21 ms·

It's instructive to contrast what other billionaires did with media properties they owned: - Jeff Bezos personally bought Washington Post but he left it alone

• ortusdux 4y ago
  I think, in his own way Elon, is trying to apply his engineering first principles. AFAIK, his #1 rule is "The best part is no part", which I think explains a fair number of his (non-ego driven) choices.
  • sigy 4y ago
    I'm sincerely confused as to whether this post is satire or not.
• actionfromafar 4y ago
  But we don't have endless front page articles about those other people because those are other people. Musk knows in his heart of hearts that he is the most interesting and newsworthy person on the planet, so it makes sense the front page articles are about him.
  • kasey_junk 4y ago
    He’s interesting because he does things we don’t expect, for good and bad. The problem is right now he’s driving so much bad publicity. He’s engaged in one of the worst LBOs in modern history. He’s had a shambolic takeover (even in the realm of fire sales where firing everyone is the plan), he’s set his credibility on fire with his customers, he’s shown himself as terminally thin skinned, and he’s made a mockery of his supposed principles. If he went back to pushing the state of normal on electric cars and space flight that would be covered, but he doesn’t seem capable of it currently.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • skinnymuch 4y ago
    Calling him the most interesting is incredibly subjective. I don’t think he knows any such thing. He seems wildly insecure. Even more than me
    • trashtester 4y ago
      Interesting enough for you to post here....
      • skinnymuch 4y ago
        Yeah. I find him interesting because he's a loser. Someone who failed upward and lacks the intelligence he believes he has to have any self awareness or human decency. If someone on HN pooped on Elon's desk, I'd find that compelling to look into. It wouldn't be interesting in a positive way though. That's what the parent comment was implying.
• woodruffw 4y ago
  Bezos is one thing, but I'm not sure if Murdoch is a great example: he perhaps refused to spike specific articles, but his entire media empire is built around promulgating his (increasingly revanchist) politics. His success is attributable not to "staying out of it," but to having a receptive audience that he (to waxing and waning degrees) has successfully influenced for the last 30 years. Besides, I don't think Twitter is what did Elon's reputation as a "savior" in. The current affair is more reaffirming than opinion shifting, for everyone I've talked to.
  • jasode 4y ago
    >, but his entire media empire is built around promulgating his (increasingly revanchist) politics. Yes, I understand that and we know that WSJ leans more conservative than New York Times. Murdoch's empire reflects his worldview. I mean "stay out of it" as in micro-managing day-to-day newspaper stories or writing constant op-eds to respond to his critics. That's the type of distracting minutiae that Elon has sucked himself into with hyper-reactive Twitter bans and incoherent replies with juvenile statements.
    • femto 4y ago
      Murdoch is the worst possible example, being in it up to his eyeballs. It's especially the case in Australia, where his empire started and still dominates. This article is one of many, its headline and opening line being: "Special report: Rupert Murdoch, a hands-on newspaperman" "To illustrate the extent to which Rupert Murdoch used to micro-manage his newspapers,..." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-newscorp-murdoch-papers-idUSTRE76I1IT20110719 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-newscorp-murdoch-papers-i... The article is past tense, but there's no reason for it to have changed. The difference between Musk and Murdoch is that Murdoch lets other people do the talking, even if they are his words.
      • jasode 4y ago
        >"To illustrate the extent to which Rupert Murdoch used to micro-manage his newspapers,..." The 2011 article you linked emphasizes his activity with tabloid newspapers. I'm unfamiliar with those. From what I've read, he doesn't meddle with his "prestige" newspaper like WSJ. Maybe that's why the WSJ didn't censor itself on negative Theranos stories even though he invested $125 million in it and Elizabeth Holmes asked him to kill the articles.
• philippejara 4y ago
  Like elon or not it makes absolutely no sense to compare social media with effectively newspapers, they're completely different things. The only comparison I guess you could realistically have is zuckerberg, but even then it wouldn't work very well.
  • flandish 4y ago
    It’s only a tangent that they are newspapers compared to twitter. The real comparison is that the owners are billionaires and giants in their “industries” in some fashion. Elon forgot capitalist step zero: Choose profit before ego. That he is a bad capitalist will become apparent at a long enough temporal scale..
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • twelve40 4y ago
      I'm sure he became the second richest person in the world by being a very forgetful loser of a capitalist
• twblalock 4y ago
  > Hopefully, Elon notices that we don't have endless HN and reddit front page articles about Rupert Murdoch's jet. Are you kidding? He loves the attention, and we are only talking about Twitter because Elon bought it rather than some boring guy. I still don't see the impending death of Twitter. Where is the evidence that it is going down the tubes? PG will be back, because everything bad about Twitter is even worse on Mastodon -- instead of one narcissistic Napoleon running things like Twitter, Mastodon has hundreds of them, and they are even less accountable than Elon. If you want to kill Twitter, stopping giving it free publicity would be a good start. But you can't help yourselves, so it survives and thrives on your outrage.
  • woodruffw 4y ago
    You aren't wrong in some senses, but I think you're wrong in the most important sense: Twitter's servers run on electricity, and electricity is paid for with ads and MAUs, not outrage on HN (and other tech forums).
    • twblalock 4y ago
      Servers are not that expensive, especially not when people are going to Twitter because they are outraged and seeing all the ads, and others are paying $8 per month. Whether or not that works out is not something I can predict, but having more user engagement than ever before is not a bad thing for a platform that makes literally every penny from exploiting user engagement in some way.
      • woodruffw 4y ago
        Expensive enough to try and shirk the bills, it seems[1]. I would say that 95% of my professional circle was on Twitter 3 months ago. Today, it feels like less than 50%. Of that same circle, I only know one who paid $8 for Twitter Blue, and he canceled this month. Outrage-driven engagement is definitely happening. But it needs to happen on Twitter, and in a way that doesn't threaten Twitter's ad sales, for it to be of any value to Twitter. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/technology/elon-musk-twitter-cost-cutting.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/technology/elon-musk-twit...
• choppaface 4y ago
  Also consider when yishan was ceo of reddit: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/13/reddit-ceo-yishan-wong-resign-office-space https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/13/reddit-ce... At the time, yishan drew a ton of criticism, but now what has happened at Twitter dwarfs that story. Recall that yishan was also from the Paypal mafia and had early experience at facebook. Yet was unable to make things work. Important for any of the current would-be Twitter investors to ponder.
• firasd 4y ago
  You're right that this raises questions about the nature of "first principles thinking". For Elon at Twitter, this seems to mean just applying hunches from Y2k era tech memories rather than understanding things like if you cut off huge IP ranges to fight 'bots' you'll affect legit users, etc
• lettergram 4y ago
  If you think the owners stay completely out of hiring decisions (which lead to editorial decisions) I have a bridge to sell you. Frankly, at least this crazy guy running Twitter is openly doing it
• machina_ex_deus 4y ago
  If you go back to Musk deal, it was immediately after Babylon bee was banned for an anti trans remark about man of the year. I'm speculating a bit, and I'm not supporting his actions, I'm trying to explain then. I think he already had disagreement with his son that came out as trans later, and I think the major reason he changed his political position is because of his child. The child also cut all ties with him. He said "The woke mind virus must be destroyed, nothing else matters". It's not Elon the entrepreneur, or Elon the management genius, or even Elon the troll on social media. What's really driving him is Elon the father that views leftism and woke as a mind virus that had possessed his child. When you reach that position as a father, there's no loyalty to old political parties, there's no choosing words carefully or looking at Twitter as a regular business. This is a person who could not care much about ideology until ideology reached his house and destroyed it - and only at that point he actually started fighting the fight. He treats Twitter and leftists as the enemies because in his mind they are enemies, enemies that managed to destroy his child. It might seem inconceivable that someone might change his position so radically, and surprise everyone, but that's because they don't understand the real motivation. Anyway, I'm not supporting his actions, this is meant to empathize with him so I'll understand what's going on and where all this is coming from, and therefore, where is it going.
  • acdha 4y ago
    > This is a person who could not care much about ideology until ideology reached his house and destroyed it I think this is made all the more powerful by being imaginary: if there really was some organized group he'd at least have some way of knowing who’s in it or what they do. Since it’s basically a conspiracy theory driven by not wanting to consider what he could have done differently, there’s nothing falsifiable, he can find signs of it almost anywhere, and anyone who tries to talk him out of it is suddenly a traitor. Since his son was trans, there’s an entire preexisting opposition group all ready to provide reassurance any time his faith wavers, too.
  • spamizbad 4y ago
    He should sit down with some conservative Christian parents and ask them if the culture wars un-gay’d their children. Anyway I’m not inclined to believe this given that he’s cozied up to people who are openly hostile to trans people (calling them groomers etc) rather than “Trans people deserve our love and support but actually are just confused we can fix them!”
• bmitc 4y ago
  > What tech people like Paul Graham and others were hoping was for Elon to apply his scientific first principles type of thinking that he demonstrated previously at SpaceX+Tesla to Twitter. I wish one could take a step back and just see how ridiculous of a statement this is. There is nothing about Musk’s history and management style that is even remotely close to what could be called “scientific first principles type of thinking”. Musk’s management style is a bull in a china closet, he manages via personal vendettas, and he follows the marketing and hype first, delivery second product development cycle. See full self-driving, Cybertruck, Tesla robot, Tesla tunnel, and whatever else he’s promised over the years but never delivered on. Edit: striking out comment about the Cybertruck’s airflow until I can find the article I read to back it up.
  • c22 4y ago
    My pet theory is that the cybertuck is just an excuse to start prototyping a future martian ground transport, in which case atmospheric drag may be less of a concern.
    • bmitc 4y ago
      That’s an incredibly generous take. Why not just develop the thing instead of playing this “oh, we didn’t fail, we were just doing this other thing all along” game.
      • c22 4y ago
        I thought hn was all about the generous take.
    • LarryMullins 4y ago
      My pet theory is that Elon Musk's talk about colonizing Mars is a recruiting ploy, allowing him to hire top tier rocket scientists relatively cheap because they believe in the mission.
      • fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
• 0x4d464d48 4y ago
  "Best thing Elon should have done was to focus only on the technical aspects of Twitter and let some more level-headed less-emotional people manage the editorial aspects." That didn't pan out too well either. https://i.redd.it/manager-does-a-little-code-cleanup-v0-5cxgt5dhtzz91.png?auto=webp&s=bdbcd38d6fb3ba14c5590508d2bfe4baa47e53b7 https://i.redd.it/manager-does-a-little-code-cleanup-v0-5cxg...
• fncivivue7 4y ago
  • stanleydrew 4y ago
    Well yeah, leaving is exactly what people are doing. Nobody I know is arguing he can't do whatever he wants with Twitter. But they are voting with their feet.
    • fncivivue7 4y ago
      You're arguing that he shouldn't, only you have no leverage to do so.
      • stanleydrew 4y ago
        I'm not arguing anything. But even if I were, I don't know what "leverage" has to do with it. Last time I checked this is a discussion forum where many people gather together to express thoughts and opinions about various topics that they may not have "leverage" to argue about.
      • tedunangst 4y ago
        I would also argue that you shouldn't put peanut butter on pizza, but it's your pizza, so I have no leverage.
  • p1necone 4y ago
    Well yeah, duh. Of course people can do what they want. Criticizing Musk's (or anybodies) actions is not tantamount to trying to say he shouldn't be allowed to do them (except for the stuff he actually shouldn't be allowed to do, and hopefully gets prosecuted for - mostly violating employment law). I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here? People should vote with their wallets/service usage but never ever discuss why? Public figures should be able to do whatever they want with no criticism?
    • xigoi 4y ago
• djur 4y ago
  > Best thing Elon should have done was to focus only on the technical aspects of Twitter The problem with this is that Twitter didn't have any technical problems that it needed Musk to solve. "Bots" were not a major problem for day-to-day usage. What it needed was a product vision to reach sustainable profitability. Not a huge amount of additional debt, massive internal disruption, and a catastrophic reputational collapse.
• readonthegoapp 4y ago
  > Jeff Bezos personally bought Washington Post but he left it alone and let the editors run it. i mean, i guess, if you don't consider having a job- and or career-ending gun pointed at your head to be at all influential or coercive. https://chomsky.info/consent01/#:~:text=SIZE%2C%20OWNERSHIP%2C%20AND%20PROFIT%20ORIENTATION%20OF%20THE%20MASS%20MEDIA%3A%20THE%20FIRST%20FILTER https://chomsky.info/consent01/#:~:text=SIZE%2C%20OWNERSHIP%...
• Gatsky 4y ago
  I can scarcely believe you are holding up Murdoch as a paragon of impartiality. His newspapers are notoriously biased and scurrilous, and actively try to influence political outcomes. He doesn’t have to intervene much because he makes sure to hire people who will enact his will.
  • hoseja 4y ago
    But he doesn't publicly (where the correct people can hear him, not his propaganda rags these people don't ever lay their marxist eyes upon) say mean things about the current insanity, therefore he must be good!
  • Nition 4y ago
    I think if we follow Hacker News Guidelines here: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. We can reasonably take the comment along the lines of "even Murdoch didn't step in in this potentially harmful scenario." It doesn't necessarily hold him up as a paragon of impartiality overall.
• thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > Jeff Bezos personally bought Washington Post but he left it alone and let the editors run it. What Jeff did do was invest some money into the IT department to modernize the workflow tools (metrics dashboards, etc) for journalists. He stayed out of the decisions of what stories get run on the front page. I don't think what you describe is actually possible. Compare Glenn Greenwald's writing about his work at an organization funded by Pierre Omidyar ( https://greenwald.substack.com/p/pierre-omidyars-financing-of-the https://greenwald.substack.com/p/pierre-omidyars-financing-o... ): > Any time I speak or write about Omidyar, the proverbial elephant in the room is my own extensive involvement with him: specifically, the fact that the journalistic outlet I co-founded in 2013, and at which I worked for eight years, was funded almost entirely by him. For purposes of basic journalistic disclosure, but also to explain how my interaction with him informs my perspective on these issues, I will describe that experience and what I learned from it. > When I left the Guardian in 2013 at the height of the Snowden/NSA reporting to co-found a new media outlet along with two other journalists, it was Omidyar who funded the project, which ultimately became The Intercept, along with its parent corporation, First Look Media. Our unconditional demand when deciding to accept funding from Omidyar was that he vow never to have any role whatsoever or attempt to interfere in any way in the editorial content of our reporting, no matter how much he disagreed with it or how distasteful he found it. He not only agreed to this condition but emphasized that he, too, believed the integrity of the new journalism project depended upon our enjoying full editorial freedom and independence from his influence. > In the eight years I spent at The Intercept, Omidyar completely kept his word. There was never a single occasion, at least to my knowledge, when he attempted to interfere in or override our journalistic independence. > For the first couple of years, adhering to that promise was easy: [...] our journalism and Omidyar's worldview were fully aligned > The arrival of Donald Trump on the political scene in 2015 changed all of that, and did so quite dramatically. > the Trump-centric worldview that I spent most of my time attacking and mocking on every platform I had — in speeches, interviews, podcasts, social media and in countless articles at The Intercept — was the exact political worldview to which Omidyar had completely devoted himself and was passionately and vocally advocating. > The radical divergence between my worldview and Omidyar's did not end there. > This extreme divergence between my public profile and Omidyar's core views expanded for years. Often Omidyar would promote and herald a view on Twitter in the morning, and I would then publish an article on The Intercept attacking that same view in the afternoon, and then go on television that night to attack it some more. > It was an irresistible story to journalists: at the time, I was the most prominent and the highest-paid journalist associated with The Intercept, which relied almost entirely on Omidyar's annual multi-million dollar largesse, and yet my primary political and journalistic focus at The Intercept was tantamount to a war on Omidyar's most cherished political beliefs and core objectives. > On at least two occasions, journalists with major outlets contacted each of us to let us know they wanted to write about this glaring split. Yet neither ended up doing so for a simple reason: Omidyar made it emphatically clear that I had the absolute right to express whatever views I wanted, and that my doing so would never create a problem with him, let alone cause him to rethink his funding of The Intercept. > Omidyar told me privately on both occasions that he knew when he decided to fund The Intercept that the day would come, likely soon, when not just me but other journalists there would be publishing articles with which he vehemently disagreed or even undermined his other interests. When he decided to fund The Intercept, he told me, he was supporting independent journalism, not promoting a particular ideology or political agenda. And indeed, no matter how much my attacks escalated on his core beliefs and the other groups he was heavily funding — and escalate they did! — I never received any remote signal that my outspoken journalism and commentary were imperiling his ongoing funding of The Intercept. > I recount all of that for two reasons. First, I want to make clear that my analysis of Omidyar's role in this scam Facebook "whistleblower” campaign and the dangers it presents is in no way motivated by personal animus toward him. > But the second point is the more important one. When it comes to billionaire funders of political and journalistic projects, Omidyar — despite the long list of political views and activities of his that I regard as misguided or even toxic — is, for the reasons I just outlined, as good as it gets. And yet despite all that, it is simply unavoidable — inevitable — that the ideology, views and political agenda of a billionaire funder will end up contaminating and dominating any project for which they are the exclusive or primary funder. Omidyar is not some apolitical or neutral guardian of good internet governance; he is a highly politicized and ideological actor with very strong views on society's most debated questions. > To understand the dangers of a small group of billionaires funding campaigns like this [...] put yourself in the place of senior editors of The Intercept. Despite Omidayr's genuine affirmation of editorial independence, they live in complete captivity to, and fear of, Omidyar's whims and preferences. > As is true of so many billionaire-funded NGOs and “non-profits,” editors and senior writers at The Intercept receive gigantic, well-above-the-market salaries. Because the site depends almost entirely on Omidyar's infinite wealth, it does not sell any subscriptions or ads and it therefore does not have any pressure to produce at all in order to generate revenue. It is a dream job for most of them: enormous salaries, endless expense accounts, a complete lack of job requirements, and no need even to attract an audience. For years, outside of three or four journalists, articles published by The Intercept produce almost no traffic. > It does not get better than that, and that is why almost nobody ever quits The Intercept. Why would they? They just stay for years and years, collecting a huge salary, with no need to do anything but avoid angering one man. They work in an industry where jobs disappear with astonishing frequency, where layoffs are the norm, where the very existence of most organizations is precarious, and where the slightest dissent from liberal orthodoxies can render someone permanently unemployable. Those who work in outlets funded by billionaires have essentially won a type of lottery, at least temporarily, and very few people are willing to risk losing a winning lottery ticket, especially if they know they have no alternatives > That means that the entire news organization has a constituency of one: Pierre Omidyar. If you were an Intercept editor who knows you could never get anywhere near that high salary working anywhere else — and that is true for virtually the entire senior editorial staff at The Intercept other than its Washington Bureau Chief Ryan Grim — you will of course be desperate to keep the sinecure going. That is not really corrupt as much as it is just basic self-preservation. If remaining in Omidyar's good graces is the only way to pay your large mortgage and maintain your lifestyle — which is true for most of them — then that will be all you ever think or care about. > Consider the power that bestows on Omidyar in the lives of those dependent on him. > They wake up knowing every day that one man has the power, on a whim, to destroy their livelihood. That desperate dynamic produces a climate where catering one's worldview and work product to Omidyar's ideological preferences becomes the overarching imperative. The only thing that matters to them in their work is keeping their sole benefactor happy and avoiding his wrath. > I want to avoid the caricature here. This need to please Omidyar is often more subliminal than conscious. There are numerous journalists who work at The Intercept who do great work and rarely think about Omidyar in any conscious or direct way. > But the inescapable reality is that the senior editorial management absolutely knows that their only real job is to foster a climate that will keep Omidyar happy, which means only hiring or publishing voices that will not offend him, ensuring that The Intercept's political and journalistic posture is aligned with his ideological worldview and, most of all, prohibiting anyone or any journalism from remaining at The Intercept if it strays too far from Omidyar's political project. ----- When the owner is ideologically committed above all else to not interfering with what his organization publishes, when he makes repeated public statements to that effect and demonstrates his sincerity over and over and over again, the result is that the organization adheres slavishly to every quirk of the owner's beliefs, and devotes all its effort to bringing itself into line and expelling anyone who might think differently. Jeff Bezos is part of every decision about what gets run on the front page of the Washington Post, whether he'd like that to be true or not.
• SanjayMehta 4y ago
  Lauren Powell Jobs' invested in The Atlantic. The Atlantic is now visibly more biased towards the "left." The original Atlantic was pretty much neutral.
  • theGnuMe 4y ago
    You could be neutral now but be called leftist if you won't publish disinformation.
    • SanjayMehta 4y ago
      True. I couldn't find the original of the cartoon in this piece. This problem cuts both ways though. https://nypost.com/2022/04/29/elon-musk-says-woke-progressive-extremists-make-him-look-right-wing/ https://nypost.com/2022/04/29/elon-musk-says-woke-progressiv...
      • skinnymuch 4y ago
        He is not on speaking terms with his trans daughter and writes stuff about his pronouns and other silly stuff. He obviously isn’t liberal in the way he and the article are using liberal.
      • mcv 4y ago
        The original version of that has the right moving to the extreme right while the left stays in place. I guess both sides feel that the gap has grown, but both sides blame the other side. Before we descend into both-sideism, though, it's worth to get a bit more perspective: the left-wing version of the comic looks at the growing divide over a period of decades; just after WW2, social democracy was strong in the US. Support for unions was strong, workers' rights, social security, all sorts of social democratic programs were broadly supported. Only with Reagan, did the Republicans suddenly start moving to the right: lower taxes, end social programs, deregulation, privatisation. And in the 1990s, the Democrats followed them on that part; both the regulation of the banks that enabled the 2008 crash and the crime bill that gave the US the largest prison population in the world, happened on Clinton's watch. So the left-wing version of the comic is absolutely correct, and people have started to push back, which may have inspired the right-wing version of the comic. Except I've got the feeling that the right-wing version is about something completely different: the pronouns issue. And frankly, that's barely a left-right issue. It's got nothing to do with economic inequality. It's entirely possible to support economic equality yet oppose accepting transgender people as their target gender (see JK Rowling, for example), or to oppose economic equality yet support accepting transgender people (classic/economic/neo-liberalism, many corporations). Politics is simply not the one-dimensional field that these comics suggest it is.
• theGnuMe 4y ago
  So what you're saying is that Elon is canceling himself?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• moralestapia 4y ago
  I'd be more impressed if they ran a poll and followed on what the majority of their readers decided.
• LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
• neycoda 4y ago
  Why would Bexzos buy the Post if not to influence its narrative? I don't think he's gonna own a news agency that will run stories undercutting Amazon.
  • lossolo 4y ago
    Seems like very critical article about Amazon in Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2022/amazon-shopping-ads/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2022/a...
• gsatic 4y ago
  Wapo and wsj are becoming more and more irrelevant. Remember the Afghan collapse that happened over one week? Just read their coverage for months prior to that one week. These are outdated legacy systems that don't have the impact they once did. So there is not much point to comparing how they operate with Twitter. One thing interesting that's happening with Elon's polls is ppl will notice who runs polls about their own decisions. And that's a good thing.
• lossolo 4y ago
  > scientific first principles type of thinking Twitter CEO Elon Musk blasts Rep. Adam Schiff in deleted tweet: 'Your brain is too small'[1] 1. https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/twitter-ceo-elon-musk-blasts-adam-schiff-deleted-tweet-your-brain-too-small https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/twitter-ceo-elon-musk-b... EDIT: Another example of scientific first principles https://twitter.com/badlin/status/1604689299701911552/photo/1 https://twitter.com/badlin/status/1604689299701911552/photo/...
• intended 4y ago
  Murdoch has been near single handedly the force that moved western news media and set us on the path we see today. Many would happily dance on his grave, and raise a toast to his departure from this realm. To say that he has a hands off approach to his editorial board, because of his handling of Theranos, is an unkindness to the harm he has caused to the fabric of decent society. If any lesson is to be learned from Murdoch’s, it would be on silencing detractors, and holding the levers of political power.
  • foepys 4y ago
    Murdoch has little to no influence in the non-English speaking world. "The West" is a lot more than just USA, UK, and Australia.
    • sph 4y ago
      Oh right, I guess one that was able to influence three of the richest countries in the world just isn't worth thinking about. That's the worst kind of pedantic whataboutism.
      • intended 4y ago
        Nor is it true. The first world had the resources to fight issues of speech/civil liberties and courts which were not utterly corrupt. The impact of Murdoch’s success in the hardest environment available, has been the long ringing death knell of many ideas we hold as intrinsic to civilized society. The fact that Rupert Murdoch’s model worked, has not been lost on hundreds of tyrants around the world.
• hjkl0 4y ago
  Murdoch is a media mogul. Of course he’ll be involved in the day to day details. He does not “stay out of it”. Murdoch staying out of content would be like Musk staying out of tech.
• lucideer 4y ago
  Almost everything in your comment is highly likely to be wrong, simply because of one fundamental difference between WaPo/WSJ and Twitter: Twitter contributors are not employees. Stating unilaterally that Bezos & Murdoch exert no influence over the content of their publications can't be grounded in any fact because any potential influence they might exert would never be public knowledge. It's falsifiable (as many commenters have done with Murdoch) but it's not provable. There's a lot of circumstantial evidence Bezos does too: it will probably remain circumstantial since he is in a position to keep it that way. Twitter content being crowdsourced means that Musk as owner has far less direct influence. All he can really do is censor, which is exactly what we've seen play out.
  • nicce 4y ago
    Washington Post has had many "Opinions" in the past, which are directly related on supporting Bezos's wealth or business models. Whether they have been pressured by Bezos or in some way, is uncertain, but it certainly leaves the benefit of the doubt.
• bearmode 4y ago
  Oh my god you're actually putting Murdoch forward as an example of a billionaire staying out of his media companies' business?
• rvieira 4y ago
  Rupert Murdoch is a bad example. He is widely acknowledged as the UK's "Kingmaker". That's even the actual title ("Kingmaker, The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty") of a BBC documentary about him: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kxvz https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kxvz
• trilbyglens 4y ago
  Fox News????
• maelito 4y ago
  Rich people owning a media don't need to do anything for the media's editorial line to be changed.
• additall 4y ago
  But that's solely because media has always been a drug (clickbaits, cognitive tricks, etc.) serving as a power tool. The ones you mentioned, including HN belong one way or another to a "Democratic" party. And all these billionaires, well, they chose their side (as all billionaires do when it comes to power and politics) and we have what we have (i.e. "democratic" media not discussing "republican-leaning" billionaires' jets).
• andrepd 4y ago
  "Rupert Murdoch doesn't interfere in the editorial stance of the media he owns" is the most outlandish thing I've read in quite a long time.