can have bias without losing honesty and accuracy. The
| latter is the problem.
| coliveira wrote:
| The ideal solution is to stop reading newspapers/sites owned by
| Bezos. I give the WP zero credibility for anything that is not
| factual. Even then they will distort the facts with opinions that
| are aligned to Bezos.
| ilamont wrote:
| WSJ is not owned by Jeff Bezos, but by another billionaire
| Rupert Murdoch.
|
| By all means skip the Wall Street Journal's sneering
| editorials, but don't ignore the reporting. For example, the
| Theranos scandal was blown open by the WSJ's John Carreyrou.
| They've done good reporting on Tesla, Epstein, Amazon, and
| others.
| mmooss wrote:
| How do you see the WSJ as not biased, when it's owned by
| Murdoch, who openly interferes in and biases Fox News, as has
| been demonstrated numerous times including in massive losses
| in court.
|
| Do you think Murdoch wouldn't do that at the WSJ?
|
| With that signal and the editorial page, I think it's wishful
| thinking to think the rest isn't biased - people just don't
| want to lose that institution. Much can be done without the
| reader knowing - omissions, slant, etc. In the end, you must
| trust them to a degree.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| wsj newsroom is probably the best national reporting entity,
| but sure
| throwworhtthrow wrote:
| The same week that WaPo announced their new editorial policy, I
| added a uBlock Origin rule to delete the opinion sidebar. It's
| basically ads run by Jeff Bezos now. There's no reason to
| expose oneself to it.
|
| Their news reporting is, for now, still decent (and retains its
| familiar slant).
| coliveira wrote:
| I 100% agree, but need to add that npr also has financial ties to
| very powerful oligarchs that need to be disclosed. For example,
| here is what I get when researching the largest donors to npr:
| "NPR's largest single donor was the estate of Joan B. Kroc, who
| left a bequest of over $200 million in 2003. Other major donors
| include foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation, the
| MacArthur Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,
| which have contributed millions to specific projects, as well as
| the Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett
| Foundation"
| archagon wrote:
| Estate bequeathals and foundation grants are a far cry from
| direct ownership and editorial control by a single oligarch.
| coliveira wrote:
| Far cry or not, they're also funded by oligarchs as well.
| archagon wrote:
| It sounds to me like they're funded by estates and
| foundations, not directly by oligarchs. (In fact, most of
| the names in your comment are long dead.) And in any case,
| there's no evidence that any of these organizations are
| reaching in and demanding direct control over NPR's
| editorial direction.
|
| You are attempting to draw a parallel where there simply is
| none.
| istjohn wrote:
| Donations from multiple foundations, most of which were created
| by people long dead, are hardly comparable to ownership by a
| wealthy, living business magnate.
| coliveira wrote:
| While the original owners are dead, this doesn't mean the
| foundation can do whatever "good" you imagine. These
| foundations are vehicles to keep doing the political bidding
| of these families and they still operate according to the
| wishes of the original donors, which are all oriented towards
| major industries. Or do you really believe people give
| millions of dollars to whatever cause with zero strings
| attached?
| donohoe wrote:
| Yes, they do. Billions per year across a wide variety of
| organizations.
| coliveira wrote:
| You just don't understand how money works. Foundations
| are as political as any other organization in the
| capitalist world.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| The issue is that donors don't have a _controlling interest_ in
| the organization.
|
| Having said that, I would expect NPR to disclose, if
| editorializing a piece on Ms Kroc, the donation that Ms Kroc
| made to NPR (and they likely do that already).
| coliveira wrote:
| They don't have control, but these foundations certainly have
| influence. Similarly for major advertisers, which also have
| influence in what is aired since editors don't want to
| anything that will alienate major sources of funding.
| burkaman wrote:
| They do disclose them when they are relevant to a story. For
| example,
| https://www.npr.org/2025/10/08/nx-s1-5564684/macarthur-overd...
| and https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-
| soda/2025/04/15/nx-s1.... They also mention them very
| frequently on air, anybody who has listened to NPR for more
| than like ten minutes probably heard them mention the Robert
| Wood Johnson Foundation.
|
| You can see a full list of donors in their latest annual
| report:
| https://media.npr.org/documents/about/annualreports/2024%20A...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I don't listen to NPR, but when I watch PBS Newshour they
| announce all their sponsors at the beginning of every program
| and mention the fact of their sponsorship again when there's
| any connection to an individual report. A recent example that
| springs to mind if the train derailment and subsequent
| pollution problems in East Palestine, Ohio; the rail firm BNSF
| sponsors the newshour but this didn't seem to have any impact
| on the volume or tone of coverage.
| senderista wrote:
| NPR does the same.
| senderista wrote:
| And they constantly mention those donors during their news
| programs!
| mhb wrote:
| I've Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here's How We Lost America's
| Trust.
|
| https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...
| neaden wrote:
| What does this have to do with the article?
| drak0n1c wrote:
| The hollowing out of the readership by ideologically partisan
| staff is what led to publications becoming overly dependent
| on the subsidy of wealthy owners, rather than a wider pool of
| paid subscribers.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Never thought of it this way before. Maybe, but are there
| papers that remained balanced without losing too many
| subscribers? Tech age has been overall tough for them.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Article is NPR's
| fdschoeneman wrote:
| I agree that Bezos should have disclosed his links to the
| construction through Amazon, but I also think every single
| reporter for NPR, including and especially the one who wrote
| this, should disclose their personal, family, and political
| relationships to political parties and politicians before
| reporting on them.
|
| One standard.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| You're saying that the rank-and-file employees of a public
| radio station should be held to the same standard as
| billionaire owners of private news media conglomerates?
| axpy906 wrote:
| Probably relates to some of the political controversies
| surrounding the source NPR here:
| https://grokipedia.com/page/NPR_controversies
| jgeada wrote:
| Right, because the guy earning a normal salary has as much
| influence as the billionaire that is rubbing shoulders with and
| paying bribes to the decision makers, and also controls the
| editorial policy, salary and employment of the newspaper in
| question.
|
| Sometimes quantity of money has a quality all of its own.
| ideonexus wrote:
| The Saturday editorial "Trump's undertaking is a shot across the
| bow at NIMBYs everywhere," was the final straw for me. I can
| forgive an editorial defending Trump's actions--no matter how
| misguided, but the fact that the WaPo did not disclose Bezos'
| personal interests in the matter infuriated me bitterly.
| According to NPR, they corrected the omission on Sunday, but I'm
| done.
|
| That subscription money now goes to my local NPR station. Anytime
| NPR covers anything related to Microsoft, they always provide the
| disclosure of receiving funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates
| Foundation. That is what legitimate news sources are supposed to
| do.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| Its impressive how well Bezos has convinced everyone to stop
| trusting WaPo rather than WaPo convincing everyone to trust
| Bezos. A paper owned by a wealthy financial interest was hardly
| unique or novel at the time he took them over, and no one would
| have been more concerned about it than they already were, and all
| he had to do was not be overt in his influence and bias of it,
| but he couldn't refrain.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| These billionaires don't have a solid feedback loop back to
| reality
| findthewords wrote:
| Think about the world's poorest man, and how disconnected he
| is from the rest of humanity. Now think of the world's
| richest man. They are equally disconnected.
| rkomorn wrote:
| The world's poorest man probably has tens millions of peers
| within an order of magnitude of "poorness".
|
| The world's richest man has at most a few hundred.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Hmm, the initial comment was disconnection from realty, not
| humanity. Most likely, reality as, all this daily throttle
| that recalls you that you are not the center of the
| universe and you have to been to its laws which were not
| fine tuned to please human desire if you want to accomplish
| anything. In that sense most humans are closer to the
| poorest man.
| atmosx wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBZTHxZvOwg - this show was
| _soooo_ good...
| seattle_spring wrote:
| I genuinely wouldn't be surprised to see Musk or Thiel make
| those exact same arguments.
| pydry wrote:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezo...
|
| He even wrote an editorial saying "the news media isnt trusted,
| we have to do better".
|
| Then he decided he didnt want to do better.
| mmooss wrote:
| I think many people (and the parent comment) are getting played
| because they don't realize the game and its stakes:
|
| 'Trust' is an issue under the old rules, in a context where an
| essentially democratic, free society was desired by all and
| where therefore public trust and a well-informed public
| mattered.
|
| The new rules are about _power_ alone, which is essentially
| anti-democratic. Bezos has power and he demonstrates it -
| demonstration is essential under the new rules - by mocking and
| thumbing his nose at trust and at informing the public. He uses
| his power to bend public opinion his way; lots of people still
| read the Post, and in a post-truth world, truth doesn 't matter
| to many of them. He doesn't care about trust, and he actively
| and intentionally demonstrates it.
|
| It's the context of post-truth philosophy: Words are about
| power, they are weapons; they are not about truth, expression,
| or information.
|
| The worship (rather than distrust) of power, post-truth, it all
| leads to the non-democratic outcome.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| > _Its impressive how well Bezos has convinced everyone to stop
| trusting WaPo rather than WaPo convincing everyone to trust
| Bezos. A paper owned by a wealthy financial interest was hardly
| unique or novel at the time he took them over, and no one would
| have been more concerned about it than they already were, and
| all he had to do was not be overt in his influence and bias of
| it, but he couldn 't refrain._
|
| My hypothesis is that his current heavy handed editorial
| intervention is designed to convince only a single person: the
| President of the United States.
|
| It's presumably worth burning the paper's reputation in order
| to curry favor with a mercurial and vengeful autocrat who
| controls the power of the federal government's purse.
|
| In 3 (or 7?) years, perhaps he will reevaluate.
| netsharc wrote:
| > In 3 (or 7?) years, perhaps he will reevaluate.
|
| Is the MAGA movement like climate change? "Oh, I'm sure a
| solution will come up to fix it...".
|
| If I had to bet, Trump/Vance/whoever Project 2025 appoints
| next will do it like Putin/Erdogan and remain in power..
| p_j_w wrote:
| I think many people, even here, are infected with "It can't
| happen here."
| serial_dev wrote:
| The best predictor of future events is past experience.
|
| Every US president in history has left office peacefully,
| the most probable outcome is that future presidents will
| too.
|
| Similarly, some people always think that the current
| president will crown himself a king and the Other Party
| will never ever be able to get into power. And these
| people have been so far always wrong.
|
| I'm not saying it can't happen this time, but in my
| opinion, it is unlikely.
|
| The real skeptical in me says it doesn't even matter, no
| matter who you vote for, you'll get John McCain.
| gryfft wrote:
| > The best predictor of future events is past experience.
|
| I have never died before, not once in my life. The most
| likely outcome is that I will live forever.
| strictnein wrote:
| > I have never died before, not once in my life. The most
| likely outcome is that I will live forever.
|
| They didn't say that this is always true for every
| situation forever. They said "The best predictor of
| future events is past experience".
|
| Keyword is "best".
|
| You being alive today is the _best_ predictor of you
| being alive tomorrow, next week, next month, or next
| year.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Okay, so "me being alive today is the _best_ predictor of
| me being alive in 150 years ".
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > You being alive today is the best predictor of you
| being alive tomorrow, next week, next month, or next
| year.
|
| An unprecedented glioblastoma diagnosis would predict
| otherwise. When the facts in evidence become
| extraordinary, one must adapt the adage accordingly.
| buran77 wrote:
| What do you do when the model you know to be best ("past
| experience") consistently fails to predict anything after
| an agent of chaos is introduced to the mix? Do you still
| stand by it? Can you really say past experience
| consistently predicted the events of this year alone?
|
| If you're in the middle of a nuclear winter do you still
| insist summer is just a few months away based on past
| experience? And if you hear someone saying it will you
| believe it's anything other than disingenuous or
| ignorant?
| disqard wrote:
| Your comment appears to ignore reality.
|
| > Every US president in history has left office
| peacefully
|
| I guess you consider the J6 riot/insurrection "peaceful"?
| You're probably in a minority if you think that way.
| netsharc wrote:
| > Every US president in history has left office
| peacefully
|
| Have they memory-holed "Jan 6, 2021" from your history
| books?
| ribosometronome wrote:
| I'm not sure how you can say every President left office
| peacefully when four of them left by way of being
| assassinated, but I do see that's not quite the point
| you're trying to make. I'm not sure why we'd be so narrow
| as to only examine US history, rather than history at
| large unless we're operating under some guise of American
| Exceptionalism.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > The best predictor of future events is past experience
|
| Except for the most impactful things.
| shippage wrote:
| This is why black swan events can be so devastating.
|
| I saw another comment here about a month ago that said
| many people tend to round a very small risk down to zero
| risk. The comments were related to driving and the risk
| of serious injury or death that most people discount, but
| I think it also applies to other areas of risk in life,
| too, for many people.
|
| Exceptional events are low probability by definition, and
| thus people tend to ignore the possibility, assuming
| instead that the status quo will continue to exist.
| lovich wrote:
| > Every US president in history has left office
| peacefully, the most probable outcome is that future
| presidents will too.
|
| That is false. On January 6th 2021 the sitting president
| fomented a mob to violently keep him in power.
|
| If we're going off your rule of past events being the
| best prediction for future events then we should all be
| shitting ourselves over the fact that this guy isn't
| leaving peacefully
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > Every US president in history has left office
| peacefully,
|
| That's not how I would describe Jan 6 2021 not to mention
| Trump's other efforts to subvert the election results,
| and refusal to accept the results to this day.
|
| > some people always think that the current president
| will crown himself a king and the Other Party will never
| ever be able to get into power.
|
| Really? When has there been such a public outcry before?
| There have never been "No Kings" protests before, because
| they weren't needed. Even if you hated Reagan, Clinton or
| Obama, you knew he wasn't going to try to run for a third
| term, whereas Trump keeps publicly saying he might.
| g8oz wrote:
| >> Every US president in history has left office
| peacefully,
|
| The events of January 6th 2021 suggest otherwise.
| timoth3y wrote:
| > Every US president in history has left office
| peacefully, the most probable outcome is that future
| presidents will too.
|
| Trump did not leave office peacefully last time. The most
| probable outcome is that he will not leave office
| peacefully next time.
| goatlover wrote:
| Not when you take into account how Trump has behaved in
| his second term and that there's an authoritarian
| playbook he's following that has worked in other
| contemporary countries like Hungary. What other president
| has refused to acknowledged they lost an election, and
| refused to acknowledge that they're not permitted a third
| term by the Constitution? There are former Trump
| officials from his first term who warned about his
| reelection.
|
| What's going to doom US democracy is all the people in
| denial that an authoritarian coup could and is happening
| in America.
| jedberg wrote:
| > The best predictor of future events is past experience.
|
| In the absence of any other data, sure. But we have lots
| of other data here. The first being that he didn't leave
| peacefully last time.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| > Every US president in history has left office
| peacefully,
|
| Every president except the currently sitting one. Yes,
| past behaviour is often a good predictor for future
| behaviour.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _The best predictor of future events is past
| experience._
|
| > _Every US president in history has left office
| peacefully_
|
| Considering the current US President tried to have his VP
| and Congress killed by an angry mob if they didn't hand
| over a second presidential term to him, we should expect
| the same this time, but better organized and with ~8
| years of planning.
| Gud wrote:
| Does it matter? Trump has destroyed what little good there
| was in the Republican Party.
| goatlover wrote:
| It's amazing how much he's turned it into a cult of
| personality to the point that things like states rights,
| free markets and Federal overreach no longer matter.
| tlogan wrote:
| > It's presumably worth burning the
|
| > paper's reputation in order to
|
| > curry favor with a mercurial and
|
| > vengeful autocrat who controls
|
| > the power of the federal
|
| > government's purse.
|
| Why there is so much of TDS on hacker news?
| bigyabai wrote:
| Iunno, I'm willing to give Trump a fair shake but none of
| those descriptors seem particularly wrong to me. Trump runs
| on quid-pro-quo politics, for better and worse.
|
| It stands to reason that the most blatantly-corrupt people
| in America are now in a race to the bottom to buy out their
| pardon and negotiate protectionist foreign policy.
| dangus wrote:
| I'm not convinced the layperson is aware.
|
| I would bet that something like 80 or 90% of Washington Post
| subscribers don't know who owns the paper, and I would save you
| the same thing about the Wall Street Journal.
| antegamisou wrote:
| Any billionaire-regulated (N"P"R my ass) major news media company
| accusing other billionaire-owned major news media companies of
| bias is being hypocritical.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Article start mentions WaPo not endorsing Harris, as if they're
| supposed to. I was glad hearing it, but turns out it's only
| because they have a new master due to Bezos-Trump ties.
|
| Wonder about LA Times too, they used to also endorse Dems.
| scottlamb wrote:
| > Article start mentions WaPo not endorsing Harris, as if
| they're supposed to. I was glad hearing it, but turns out it's
| only because they have a new master due to Bezos-Trump ties.
|
| Right: it's not just that they didn't endorse Harris. It's that
| they had a 36-year tradition of endorsing a presidential
| candidate, had _planned_ to endorse Harris, and then were
| overridden by their new owner in a way that became really
| public. I expect the editorial positions (or lack thereof) to
| be chosen by senior journalists, not billionaires.
|
| My subscription may or may not be among the 300,000
| cancellations mentioned in the story. I turned off autorenew
| nearly a year ago; my subscription expires in a few days.
| 11101010001100 wrote:
| This is the sort of stuff that happens when someone who had one
| good idea long ago has run out of good ideas.
| axpy906 wrote:
| I am both bemused and disappointed that the top comments are all
| political. Kind of plays into what Billionaires like Bezos would
| want - the commoners bickering and not united.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Every media company is subject to the bias of the person or
| entity that owns it.
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