20 ms·

Jeff Bezos exerts more control of Washington Post opinion

391 points by nickthegreek 2y ago

Daishiman 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
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suraci 2y ago
hey, jeff, you shouldn't say this aloud
deleted 2y ago
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scblock 2y ago
I think you misspelled "to push right wing dogma"
- deleted 2y ago
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- VOIPThrowaway 2y ago
  "Personal liberty" is not exclusively a right-wing idea.
  - TheCoelacanth 2y ago
    What billionaires mean by "personal liberty" usually is, though.
    - j2kun 2y ago
      Personal liberty for me, but not for thee.
    - yyyyz 2y ago
      [dead]
  - steve_adams_86 2y ago
    Thinking of social anarchists. Extremely "left" in many regards by North American standards, and pushing towards being about as pro personal liberty as you can get. Arguably social anarchists have a different read on what personal liberty is and should be compared to, say, Ayn Rand. It might not be the best comparison, but I think the gist of it is true. Heaps of leftists value personal liberty.
    - mempko 2y ago
      As an anarchist, we are for absolute personal liberty. But when we hear "personal liberty " followed by "free markets" pushed by a billionaire, it's clearly right wing propaganda. There are no right wing anarchists.
      - steve_adams_86 2y ago
        Hopefully my comment doesn't make it appear as though I disagree. This entire situation reads to me as extremely corrupt and—almost ironically yet not surprisingly at all—more likely to be harmful to personal liberties of many while beneficial to very few. Free market coming from Bezos' mouth is a laughable concept. He will do everything in his power to nullify competitors while squashing the liberties of his own employees. Nothing about this is sincere.
  - gizzlon 2y ago
    the irony of censorship in the name of "personal liberty". Grade a doublespeak bullshit
  - DennisP 2y ago
    Definitely not, but it's possible to focus exclusively on liberties that the right wing prefers. I guess we'll see whether Bezos is willing to promote the liberty of a business to hire based on DEI criteria if that's what it prefers, or of individuals to marry people of the same sex. Or any of the other liberties that the right wing doesn't like. Given the recent closeness of Bezos to Trump, I suspect we won't see anything like that, but maybe he'll surprise me.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    The combination of “personal liberty and free markets” as a description of an ideological orientation is not merely exclusively right-wing, its pretty much a defining slogan of the American pro-big-business corporate capitalist Right (one of many segments of the American Right.) It’s no less of a clear, specific ideological marker in the US today than “Blood and Soil” in 1930s Germany. But its interesting how those trying to sell this as not ideological are just ignoring the “free markets” part.
  - nemothekid 2y ago
    >"Personal liberty" is not exclusively a right-wing idea. I wonder if the approved op-eds on personal liberty will include Trans and Abortion rights? Will it include the right to organize?
    - archagon 2y ago
      Or how about immigrant rights, what with the DoJ going after AOC for hosting a webinar?
  - derbOac 2y ago
    It remains to be seen what he means by it in practice. It is possible many will be pleasantly surprised at what emerges. This article does suggest Shipley wanted a more balanced, "both sides" approach to the opinions section, which I agree with Bezos is shortsighted and sort of shallow: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/26/nx-s1-5309725/jeff-bezos-washington-post-opinion-section https://www.npr.org/2025/02/26/nx-s1-5309725/jeff-bezos-wash... On the other hand, it's difficult for me to imagine David Shipley leaving over that alone if there wasn't something pointed or questionable about what Bezos was suggesting. Also, if Bezos' recent interventions are any guide, he isn't exactly pushing for greater freedom of speech, or more rigorous critique, at the Washington Post — there's a "liberty for me but not for thee" kind of sense to his actions. If Bezos wanted to turn the Washington Post into some kind of Reason Magazine with a primary news arm attached to it, it wouldn't be the worst thing in my opinion for me personally. But I'm skeptical of his vision without more evidence: for one thing, if he wanted to come out swinging, he could have made his vision clear.
    - ein0p 2y ago
      Perhaps you should re-familiarize yourself with the Pledge of Allegiance.
      - llamaimperative 2y ago
        Say more?
      - mulmen 2y ago
        Can you be more specific? Do you mean the history or the content?
        ein0p 2y ago
        "With _liberty_ and justice for all"? This should be pretty bipartisan IMO.
        mulmen 2y ago
cafard 2y ago
I have been a Post subscriber (in a Post-subscribing household) for almost fifty years, and my consumption of the opinion pages has gradual declined over that period. I just wish the news content was back to what it once was.
- gaws 2y ago
  > I just wish the news content was back to what it once was. Back to when? 1970s?
  - cafard 2y ago
    Before the classified advertising all disappeared to the Internet. In the 1990s, the Post had a larger newsroom, and published more news. Now the Metro section has fewer but larger articles, often enough not really news in the old sense.
draw_down 2y ago
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Hikikomori 2y ago
>Focus Will Be On “Personal Liberties And Free Markets” So let billionaires and corporations do whatever they want for profit, even if they kill people.
- leesec 2y ago
  not what was said at all
  - Hikikomori 2y ago
    What was said then? Do you believe that the free markets concept never got anyone killed?
    - psunavy03 2y ago
      Hate to break it to you, but "from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs" has been stacking far, far more bodies over the past ~125 years.
      - Hikikomori 2y ago
        Yes, its comparable to communism, they're both far up on the leaderboard, with religion. There's something between those extremes that works very well and produce societies that are great for all people, regulated markets and socialised democracy.
        Jensson 2y ago
        In many regards USA has more regulations than the Scandinavian countries do, so isn't really a freer market. So that difference isn't about number of regulations but just taxation rates.
        Hikikomori 2y ago
        Depends on which regulations you look at. Employment isn't heavily regulated there as they have strong unions and contracts tailored to their specific needs that would otherwise be ill served by broad strokes regulation. Then they have strong regulation in environment, food, drugs, etc. US also has strong regulation in some aspects, but its less impactful these days due to regulatory capture, those were created when the free market was for example killing babies with unpasteurized milk, and tried to avoid doing that due to cost by putting formaldehyde in it instead. Free market believers want to go back to that age where companies are completely unregulated and hired guns to break up unions and believe this wont happen again. What regulations do is put everyone on the same playing field, so there's isn't one milk company that can lower costs by not pasteurized its milk.
jmclnx 2y ago
This is what we get allowing mega-corporations control our media. I hope the US brings back fairness doctrine. Or if not, force these companies and all their parent/subsidizes to own no more than 3 Media companies. By media I mean: Radio, TV, Cable, Streaming, Movie Production and Social Media.
- bartc 2y ago
  Zero chance of that happening unfortunately. The current Supreme Court would consider restrictions on corporate media ownership a violation of the first amendment, much like restrictions against unlimited campaign donations and restrictions on discriminating against non-Christians.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  if the Fairness Doctrine was implemented for the Internet and you had a Democrat leaning political blog you would have to give equal time/space to MAGA narratives on your site. That's what you want?
  - daveguy 2y ago
    If that's what it takes to get 50% of the US to not be forced fed only one side by dipshits. Yup.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    I think if you are going to claim fair coverage, then yes. If you are going to openly say you are for one side or the other, then okay. Having a tag line like "fair and balanced" without the balance or being fair then no.
  - xboxnolifes 2y ago
    The fairness doctrine does not require equal time. It requires you to dedicate some amount of time to controversial topics, and then give some amount of time to opposing parties within those topics. Which, if you're going to argue against someone's position, I'd think it best to get that position directly from them, rather than building a strawman to beat down.
hello_moto 2y ago
It's very interesting to see Tech from the mid 90s all the way to today. From nerds, niche, to Oligarchs. From breaking boundaries to limiting alternatives. From rebelling against the status-quo to become the status-quo. The nerds now become the slave.
- Gothmog69 2y ago
  Ya I find it interesting I feel like the nerds have been pushed aside by the mainstream. Social networks for instance were a lot better when it was just nerds.
  - ddq 2y ago
    Nerds wield potentially vast collective bargaining power if we refused to contribute to the systems that exploit our expertise and labor for the benefit of the ownership class. We could simply drop out and support one another with all our surplus time. Easier said than done, of course, but at this point I have to dream of bold alternatives to keep myself sane. The status quo and its present trajectory are just too unthinkably broken to have faith in incrementalism while the accelerationists are punishing us for our complacency in replacing rotted, unsustainable systems.
    - fullshark 2y ago
      Good luck with that, i'm gonna indulge in various vices to dull the cognitive dissonance and work in the machine to feed my kids.
  - _cenw 2y ago
    Nerds were required on the early internet for community building - to run IRC and TS and phpBB. These days everyone has these tools. But as with the media monopoly dying, this is not a strictly better or worse thing, it's just different. And generally I like it when we get rid of gatekeeping.
  - kelseydh 2y ago
    The hot people are now in charge, just like everywhere else.
empath75 2y ago
John Swinton, 1883: > There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns. You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same — his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an "Independent Press"! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  this is complaining about the state of nature dressed as political commentary. perhaps Mr Swinton could show an example of a society that would satisfy his definitions, but he cannot, because his complaint amounts to the fact that the world is flawed and no system is a utopia. In fact his central complaint, that we are slaves, is the same exact lesson taught in the story of Genesis from the oral history that predates Judaism. He is complaining that in life, we are cursed to work. You know, "the fall." A problem for every human since we became aware of the existence of the future. This isn't some cutting insight into the downfall of American society, it's just a complaint that the world is unfair. Well guess what? Get used to it. It's unfair in every system. This one is one of the more fair systems, though.
- derbOac 2y ago
  There seems to be a lot of political circles wanting to return to the late 1800s. I'm personally not one of them.
- aqueueaqueue 2y ago
Panzer04 2y ago
At least he's honest about it. Truth be told, it does feel like free markets have become a bit of a dirty word in both political realms recently; I'm not going to complain too much about Bezos advocating for it, we could use the help. I guess it remains to be seen just what kind of views they end up pushing, rather than what he says he wants to push :P
- deleted 2y ago
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- merb 2y ago
  tbf most newspapers have a certain agenda to push, the same thing applies even to newspapers in Germany. You can clearly see that all of them do favor a certain view. Yes some of them look more open to alternative views, but they still favor something.
  - oinkbutton 2y ago
    [dead]
  - Barrin92 2y ago
    >tbf most newspapers have a certain agenda to push that's not the issue here though. Bezos is directly ordering the opinion editor to tow a certain line, and that is not a common practice at any reputable newspaper I am aware of (which is why the responsible editor, David Shipley immediately quit). I am German and I have friends working in the news sector. A corporate shareholder trying to dictate the topics would be considered a breach of ethics. Pretty sure that's the case at highly regarded newspapers in the US too.
- bigtimesink 2y ago
  When he killed the Harris endorsement, that sent a stronger signal than endorsing her.
  - waveBidder 2y ago
    Hard to take calls for endorsing the free market seriously from someone so clearly trying to form a monopoly on online shopping.
djrobstep 2y ago
Good example of how ideology (and motivated reasoning) really clouds people's thinking. Personal liberty and free markets are in direct conflict with each other. Free markets require private property, which requires enforcement through violent aggression (or the threat thereof). Free markets and private property might be justified for any number of (other) reasons, but "personal liberty" isn't one of them.
- waltercool 2y ago
  You are wrong here. You can't have free markets without personal liberty. In the same way, personal liberties aren't a thing if are are unable to establish your own business
  - tdb7893 2y ago
    I'm gonna ignore the first part because I've found on the internet people don't agree on what "free markets" mean. For the second part you don't need a business to be free. As a simple counterexample: I wouldn't say that human ancestors hunting and gathering in the savannah weren't free (they had literally no governmental limits) and it would take an absurd stretch to say they owned a business.
    - gcau 2y ago
      You're misunderstanding or strawmanning. You don't need a business to be free, obviously, and no not everyone that's free has a business (???). But that's different from being forbidden from making one.
      - djrobstep 2y ago
        The concept of a business can only exist within the context of a myriad of laws (property law, contract law, etc) all of which require violent enforcement or the threat thereof, ie reduction in personal liberty.
  - djrobstep 2y ago
waltercool 2y ago
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gizzlon 2y ago
"Bezos also made clear that alternate views will not appear on the pages." So glad the US finally got a government focusing on freedom of speech .. And you know, not pressuring companies and the press to do their bidding /s
- ein0p 2y ago
  Bezos is not a part of US government, thankfully.
  - joshuamorton 2y ago
    Assuredly, but this does appear to be a move to appease an administration that has signaled it will attack an unfriendly press.
    - nxm 2y ago
      Just like Biden administration did before
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Nor was Dorsey's Twitter?
    - ein0p 2y ago
      That very much was a part of the government. They were receiving orders directly from the White House, same as now, I suppose.
      - kalleboo 2y ago
        They received requests, many of which were denied. Not part of the government.
        ein0p 2y ago
        Not according to Twitter files. Twitter under Dorsey and later under Agarwal was quite enthusiastic and eager about pushing the government narratives and suppressing dissent. They even deplatformed a sitting president. I get that you probably liked it back then, but let's be real here. Twitter neither was in a position to deny any requests, nor did it have any inclination to do so.
dailyplanet 2y ago
It's amazing how right-wing billionaire figures have captured social media platforms and news media outlets, such as Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter/X, Jeff Bezos's takeover of The Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong's takeover of LA Times, and Rupert Murdoch’s continued control of Fox News/Sky News/WSJ/NYPost, Mark Zuckerberg's recent rightward shift on FB/IG, and yet the right keeps yelling about George Soros. The propaganda networks on the internet are mostly rightwing with lots of surrendering to Russian/Chinese influence.
- lr1970 2y ago
  > It's amazing how right-wing billionaire figures have captured social media platforms and news media outlets, such as Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter/X, Jeff Bezos's takeover of The Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong's takeover of LA Times, and Rupert Murdoch’s continued control of Fox News/Sky News/WSJ/NYPost, Tight media control and media empires are nothing new. I would recommend you to read about William Randolph Hearst [0] and his media empire in the late eighteen hundreds and watch the movie Citizen Kane. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst
  - cauch 2y ago
    I think the point of GP is not that media control is new, it is that a big part of media control is right-wing and yet right-wing people keep saying that media are owned by left-wing. And of course, facts and reality are left-wing fake news and misleading info are free speech when it's convenient to them.
- gaws 2y ago
  It's simple: Using right-wing thinking to drive business decisions means more profits.
quacked 2y ago
One thing that is curious to me is that the "free market" appears to only be "free" once you've amassed a certain amount of capital, which you can then expend to defend your enterprise from any number of legal challenges (some spurious, some real) and also comply with any number of governmental regulations (some spurious, some real). Even so, it's not so much that I distrust the phrase "free market" as it is that I think that for whatever reason, we, common Americans, are not allowed to take advantage of the "free market". Many "anti-capitalist" Americans haven't even ever experienced anything close to a "free market". At the billionaire level, it's easy to think about the relative successes of SpaceX and Blue Origin; as they are held privately, they can hire, fire, and structure themselves without worrying about federal regulations or shareholder obligations. That is, of course, the only reliable way to get yourself into a footing that permits innovation past the status quo. These companies are, in a sense, proving that the "free market" can act on the aerospace industry to drive down prices (cost of a Falcon Launch or a Starlink connection) and to increase technical capacity at a brutal pace (Starship projections on mass-to-orbit). But the cavernous pockets of their billionaire owners also protect them from the rest of the "market", by which I mean their competitors waging corporate and legal warfare against them. My primary complaint about the status quo of the US market, i.e. "only-billionaires-get-to-seriously-push-the-needle-in-innovation" really makes more sense when one considers the price of medical supplies. The EpiPen costs $500 for what I bet is less than $10 in materials and labor, even counting the strict standards its manufacturers are obliged to conform to in terms of batch creation and ingredients tracking. (A piece of metal in the aerospace industry is always more expensive than a piece of metal in the residential construction industry because it must always be possible to trace its pedigree.) But surely the chemical process to manufacture epinephrine is easily known, and the injection molding and assembly techniques needed to make and inspect the EpiPen is trivial in a modern supply chain that can provide OLED TVs for a pittance. So why don't we have two dozen scrappy American firms competing against Pfizer's Meridian Medical Technologies to produce adrenaline auto-injectors? Does it really take a billionaire to make a company that can produce a product that can actually cause the "free market" to act on the prices of emergency allergy medication? It certainly feels that way, especially when the main out-of-pocket pharmaceutical supplier that appears to be to putting a dent in out-of-pocket medicine pricing is... GoodRx, owned by Mark Cuban. I may have gotten some of the details wrong, but I believe the principles about which I allude to are accurate: even thought the "free market" is indeed a civilization-defining socioeconomic technology that helped give America its exceptional power, the market is not free unless you are a billionaire. It would be nice if Bezos' new Washington Post Opinion column was focused on extending the benefits of the "free market" back down to the masses, as it was in some industries during some eras of American history, but somehow I doubt that will be the case.
lsy 2y ago
What a bizarre fixation for a national paper, the follow-on letter from Will Lewis is even more transparently fixated on the daily appearance of the "pillars" [1]. "Personal liberties" appears to be a new construction that is conspicuously different from "civil liberties", and I think the distinction really speaks to what Bezos wants here. At the end of the day I expect the quality of discourse to dip: being afraid of contradictory opinions is the first step in intellectual decline. [1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/jeff-bezos-washington-post-1236147681/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/jef...
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  Bezos would like to go back to the original draft of the Declaration of Independence about the pursuit of property.
  - DiggyJohnson 2y ago
    What do you mean by this in practice?
    - selimthegrim 2y ago
      I thought it was that way in original Lockean formulation but basically that’s what materialist Bezos seems to care about. Maybe if you asked him about freedom from being hacked by Saudis he might have a different approach.
    - Nasrudith 2y ago
      I personally read it as a 'wants slaves back' insult/accusation.
      - selimthegrim 2y ago
        Yes that is also included.
- mempko 2y ago
baxtr 2y ago
Things are moving fast and breaking. Maybe woke went too far and that’s the old white man’s revenge? We are probably fine on a 100 year horizon. But the next 10 years. Oh boy.
- femiagbabiaka 2y ago
  "Woke" is a meme, not a political orientation or a coherent bloc that can take concerted actions. And for what it's worth, plenty of old white men venture capitalists made tons of money selling DEI to the Fortune 500.
  - cocacola1 2y ago
    Moreover, from my POV, “woke” is often pronounced with a hard R.
- tasty_freeze 2y ago
  "Maybe woke went too far ..." From where I sit on the left, the right wing is extremely effective in making people believe the left is a parody of itself. For instance, the left does have stronger support for LGBTQ issues than the right, but it isn't the primary issue. I'm sure "Build Back Better" investments in infrastructure involved 100x the attention and resources that LGBTQ issues did. But right media pushes stories multiple times a day about how the left is trying to turn your little Johnny into Janie. There are fewer than ten M->F trans athletes in college sports [1], but it is nearly a daily news item. The the casual news viewer (most everybody) their impression watching their news is that the only concern of Democrats is to advance a LGBTQ takeover. Same thing with CRT. Same thing with Benghazi. Same thing with Hillary's emails. They pick an issue and hammer it, hammer it, hammer it. And it doesn't stay stuck in the right wing mediasphere. It becomes part of the "national conversation" and so mainstream media has to report on it too. [1] https://thehill.com/homenews/lgbtq/5046662-ncaa-president-transgender-athletes-college-sports/ https://thehill.com/homenews/lgbtq/5046662-ncaa-president-tr...
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Part of the problem is that "the left" is not a monolith. I regularly interact with a part of the left who sincerely believe both that "trans rights are human rights" is the key, defining issue of the decade and that critical race theory absolutely should be taught in schools. These people do in fact believe the things that the right says they do. And they were in fact working for many years prior to this past election to push their worldview into the wider cultural sphere. I'm not pulling this from the media, I've literally sat in rooms where people planned how to use school curricula to build acceptance for both these ideas. There are other parts of the left that aren't that way, and you're correct that the right benefited immensely from making the left seem like it was a monolith. But that part of the left that pushed these ideas so hard so fast actually does exist and actually did fuel the fire.
gred 2y ago
Hah, the whiplash must be tremendous for some of the employees, and even for some of the customers. It'll be very interesting to see how both employees and customers react and evolve over the next few years.
- bigtimesink 2y ago
  Not WaPo, but chuckr is back at Meta because of the political shift. Chuckr is well-known for being a firearm enthusiast.
  - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    Wow, he's gonna get a shock. Meta is a very different place than FB was.
- jknoepfler 2y ago
  I cancelled my subscription and moved on with my life. I get my dose of economic centrism from the Economist. Same with leaving the shithole that is "X," but slightly less inconvenient.
josefritzishere 2y ago
Bezos isn't Goebbels, but he did just confirm two things: 1. He has confirmed that he exerts some editorial control 2. He intends to exert more of it.
- righthand 2y ago
  If that wasn’t clear already when he suppressed the Kamala backing months ago.
markus_zhang 2y ago
Let me say the unpopular and evil: no individual should control assets of more than 100 million USD. Run /s
- mempko 2y ago
  Agreed. Inequality is out of control. Let's tax regular people less, and those making hundreds of millions and billions much more. We must close the gap for the sake of the vast majority of people.
  - nxm 2y ago
    Problem is those who love to tax will eventually tax regular people more and more.
    - mckn1ght 2y ago
      I really don't think many people set taxes because they love to tax. They are a means to an end, not an end themselves.
    - markus_zhang 2y ago
      To achieve that you basically need an ordinary people's government. Ah, another hot topic. Run /s
- whatever1 2y ago
  Definitely no offsprings of billionaires should inherit $100M. This is against any merit discussion.
shmerl 2y ago
Bezos: Media's responsibility is to bootlick the boss.
- hinkley 2y ago
  How do you get to be a billionaire and still need people to coddle your ego? Fuck you, I'm disgustingly rich! I don't care about your opinions. I am numerically, objectively killing it. I'm going to paint all of the mailboxes in town teal just because I can and it's my eldest kid's favorite color. What part of you is still stuck in freshman year of highschool when that girl laughed at you for having a crush on her, or just for liking turtles? Just fuckin let it go man.
  - shmerl 2y ago
    Easy, he can't crave money anymore, so he craves feeding his ego.
    - gred 2y ago
      Or he just wants to make the world a better place, and you don't see eye to eye on the best way to make that happen?
      - shmerl 2y ago
        Not funny.
        gred 2y ago
        It's a serious suggestion and a real possibility.
CamperBob2 2y ago
In this issue: a lecture on individual liberty from a supporter of the party that wants to ban abortion nationally.
5kg 2y ago
you have no freedom of speech to publish opinions opposing (as decided by me) freedom of speech.
- kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago
  [dead]
- aqueueaqueue 2y ago
  That's how freedom of speech works. It is free from government persecution.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> "Bezos also made clear that alternate views will not appear on the pages." Sure, it's Bezos' private company, and people are free not to subscribe to WaPo. So it's not restricting free speech. But it's very telling that more oligarchs are trying to control the _flow of information and ideas_ to the masses. A key requirement of fascism.
- CapricornNoble 2y ago
  > But it's very telling that more oligarchs are trying to control the _flow of information and ideas_ to the masses. A key requirement of fascism. People only notice this problem when the oligarchs that they don't agree with are doing it. https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/hillary-clinton-warns-we-lose-total-control-without-social-media-content-moderation-politics-facebook-x-twitter-tiktok-meta-section-230 https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/hillary-clinton-warns-... When Hillary outright said as much last year it wasn't even a blip on HN's radar.
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    Please refresh my memory as to when "oligarch Hillary" was owner, and held control of, a large media company or social media network.
    - CapricornNoble 2y ago
      That was close to the question many were asking when her remarks broke: "She said 'we' lose control.....who is 'we'?" Nobody on HN seems interested in digging deeper on that. It's only when the despicable shady scumbags are aligned with Trump that it becomes a problem.
Molitor5901 2y ago
I have always felt that the elite control the big news organizations. Hearst, Bezos, all of them are the wealthy. They gobble up smaller news organizations and align each with their editorial preference. Bezos is the new Hearst. What is needed is more local news, and for the populace to prefer local. Bring back the daily town newspaper by email. We spend so much time looking down at our phones across the world that we fail to see the news happening right in front of us.
softwaredoug 2y ago
Bezos didn’t get where he is from just the free market. He got here because he was fortunate enough to have parents who could give him a $250k seed round. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/08/02/how-jeff-bezos-got-his-parents-to-invest-in-amazon--turning-them-into.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/08/02/how-jeff-bezos-got-his-p...
- twasold 2y ago
  He was a finance guy during the tech boom. He could have gotten the capital somewhere else.
  - anonymousDan 2y ago
    And yet he didn't....
- aqueueaqueue 2y ago
  This is more a bootstraps vs. handouts argument not free-market vs non free-market
j_timberlake 2y ago
It's basically a "Pig Butchering" scam. Get people to give you a little time and attention, and then reward them with whatever they're looking for. Then after you've gotten as much trust as you're going to get (fattened the pig), change the game to extract as much value as you can from them (butcher the pig), regardless of any long-term bridge-burning. From the oligarchs' point of view, none of these users or services are going to be valuable anymore once AI automates the bulk of the economy (AI companies are strongly expecting this in the 2030s), so now's the right time to start "butchering" some pigs. In this case, shameless support for Trump in exchange for political sway for Bezos, regardless of the ramifications for the brand or customers. In game theory terms, this the tail-end of a game of iterated prisoner's dilemma, where people start betraying each other after years of cooperation. And if AI progress accelerates, so will this.
aucisson_masque 2y ago
USA is turning every day more and more into a totalitarian state, the newspaper owner feel (and in truth are) obligated to get into the trump's cult or else take the risk to loose on important government contract, get lawsuit or worse. Self censorship is the worst censorship of them all, every totalitarian state does that because it doesn't cost anything but a few threat and exemplary case, and since the news are controlled by very few people there it's easy for the state to pressure them to do the right thing. I think that 60 or 70 years ago you had many newspaper owned by small companies, very decentralized. You wouldn't have been able to do that but now every news paper, television and social network are owned by very few. If you can't rely on professional to report on the news, and if people are forbidden to express themselves (i mean real educated opinion) on facebook, twitter and maybe tiktok you have effectively suppressed one's opinion reach. then when people don't have the possibility anymore to voice their opinion, what prevent you from completely shutting down their voice ? i'm probably being over dramatic, trump never expressed anything about violating usa constitution. like taking a third presidency mandate or not having the people vote for him for the next election, he didn't have close collaborators make fascist salutes to test population outcry (or lack of). free press is always one of the first target with the army of any government that try to turn a democracy into a totalitarian state. Seeing how every big company donated to trump investiture and now how they bow to him. All of them, microsoft, apple, amazon, meta, oracle. i think he succeeded in making the usa technology, social and news companies his own puppets.
- isaacremuant 2y ago
  The thing is that you think this only started with Trump and that it wasn't happening with the previous Democrats. It was, you just agreed with the totalitarian state when it went your way. Hopefully you learn, but I doubt it. Trump/Elon bad and all that, right?
  - aucisson_masque 2y ago
    I never said it all started with trump but trump is the current head of government and he is pushing much harder than previous government. I have never seen for instance Biden or Obama close one make fascist salute.
randcraw 2y ago
This is a very big change at the Post. For decades they have dutifully aired competing perspectives from the political left and right as well as major international players of different stripes. Now all of that will end. It seems future op-eds will be written only by a carefully curated pool of sanitized Post staff. This suggests that the Post will effectively become just another municipal newspaper that happens to be in located the US capitol, rather than a source of national scope news. This giant shift in strategy will surely decrease the paper's market size and reputation for breaking news (as it did with Watergate and Snowden). I suspect this also portends a big reduction in the paper's commitment to investigative journalism, something that IMO, is truly irreplaceable (especially since investigations at the NY Times have faded into a mere shadow of what the Post has long been in that endeavor. They did a rotten job at reporting Snowden's revelations, for example.) [BTW, I was a subscriber to the Post (and a long time reader before that) but cancelled in protest when Bezos suddenly pulled the Post's endorsement of a presidential candidate in 2024. Now I guess I'll stay away forever.]
- ipnon 2y ago
  Changing strategy was inevitable. They lost 90% of readers between 2021 and 2024. It would be a dereliction of duty for the owner of the company to continue business as usual in such conditions.
  - brewdad 2y ago
    They lost most of those readers due to an alarming shift rightward in tone and coverage. Not Fox News right but certainly further right than they have historically been. Seems an odd choice to combat that loss by apparently shifting further right. You are never going to get large numbers of Fox News consumers to read WaPo. They have been told for decades how far left the Post is and that it can't be trusted. Bezos needs a hobby I guess.
    - edmundsauto 2y ago
      Right wing news is popular in America, I don’t think this could be the main reason why they had such steep declines.
cherrycherry98 2y ago
Sounds rather similar to what The Economist purports to support (or at least used to) but with more of a tilt towards personal liberties. That's open to interpretation but could be pro free speech, pro gun rights, pro reproductive rights, pro LGBT. From their 2009 about us: "What, besides free trade and free markets, does The Economist believe in? 'It is to the Radicals that The Economist still likes to think of itself as belonging. The extreme centre is the paper's historical position.' That is as true today as when former Economist editor Geoffrey Crowther said it in 1955. The Economist considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability. It has backed conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It has supported the Americans in Vietnam. But it has also endorsed Harold Wilson and Bill Clinton, and espoused a variety of liberal causes: opposing capital punishment from its earliest days, while favoring penal reform and decolonization, as well as—most recently—gun control and gay marriage." https://web.archive.org/web/20090228231949/http://www.economist.com/help/DisplayHelp.cfm?folder=663377 https://web.archive.org/web/20090228231949/http://www.econom...
enragedcacti 2y ago
If you liked "Books, but from the Internet" you'll love this genius founder's latest invention: The Cato Institute Blog but You Have To Pay for It
- t-3 2y ago
  Nah, the Cato Institute Blog has articles worth reading and, in general, a pragmatic and nuanced take on most issues.
michaelhoney 2y ago
We have something like this in Australia. The News Corp masthead The Australian (https://www.theaustralian.com.au https://www.theaustralian.com.au) is basically a propaganda rag for Rupert Murdoch. Every day there are opinions, and every day the opinions are the same.
- nxm 2y ago
  Very much like the Washington Post opinion section was, just for the left
  - kelseydh 2y ago
    WaPo was more establishment than left. You were not seeing pro-Palestine editorials from WaPo, rather quite the contrary.
    - skyyler 2y ago
      A large contingent of the US has been tricked into thinking that the centre-right establishment is somehow left wing...
voidhorse 2y ago
Bezos's letter was nice but a little wordy, I had chatgpt give me an executive summary: > Billionaire intends to turn popular newspaper into personal propaganda outlet.
- kelseydh 2y ago
  There is nothing more Bezos than Bezos expecting people to still pay, in order to read his propaganda.
TheAlchemist 2y ago
Things in the US are getting scarier and scarier every day that passes. Look up the article Washington Post published on the fictional DOGE chief - Amy Gleason. It's absolutely clear to anybody with a brain, that Musk is running DOGE and they just named a random person, because courts forced them to. And yet, WaPo is happy presenting a profile of said Amy as if all was normal. This is Russia / North Korea level of compliance with what the Dear Leader says... But then US recently voted along Russia and North Korea on the UN resolution regarding Ukraine so...
- mmooss 2y ago
  Could you give us a link to the article?
mmooss 2y ago
Don't look at what he says but rather what he does - that is, at how he says it, because that is how the Washington Post will say things going forward: * He uses the current popular propaganda of the right-wing business elite - especially in Silicon Valley - claiming his positions "proud" and patriotic and implying inescapably that people who disagree are anti-American. * He also uses the current businessspeak: When a top editor quits, Bezos projects uncaring disregard for any negative implication and instead he aggressively claims it was his idea and he wants it to happen, a way of making himself look invulnerable to criticism, powerful beyond restraint. (That trick should look familiar to everyone by now.) * His claim that the news media needs a voice supporting these positions is obviously false, as they are probably the most widely supported positions supported by the most powerful people. But he brazenly makes the claim anyway with no care for its truth, only its power. * Absent is any serious examination of the merits. The whole thing is all BS and propaganda. And that's what we may expect to see from the Washington Post going forward: BS and propaganda. It's an aggressive embrace of those things, and a disregard for serious thought, fact, or merits. His message isn't about free markets or patriotism, but that Bezos and the Washington Post have made this their mode of communication, that he can brazenly lie and mislead and nobody can stop him - like so many others. (It also suggests that Bezos blows with the prevailing cultural winds.)
isaacremuant 2y ago
As someone who actually values freedom consistently and not depending on the whims of money. This 180 from the tech main characters that just yesterday would've been pushing the most aggressive of censorships is so laughable. I hope people who disagree with these people remember that corporations and politicians are not their friends, instead of simply asking for them to wage wars against the opposing political team.
- timacles 2y ago
  The tech main characters discovered that there’s not that much money in honor. But manipulating the masses could be a very profitable venture
jedberg 2y ago
I'm so glad that he promised that his ownership would never affect the editorial decisions...
- mmooss 2y ago
  Interesting - do you happen to know a citation?
  - jedberg 2y ago
    I don't have one handy but when he first bought it and got pushback about concern that he would be pushing his liberal agenda (ironically) that was his response.
    - goldfishgold 2y ago
      Best I can find is “But the key thing I hope people will take away from this is that the values of The Post do not need changing. The duty of the paper is to the readers, not the owners.” https://archive.is/BpcDZ https://archive.is/BpcDZ He might claim otherwise but hard to argue that the values aren’t changing when the opinion editor is resigning.
  - steve_adams_86 2y ago
    Döpfner: Are you upset if the Post journalists are writing critical stories about Amazon? Bezos: No, I’m not upset at all. Döpfner: Did or would you ever interfere? Bezos: Never. I would be humiliated to interfere. I would be so embarrassed. I would turn bright red. It has nothing to do with … I don’t even get so far… I just don’t want to. It would feel icky; it would feel gross. It would be one of those things when I’m 80 years old I would be so unhappy with myself if I had interfered. Why would I? I want that paper to be independent. We have a fantastic editor in Marty Baron. We have a fantastic publisher in Fred Ryan. The head of our technology team, a guy named Shailesh, is fantastic. They don’t need my help in the newsroom for sure. First of all, that’s also an expert’s job. It would be like me getting on the airplane and going up to the front of the plane and saying to the pilot, “You should move aside — let me do this!” https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-interview-axel-springer-ceo-amazon-trump-blue-origin-family-regulation-washington-post-2018-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-interview-axel-sp...
godelski 2y ago
> I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no.’ This is a concerning statement. It's the kind which is made by those who believe they are being generous and fair while they aren't. This is how people surround themselves with "yes men". I fear that is connected to the predicament we are in, and this infection exists in many corporations. It's hard to fight. We want validation while many "yes men" are just trying to survive (but some are manipulative). But this always results in the death of a business. Too big to fail just means a slow death because the environment discourages competition. Ironically the environment Bezos is creating while claiming to be encouraging. It might even be sincere. As adults we still feel young, is this also true for businesses?
- mozzieman 2y ago
  It is just Bezos corp speak way of saying he fired him without sounding negative.
  - righthand 2y ago
    It is also Bezos corp speak for “Who wouldn’t want to be a dog on my lap? I’ve got room.”
    - selimthegrim 2y ago
      Now I’m imagining that basset hound clown car video where they all pile out of one doghouse but on his lap.
  - godelski 2y ago
    > Bezos corp speak Yes? Double speak is created to mask normal speech. Being masked with what? I think we agree on the answer here.
- adamisom 2y ago
  >This is how people surround themselves with "yes men" >But this always results in the death of a business I think you are conflating a "business yes man" with a "newspaper angle yes man". It is fine for a major newspaper to endorse certain values, and distance themselves from others! It's fine because it's a big country with a lot of newspapers!
mjfl 2y ago
People who oppose these moves like "I don't like when visible billionaires own our news services, I much prefer the invisible ones" bewilder me.
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idiotsecant 2y ago
Another indicator that the time of capitalism is over and the time of techno-feudalism has begun. All hail the algorithm, may it be satisfied.
analog31 2y ago
My opinion is that "personal liberties and free markets" is effectively a safe refuge from having to directly confront the reality of what's happening right now.
- hackyhacky 2y ago
  > My opinion is that "personal liberties and free markets" effectively steers the Post away from engaging with issues of immediate concern. Why? I'd say those issues are of immediate concern to many, especially insofar as they are used as euphemisms to describe the goals of the American political right.
  - analog31 2y ago
    Exactly. It allows him to speak in tongues while the right wing carries on with its agenda. Oops, I edited my post while you were responding. I'll let your quote represent what I originally wrote, which I think was in the same spirit. Sorry about that.
karaterobot 2y ago
I don't think it's unusual for an owner to exert influence over the opinion section. Bezos is a hypocrite for saying he wouldn't take a heavy hand with the paper when he bought it, and for pretending now that he's doing this for any other reason than not being willing to forego political favors. He sucks, and can't be trusted. But that's also always been true of the opinion sections of newspapers, which in the end are just a wordier version of the poorly-reasoned hot takes you can get for free just by reading this comment.
SanjayMehta 2y ago
From an outsider’s perspective it’s hard see any difference in the viewpoints of the NYT, WaPo and the WSJ.
breaker-kind 2y ago
it is so, so demoralizing to see how lacking in critical thought so many of you are. i choose to hope those who leave such callous comments are stupid 20-somethings like me, but i know it isn't true. you are adults. you are the ones in charge, you have been alive for thrice as long as me, and it's left you addled, heartless, and stupid. soon, not soon, but sooner than me, you will die, alone and filled with regret, in tatters, scorched by the fires you dismissed. morons.
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago
  Tilting at windmills.
vcryan 2y ago
I assumed owning a newspaper is some sort of billionaire trophy. I haven't read newspaper in like 30 years and I can't imagine why I ever would in the future. Same goes for the digital properties. If you are actually paying attention to any particular issue it's pretty clear how nonsensical most reporting is. How badly do you need to be misinformed?
robomartin 2y ago
This, and reading through many of the comments on this thread, remind me of Politico's excellent article (from 2017) on the subject of how media evolved into what it was then (and what it is today). Until I read this article I did not understand how we got here. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bubble-real-journalism-jobs-east-coast-215048/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub... I won't spoil it. It is well worth reading. I'll just say that I firmly believe in the protections afforded to the press by the US constitution. I also believe those who penned these protections never intended for them to be used and abused as they have been for years.
williamDafoe 2y ago
Once you screw up there is a temptation to screw up more and more in the same way ....
pmkary 2y ago
Remember the days when he had just bought the paper and said: "No I have nothing to do with it, they just needed the money", me neither, such silly things I say...
NoGravitas 2y ago
We've been saying for a while that "Democracy dies in darkness" wasn't just a motto, but a business plan. This is just accelerating it and making it explicit.
culebron21 2y ago
A recent Russian joke: Bezos comes out of the oval office and mumbles: "dumb old asshole!" Zuckerberg overhears it and reports to Trump. Next meeting, Trump asks him: - Who did you mean by "dumb old asshole", comrade Bezos? - Biden, of course, comrade president. - And who did YOU mean by that, comrade Zuckerberg? (hint: this is a re-purposed joke about Stalin)

391 points by nickthegreek 2y ago

Daishiman 2y ago

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deleted 2y ago
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suraci 2y ago

hey, jeff, you shouldn't say this aloud

deleted 2y ago

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scblock 2y ago

I think you misspelled "to push right wing dogma"

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VOIPThrowaway 2y ago
"Personal liberty" is not exclusively a right-wing idea.
- TheCoelacanth 2y ago
  What billionaires mean by "personal liberty" usually is, though.
  - j2kun 2y ago
    Personal liberty for me, but not for thee.
  - yyyyz 2y ago
    [dead]
- steve_adams_86 2y ago
  Thinking of social anarchists. Extremely "left" in many regards by North American standards, and pushing towards being about as pro personal liberty as you can get. Arguably social anarchists have a different read on what personal liberty is and should be compared to, say, Ayn Rand. It might not be the best comparison, but I think the gist of it is true. Heaps of leftists value personal liberty.
  - mempko 2y ago
    As an anarchist, we are for absolute personal liberty. But when we hear "personal liberty " followed by "free markets" pushed by a billionaire, it's clearly right wing propaganda. There are no right wing anarchists.
    - steve_adams_86 2y ago
      Hopefully my comment doesn't make it appear as though I disagree. This entire situation reads to me as extremely corrupt and—almost ironically yet not surprisingly at all—more likely to be harmful to personal liberties of many while beneficial to very few. Free market coming from Bezos' mouth is a laughable concept. He will do everything in his power to nullify competitors while squashing the liberties of his own employees. Nothing about this is sincere.
- gizzlon 2y ago
  the irony of censorship in the name of "personal liberty". Grade a doublespeak bullshit
- DennisP 2y ago
  Definitely not, but it's possible to focus exclusively on liberties that the right wing prefers. I guess we'll see whether Bezos is willing to promote the liberty of a business to hire based on DEI criteria if that's what it prefers, or of individuals to marry people of the same sex. Or any of the other liberties that the right wing doesn't like. Given the recent closeness of Bezos to Trump, I suspect we won't see anything like that, but maybe he'll surprise me.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  The combination of “personal liberty and free markets” as a description of an ideological orientation is not merely exclusively right-wing, its pretty much a defining slogan of the American pro-big-business corporate capitalist Right (one of many segments of the American Right.) It’s no less of a clear, specific ideological marker in the US today than “Blood and Soil” in 1930s Germany. But its interesting how those trying to sell this as not ideological are just ignoring the “free markets” part.
- nemothekid 2y ago
  >"Personal liberty" is not exclusively a right-wing idea. I wonder if the approved op-eds on personal liberty will include Trans and Abortion rights? Will it include the right to organize?
  - archagon 2y ago
    Or how about immigrant rights, what with the DoJ going after AOC for hosting a webinar?
- derbOac 2y ago
  It remains to be seen what he means by it in practice. It is possible many will be pleasantly surprised at what emerges. This article does suggest Shipley wanted a more balanced, "both sides" approach to the opinions section, which I agree with Bezos is shortsighted and sort of shallow: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/26/nx-s1-5309725/jeff-bezos-washington-post-opinion-section https://www.npr.org/2025/02/26/nx-s1-5309725/jeff-bezos-wash... On the other hand, it's difficult for me to imagine David Shipley leaving over that alone if there wasn't something pointed or questionable about what Bezos was suggesting. Also, if Bezos' recent interventions are any guide, he isn't exactly pushing for greater freedom of speech, or more rigorous critique, at the Washington Post — there's a "liberty for me but not for thee" kind of sense to his actions. If Bezos wanted to turn the Washington Post into some kind of Reason Magazine with a primary news arm attached to it, it wouldn't be the worst thing in my opinion for me personally. But I'm skeptical of his vision without more evidence: for one thing, if he wanted to come out swinging, he could have made his vision clear.
  - ein0p 2y ago
    Perhaps you should re-familiarize yourself with the Pledge of Allegiance.
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      Say more?
    - mulmen 2y ago
      Can you be more specific? Do you mean the history or the content?
      - ein0p 2y ago
        "With _liberty_ and justice for all"? This should be pretty bipartisan IMO.
        mulmen 2y ago

cafard 2y ago

I have been a Post subscriber (in a Post-subscribing household) for almost fifty years, and my consumption of the opinion pages has gradual declined over that period. I just wish the news content was back to what it once was.

gaws 2y ago
> I just wish the news content was back to what it once was. Back to when? 1970s?
- cafard 2y ago
  Before the classified advertising all disappeared to the Internet. In the 1990s, the Post had a larger newsroom, and published more news. Now the Metro section has fewer but larger articles, often enough not really news in the old sense.

draw_down 2y ago

[dead]

Hikikomori 2y ago

>Focus Will Be On “Personal Liberties And Free Markets” So let billionaires and corporations do whatever they want for profit, even if they kill people.

leesec 2y ago
not what was said at all
- Hikikomori 2y ago
  What was said then? Do you believe that the free markets concept never got anyone killed?
  - psunavy03 2y ago
    Hate to break it to you, but "from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs" has been stacking far, far more bodies over the past ~125 years.
    - Hikikomori 2y ago
      Yes, its comparable to communism, they're both far up on the leaderboard, with religion. There's something between those extremes that works very well and produce societies that are great for all people, regulated markets and socialised democracy.
      - Jensson 2y ago
        In many regards USA has more regulations than the Scandinavian countries do, so isn't really a freer market. So that difference isn't about number of regulations but just taxation rates.
        Hikikomori 2y ago
        Depends on which regulations you look at. Employment isn't heavily regulated there as they have strong unions and contracts tailored to their specific needs that would otherwise be ill served by broad strokes regulation. Then they have strong regulation in environment, food, drugs, etc. US also has strong regulation in some aspects, but its less impactful these days due to regulatory capture, those were created when the free market was for example killing babies with unpasteurized milk, and tried to avoid doing that due to cost by putting formaldehyde in it instead. Free market believers want to go back to that age where companies are completely unregulated and hired guns to break up unions and believe this wont happen again. What regulations do is put everyone on the same playing field, so there's isn't one milk company that can lower costs by not pasteurized its milk.

jmclnx 2y ago

This is what we get allowing mega-corporations control our media. I hope the US brings back fairness doctrine. Or if not, force these companies and all their parent/subsidizes to own no more than 3 Media companies. By media I mean: Radio, TV, Cable, Streaming, Movie Production and Social Media.

bartc 2y ago
Zero chance of that happening unfortunately. The current Supreme Court would consider restrictions on corporate media ownership a violation of the first amendment, much like restrictions against unlimited campaign donations and restrictions on discriminating against non-Christians.
dingnuts 2y ago
if the Fairness Doctrine was implemented for the Internet and you had a Democrat leaning political blog you would have to give equal time/space to MAGA narratives on your site. That's what you want?
- daveguy 2y ago
  If that's what it takes to get 50% of the US to not be forced fed only one side by dipshits. Yup.
- dylan604 2y ago
  I think if you are going to claim fair coverage, then yes. If you are going to openly say you are for one side or the other, then okay. Having a tag line like "fair and balanced" without the balance or being fair then no.
- xboxnolifes 2y ago
  The fairness doctrine does not require equal time. It requires you to dedicate some amount of time to controversial topics, and then give some amount of time to opposing parties within those topics. Which, if you're going to argue against someone's position, I'd think it best to get that position directly from them, rather than building a strawman to beat down.

hello_moto 2y ago

It's very interesting to see Tech from the mid 90s all the way to today. From nerds, niche, to Oligarchs. From breaking boundaries to limiting alternatives. From rebelling against the status-quo to become the status-quo. The nerds now become the slave.

Gothmog69 2y ago
Ya I find it interesting I feel like the nerds have been pushed aside by the mainstream. Social networks for instance were a lot better when it was just nerds.
- ddq 2y ago
  Nerds wield potentially vast collective bargaining power if we refused to contribute to the systems that exploit our expertise and labor for the benefit of the ownership class. We could simply drop out and support one another with all our surplus time. Easier said than done, of course, but at this point I have to dream of bold alternatives to keep myself sane. The status quo and its present trajectory are just too unthinkably broken to have faith in incrementalism while the accelerationists are punishing us for our complacency in replacing rotted, unsustainable systems.
  - fullshark 2y ago
    Good luck with that, i'm gonna indulge in various vices to dull the cognitive dissonance and work in the machine to feed my kids.
- _cenw 2y ago
  Nerds were required on the early internet for community building - to run IRC and TS and phpBB. These days everyone has these tools. But as with the media monopoly dying, this is not a strictly better or worse thing, it's just different. And generally I like it when we get rid of gatekeeping.
- kelseydh 2y ago
  The hot people are now in charge, just like everywhere else.

empath75 2y ago

John Swinton, 1883: > There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns. You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same — his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an "Independent Press"! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

dingnuts 2y ago
this is complaining about the state of nature dressed as political commentary. perhaps Mr Swinton could show an example of a society that would satisfy his definitions, but he cannot, because his complaint amounts to the fact that the world is flawed and no system is a utopia. In fact his central complaint, that we are slaves, is the same exact lesson taught in the story of Genesis from the oral history that predates Judaism. He is complaining that in life, we are cursed to work. You know, "the fall." A problem for every human since we became aware of the existence of the future. This isn't some cutting insight into the downfall of American society, it's just a complaint that the world is unfair. Well guess what? Get used to it. It's unfair in every system. This one is one of the more fair systems, though.
derbOac 2y ago
There seems to be a lot of political circles wanting to return to the late 1800s. I'm personally not one of them.
aqueueaqueue 2y ago

Panzer04 2y ago

At least he's honest about it. Truth be told, it does feel like free markets have become a bit of a dirty word in both political realms recently; I'm not going to complain too much about Bezos advocating for it, we could use the help. I guess it remains to be seen just what kind of views they end up pushing, rather than what he says he wants to push :P

deleted 2y ago
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merb 2y ago
tbf most newspapers have a certain agenda to push, the same thing applies even to newspapers in Germany. You can clearly see that all of them do favor a certain view. Yes some of them look more open to alternative views, but they still favor something.
- oinkbutton 2y ago
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- Barrin92 2y ago
  >tbf most newspapers have a certain agenda to push that's not the issue here though. Bezos is directly ordering the opinion editor to tow a certain line, and that is not a common practice at any reputable newspaper I am aware of (which is why the responsible editor, David Shipley immediately quit). I am German and I have friends working in the news sector. A corporate shareholder trying to dictate the topics would be considered a breach of ethics. Pretty sure that's the case at highly regarded newspapers in the US too.
bigtimesink 2y ago
When he killed the Harris endorsement, that sent a stronger signal than endorsing her.
- waveBidder 2y ago
  Hard to take calls for endorsing the free market seriously from someone so clearly trying to form a monopoly on online shopping.

djrobstep 2y ago

Good example of how ideology (and motivated reasoning) really clouds people's thinking. Personal liberty and free markets are in direct conflict with each other. Free markets require private property, which requires enforcement through violent aggression (or the threat thereof). Free markets and private property might be justified for any number of (other) reasons, but "personal liberty" isn't one of them.

waltercool 2y ago
You are wrong here. You can't have free markets without personal liberty. In the same way, personal liberties aren't a thing if are are unable to establish your own business
- tdb7893 2y ago
  I'm gonna ignore the first part because I've found on the internet people don't agree on what "free markets" mean. For the second part you don't need a business to be free. As a simple counterexample: I wouldn't say that human ancestors hunting and gathering in the savannah weren't free (they had literally no governmental limits) and it would take an absurd stretch to say they owned a business.
  - gcau 2y ago
    You're misunderstanding or strawmanning. You don't need a business to be free, obviously, and no not everyone that's free has a business (???). But that's different from being forbidden from making one.
    - djrobstep 2y ago
      The concept of a business can only exist within the context of a myriad of laws (property law, contract law, etc) all of which require violent enforcement or the threat thereof, ie reduction in personal liberty.
- djrobstep 2y ago

waltercool 2y ago

[dead]

gizzlon 2y ago

"Bezos also made clear that alternate views will not appear on the pages." So glad the US finally got a government focusing on freedom of speech .. And you know, not pressuring companies and the press to do their bidding /s

ein0p 2y ago
Bezos is not a part of US government, thankfully.
- joshuamorton 2y ago
  Assuredly, but this does appear to be a move to appease an administration that has signaled it will attack an unfriendly press.
  - nxm 2y ago
    Just like Biden administration did before
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Nor was Dorsey's Twitter?
  - ein0p 2y ago
    That very much was a part of the government. They were receiving orders directly from the White House, same as now, I suppose.
    - kalleboo 2y ago
      They received requests, many of which were denied. Not part of the government.
      - ein0p 2y ago
        Not according to Twitter files. Twitter under Dorsey and later under Agarwal was quite enthusiastic and eager about pushing the government narratives and suppressing dissent. They even deplatformed a sitting president. I get that you probably liked it back then, but let's be real here. Twitter neither was in a position to deny any requests, nor did it have any inclination to do so.

dailyplanet 2y ago

It's amazing how right-wing billionaire figures have captured social media platforms and news media outlets, such as Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter/X, Jeff Bezos's takeover of The Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong's takeover of LA Times, and Rupert Murdoch’s continued control of Fox News/Sky News/WSJ/NYPost, Mark Zuckerberg's recent rightward shift on FB/IG, and yet the right keeps yelling about George Soros. The propaganda networks on the internet are mostly rightwing with lots of surrendering to Russian/Chinese influence.

lr1970 2y ago
> It's amazing how right-wing billionaire figures have captured social media platforms and news media outlets, such as Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter/X, Jeff Bezos's takeover of The Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong's takeover of LA Times, and Rupert Murdoch’s continued control of Fox News/Sky News/WSJ/NYPost, Tight media control and media empires are nothing new. I would recommend you to read about William Randolph Hearst [0] and his media empire in the late eighteen hundreds and watch the movie Citizen Kane. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst
- cauch 2y ago
  I think the point of GP is not that media control is new, it is that a big part of media control is right-wing and yet right-wing people keep saying that media are owned by left-wing. And of course, facts and reality are left-wing fake news and misleading info are free speech when it's convenient to them.
gaws 2y ago
It's simple: Using right-wing thinking to drive business decisions means more profits.

quacked 2y ago

One thing that is curious to me is that the "free market" appears to only be "free" once you've amassed a certain amount of capital, which you can then expend to defend your enterprise from any number of legal challenges (some spurious, some real) and also comply with any number of governmental regulations (some spurious, some real). Even so, it's not so much that I distrust the phrase "free market" as it is that I think that for whatever reason, we, common Americans, are not allowed to take advantage of the "free market". Many "anti-capitalist" Americans haven't even ever experienced anything close to a "free market". At the billionaire level, it's easy to think about the relative successes of SpaceX and Blue Origin; as they are held privately, they can hire, fire, and structure themselves without worrying about federal regulations or shareholder obligations. That is, of course, the only reliable way to get yourself into a footing that permits innovation past the status quo. These companies are, in a sense, proving that the "free market" can act on the aerospace industry to drive down prices (cost of a Falcon Launch or a Starlink connection) and to increase technical capacity at a brutal pace (Starship projections on mass-to-orbit). But the cavernous pockets of their billionaire owners also protect them from the rest of the "market", by which I mean their competitors waging corporate and legal warfare against them. My primary complaint about the status quo of the US market, i.e. "only-billionaires-get-to-seriously-push-the-needle-in-innovation" really makes more sense when one considers the price of medical supplies. The EpiPen costs $500 for what I bet is less than $10 in materials and labor, even counting the strict standards its manufacturers are obliged to conform to in terms of batch creation and ingredients tracking. (A piece of metal in the aerospace industry is always more expensive than a piece of metal in the residential construction industry because it must always be possible to trace its pedigree.) But surely the chemical process to manufacture epinephrine is easily known, and the injection molding and assembly techniques needed to make and inspect the EpiPen is trivial in a modern supply chain that can provide OLED TVs for a pittance. So why don't we have two dozen scrappy American firms competing against Pfizer's Meridian Medical Technologies to produce adrenaline auto-injectors? Does it really take a billionaire to make a company that can produce a product that can actually cause the "free market" to act on the prices of emergency allergy medication? It certainly feels that way, especially when the main out-of-pocket pharmaceutical supplier that appears to be to putting a dent in out-of-pocket medicine pricing is... GoodRx, owned by Mark Cuban. I may have gotten some of the details wrong, but I believe the principles about which I allude to are accurate: even thought the "free market" is indeed a civilization-defining socioeconomic technology that helped give America its exceptional power, the market is not free unless you are a billionaire. It would be nice if Bezos' new Washington Post Opinion column was focused on extending the benefits of the "free market" back down to the masses, as it was in some industries during some eras of American history, but somehow I doubt that will be the case.

lsy 2y ago

What a bizarre fixation for a national paper, the follow-on letter from Will Lewis is even more transparently fixated on the daily appearance of the "pillars" [1]. "Personal liberties" appears to be a new construction that is conspicuously different from "civil liberties", and I think the distinction really speaks to what Bezos wants here. At the end of the day I expect the quality of discourse to dip: being afraid of contradictory opinions is the first step in intellectual decline. [1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/jeff-bezos-washington-post-1236147681/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/jef...

selimthegrim 2y ago
Bezos would like to go back to the original draft of the Declaration of Independence about the pursuit of property.
- DiggyJohnson 2y ago
  What do you mean by this in practice?
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    I thought it was that way in original Lockean formulation but basically that’s what materialist Bezos seems to care about. Maybe if you asked him about freedom from being hacked by Saudis he might have a different approach.
  - Nasrudith 2y ago
    I personally read it as a 'wants slaves back' insult/accusation.
    - selimthegrim 2y ago
      Yes that is also included.
mempko 2y ago

baxtr 2y ago

Things are moving fast and breaking. Maybe woke went too far and that’s the old white man’s revenge? We are probably fine on a 100 year horizon. But the next 10 years. Oh boy.

femiagbabiaka 2y ago
"Woke" is a meme, not a political orientation or a coherent bloc that can take concerted actions. And for what it's worth, plenty of old white men venture capitalists made tons of money selling DEI to the Fortune 500.
- cocacola1 2y ago
  Moreover, from my POV, “woke” is often pronounced with a hard R.
tasty_freeze 2y ago
"Maybe woke went too far ..." From where I sit on the left, the right wing is extremely effective in making people believe the left is a parody of itself. For instance, the left does have stronger support for LGBTQ issues than the right, but it isn't the primary issue. I'm sure "Build Back Better" investments in infrastructure involved 100x the attention and resources that LGBTQ issues did. But right media pushes stories multiple times a day about how the left is trying to turn your little Johnny into Janie. There are fewer than ten M->F trans athletes in college sports [1], but it is nearly a daily news item. The the casual news viewer (most everybody) their impression watching their news is that the only concern of Democrats is to advance a LGBTQ takeover. Same thing with CRT. Same thing with Benghazi. Same thing with Hillary's emails. They pick an issue and hammer it, hammer it, hammer it. And it doesn't stay stuck in the right wing mediasphere. It becomes part of the "national conversation" and so mainstream media has to report on it too. [1] https://thehill.com/homenews/lgbtq/5046662-ncaa-president-transgender-athletes-college-sports/ https://thehill.com/homenews/lgbtq/5046662-ncaa-president-tr...
- lolinder 2y ago
  Part of the problem is that "the left" is not a monolith. I regularly interact with a part of the left who sincerely believe both that "trans rights are human rights" is the key, defining issue of the decade and that critical race theory absolutely should be taught in schools. These people do in fact believe the things that the right says they do. And they were in fact working for many years prior to this past election to push their worldview into the wider cultural sphere. I'm not pulling this from the media, I've literally sat in rooms where people planned how to use school curricula to build acceptance for both these ideas. There are other parts of the left that aren't that way, and you're correct that the right benefited immensely from making the left seem like it was a monolith. But that part of the left that pushed these ideas so hard so fast actually does exist and actually did fuel the fire.

gred 2y ago

Hah, the whiplash must be tremendous for some of the employees, and even for some of the customers. It'll be very interesting to see how both employees and customers react and evolve over the next few years.

bigtimesink 2y ago
Not WaPo, but chuckr is back at Meta because of the political shift. Chuckr is well-known for being a firearm enthusiast.
- disgruntledphd2 2y ago
  Wow, he's gonna get a shock. Meta is a very different place than FB was.
jknoepfler 2y ago
I cancelled my subscription and moved on with my life. I get my dose of economic centrism from the Economist. Same with leaving the shithole that is "X," but slightly less inconvenient.

josefritzishere 2y ago

Bezos isn't Goebbels, but he did just confirm two things: 1. He has confirmed that he exerts some editorial control 2. He intends to exert more of it.

righthand 2y ago
If that wasn’t clear already when he suppressed the Kamala backing months ago.

markus_zhang 2y ago

Let me say the unpopular and evil: no individual should control assets of more than 100 million USD. Run /s

mempko 2y ago
Agreed. Inequality is out of control. Let's tax regular people less, and those making hundreds of millions and billions much more. We must close the gap for the sake of the vast majority of people.
- nxm 2y ago
  Problem is those who love to tax will eventually tax regular people more and more.
  - mckn1ght 2y ago
    I really don't think many people set taxes because they love to tax. They are a means to an end, not an end themselves.
  - markus_zhang 2y ago
    To achieve that you basically need an ordinary people's government. Ah, another hot topic. Run /s
whatever1 2y ago
Definitely no offsprings of billionaires should inherit $100M. This is against any merit discussion.

shmerl 2y ago

Bezos: Media's responsibility is to bootlick the boss.

hinkley 2y ago
How do you get to be a billionaire and still need people to coddle your ego? Fuck you, I'm disgustingly rich! I don't care about your opinions. I am numerically, objectively killing it. I'm going to paint all of the mailboxes in town teal just because I can and it's my eldest kid's favorite color. What part of you is still stuck in freshman year of highschool when that girl laughed at you for having a crush on her, or just for liking turtles? Just fuckin let it go man.
- shmerl 2y ago
  Easy, he can't crave money anymore, so he craves feeding his ego.
  - gred 2y ago
    Or he just wants to make the world a better place, and you don't see eye to eye on the best way to make that happen?
    - shmerl 2y ago
      Not funny.
      - gred 2y ago
        It's a serious suggestion and a real possibility.

CamperBob2 2y ago

In this issue: a lecture on individual liberty from a supporter of the party that wants to ban abortion nationally.

5kg 2y ago

you have no freedom of speech to publish opinions opposing (as decided by me) freedom of speech.

kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago
[dead]
aqueueaqueue 2y ago
That's how freedom of speech works. It is free from government persecution.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

> "Bezos also made clear that alternate views will not appear on the pages." Sure, it's Bezos' private company, and people are free not to subscribe to WaPo. So it's not restricting free speech. But it's very telling that more oligarchs are trying to control the _flow of information and ideas_ to the masses. A key requirement of fascism.

CapricornNoble 2y ago
> But it's very telling that more oligarchs are trying to control the _flow of information and ideas_ to the masses. A key requirement of fascism. People only notice this problem when the oligarchs that they don't agree with are doing it. https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/hillary-clinton-warns-we-lose-total-control-without-social-media-content-moderation-politics-facebook-x-twitter-tiktok-meta-section-230 https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/hillary-clinton-warns-... When Hillary outright said as much last year it wasn't even a blip on HN's radar.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Please refresh my memory as to when "oligarch Hillary" was owner, and held control of, a large media company or social media network.
  - CapricornNoble 2y ago
    That was close to the question many were asking when her remarks broke: "She said 'we' lose control.....who is 'we'?" Nobody on HN seems interested in digging deeper on that. It's only when the despicable shady scumbags are aligned with Trump that it becomes a problem.

Molitor5901 2y ago

I have always felt that the elite control the big news organizations. Hearst, Bezos, all of them are the wealthy. They gobble up smaller news organizations and align each with their editorial preference. Bezos is the new Hearst. What is needed is more local news, and for the populace to prefer local. Bring back the daily town newspaper by email. We spend so much time looking down at our phones across the world that we fail to see the news happening right in front of us.

softwaredoug 2y ago

Bezos didn’t get where he is from just the free market. He got here because he was fortunate enough to have parents who could give him a $250k seed round. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/08/02/how-jeff-bezos-got-his-parents-to-invest-in-amazon--turning-them-into.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/08/02/how-jeff-bezos-got-his-p...

twasold 2y ago
He was a finance guy during the tech boom. He could have gotten the capital somewhere else.
- anonymousDan 2y ago
  And yet he didn't....
aqueueaqueue 2y ago
This is more a bootstraps vs. handouts argument not free-market vs non free-market

j_timberlake 2y ago

It's basically a "Pig Butchering" scam. Get people to give you a little time and attention, and then reward them with whatever they're looking for. Then after you've gotten as much trust as you're going to get (fattened the pig), change the game to extract as much value as you can from them (butcher the pig), regardless of any long-term bridge-burning. From the oligarchs' point of view, none of these users or services are going to be valuable anymore once AI automates the bulk of the economy (AI companies are strongly expecting this in the 2030s), so now's the right time to start "butchering" some pigs. In this case, shameless support for Trump in exchange for political sway for Bezos, regardless of the ramifications for the brand or customers. In game theory terms, this the tail-end of a game of iterated prisoner's dilemma, where people start betraying each other after years of cooperation. And if AI progress accelerates, so will this.

aucisson_masque 2y ago

USA is turning every day more and more into a totalitarian state, the newspaper owner feel (and in truth are) obligated to get into the trump's cult or else take the risk to loose on important government contract, get lawsuit or worse. Self censorship is the worst censorship of them all, every totalitarian state does that because it doesn't cost anything but a few threat and exemplary case, and since the news are controlled by very few people there it's easy for the state to pressure them to do the right thing. I think that 60 or 70 years ago you had many newspaper owned by small companies, very decentralized. You wouldn't have been able to do that but now every news paper, television and social network are owned by very few. If you can't rely on professional to report on the news, and if people are forbidden to express themselves (i mean real educated opinion) on facebook, twitter and maybe tiktok you have effectively suppressed one's opinion reach. then when people don't have the possibility anymore to voice their opinion, what prevent you from completely shutting down their voice ? i'm probably being over dramatic, trump never expressed anything about violating usa constitution. like taking a third presidency mandate or not having the people vote for him for the next election, he didn't have close collaborators make fascist salutes to test population outcry (or lack of). free press is always one of the first target with the army of any government that try to turn a democracy into a totalitarian state. Seeing how every big company donated to trump investiture and now how they bow to him. All of them, microsoft, apple, amazon, meta, oracle. i think he succeeded in making the usa technology, social and news companies his own puppets.

isaacremuant 2y ago
The thing is that you think this only started with Trump and that it wasn't happening with the previous Democrats. It was, you just agreed with the totalitarian state when it went your way. Hopefully you learn, but I doubt it. Trump/Elon bad and all that, right?
- aucisson_masque 2y ago
  I never said it all started with trump but trump is the current head of government and he is pushing much harder than previous government. I have never seen for instance Biden or Obama close one make fascist salute.

randcraw 2y ago

This is a very big change at the Post. For decades they have dutifully aired competing perspectives from the political left and right as well as major international players of different stripes. Now all of that will end. It seems future op-eds will be written only by a carefully curated pool of sanitized Post staff. This suggests that the Post will effectively become just another municipal newspaper that happens to be in located the US capitol, rather than a source of national scope news. This giant shift in strategy will surely decrease the paper's market size and reputation for breaking news (as it did with Watergate and Snowden). I suspect this also portends a big reduction in the paper's commitment to investigative journalism, something that IMO, is truly irreplaceable (especially since investigations at the NY Times have faded into a mere shadow of what the Post has long been in that endeavor. They did a rotten job at reporting Snowden's revelations, for example.) [BTW, I was a subscriber to the Post (and a long time reader before that) but cancelled in protest when Bezos suddenly pulled the Post's endorsement of a presidential candidate in 2024. Now I guess I'll stay away forever.]

ipnon 2y ago
Changing strategy was inevitable. They lost 90% of readers between 2021 and 2024. It would be a dereliction of duty for the owner of the company to continue business as usual in such conditions.
- brewdad 2y ago
  They lost most of those readers due to an alarming shift rightward in tone and coverage. Not Fox News right but certainly further right than they have historically been. Seems an odd choice to combat that loss by apparently shifting further right. You are never going to get large numbers of Fox News consumers to read WaPo. They have been told for decades how far left the Post is and that it can't be trusted. Bezos needs a hobby I guess.
  - edmundsauto 2y ago
    Right wing news is popular in America, I don’t think this could be the main reason why they had such steep declines.

cherrycherry98 2y ago

Sounds rather similar to what The Economist purports to support (or at least used to) but with more of a tilt towards personal liberties. That's open to interpretation but could be pro free speech, pro gun rights, pro reproductive rights, pro LGBT. From their 2009 about us: "What, besides free trade and free markets, does The Economist believe in? 'It is to the Radicals that The Economist still likes to think of itself as belonging. The extreme centre is the paper's historical position.' That is as true today as when former Economist editor Geoffrey Crowther said it in 1955. The Economist considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability. It has backed conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It has supported the Americans in Vietnam. But it has also endorsed Harold Wilson and Bill Clinton, and espoused a variety of liberal causes: opposing capital punishment from its earliest days, while favoring penal reform and decolonization, as well as—most recently—gun control and gay marriage." https://web.archive.org/web/20090228231949/http://www.economist.com/help/DisplayHelp.cfm?folder=663377 https://web.archive.org/web/20090228231949/http://www.econom...

enragedcacti 2y ago

If you liked "Books, but from the Internet" you'll love this genius founder's latest invention: The Cato Institute Blog but You Have To Pay for It

t-3 2y ago
Nah, the Cato Institute Blog has articles worth reading and, in general, a pragmatic and nuanced take on most issues.

michaelhoney 2y ago

We have something like this in Australia. The News Corp masthead The Australian (https://www.theaustralian.com.au https://www.theaustralian.com.au) is basically a propaganda rag for Rupert Murdoch. Every day there are opinions, and every day the opinions are the same.

nxm 2y ago
Very much like the Washington Post opinion section was, just for the left
- kelseydh 2y ago
  WaPo was more establishment than left. You were not seeing pro-Palestine editorials from WaPo, rather quite the contrary.
  - skyyler 2y ago
    A large contingent of the US has been tricked into thinking that the centre-right establishment is somehow left wing...

voidhorse 2y ago

Bezos's letter was nice but a little wordy, I had chatgpt give me an executive summary: > Billionaire intends to turn popular newspaper into personal propaganda outlet.

kelseydh 2y ago
There is nothing more Bezos than Bezos expecting people to still pay, in order to read his propaganda.

TheAlchemist 2y ago

Things in the US are getting scarier and scarier every day that passes. Look up the article Washington Post published on the fictional DOGE chief - Amy Gleason. It's absolutely clear to anybody with a brain, that Musk is running DOGE and they just named a random person, because courts forced them to. And yet, WaPo is happy presenting a profile of said Amy as if all was normal. This is Russia / North Korea level of compliance with what the Dear Leader says... But then US recently voted along Russia and North Korea on the UN resolution regarding Ukraine so...

mmooss 2y ago
Could you give us a link to the article?

mmooss 2y ago

Don't look at what he says but rather what he does - that is, at how he says it, because that is how the Washington Post will say things going forward: * He uses the current popular propaganda of the right-wing business elite - especially in Silicon Valley - claiming his positions "proud" and patriotic and implying inescapably that people who disagree are anti-American. * He also uses the current businessspeak: When a top editor quits, Bezos projects uncaring disregard for any negative implication and instead he aggressively claims it was his idea and he wants it to happen, a way of making himself look invulnerable to criticism, powerful beyond restraint. (That trick should look familiar to everyone by now.) * His claim that the news media needs a voice supporting these positions is obviously false, as they are probably the most widely supported positions supported by the most powerful people. But he brazenly makes the claim anyway with no care for its truth, only its power. * Absent is any serious examination of the merits. The whole thing is all BS and propaganda. And that's what we may expect to see from the Washington Post going forward: BS and propaganda. It's an aggressive embrace of those things, and a disregard for serious thought, fact, or merits. His message isn't about free markets or patriotism, but that Bezos and the Washington Post have made this their mode of communication, that he can brazenly lie and mislead and nobody can stop him - like so many others. (It also suggests that Bezos blows with the prevailing cultural winds.)

isaacremuant 2y ago

As someone who actually values freedom consistently and not depending on the whims of money. This 180 from the tech main characters that just yesterday would've been pushing the most aggressive of censorships is so laughable. I hope people who disagree with these people remember that corporations and politicians are not their friends, instead of simply asking for them to wage wars against the opposing political team.

timacles 2y ago
The tech main characters discovered that there’s not that much money in honor. But manipulating the masses could be a very profitable venture

jedberg 2y ago

I'm so glad that he promised that his ownership would never affect the editorial decisions...

mmooss 2y ago
Interesting - do you happen to know a citation?
- jedberg 2y ago
  I don't have one handy but when he first bought it and got pushback about concern that he would be pushing his liberal agenda (ironically) that was his response.
  - goldfishgold 2y ago
    Best I can find is “But the key thing I hope people will take away from this is that the values of The Post do not need changing. The duty of the paper is to the readers, not the owners.” https://archive.is/BpcDZ https://archive.is/BpcDZ He might claim otherwise but hard to argue that the values aren’t changing when the opinion editor is resigning.
- steve_adams_86 2y ago
  Döpfner: Are you upset if the Post journalists are writing critical stories about Amazon? Bezos: No, I’m not upset at all. Döpfner: Did or would you ever interfere? Bezos: Never. I would be humiliated to interfere. I would be so embarrassed. I would turn bright red. It has nothing to do with … I don’t even get so far… I just don’t want to. It would feel icky; it would feel gross. It would be one of those things when I’m 80 years old I would be so unhappy with myself if I had interfered. Why would I? I want that paper to be independent. We have a fantastic editor in Marty Baron. We have a fantastic publisher in Fred Ryan. The head of our technology team, a guy named Shailesh, is fantastic. They don’t need my help in the newsroom for sure. First of all, that’s also an expert’s job. It would be like me getting on the airplane and going up to the front of the plane and saying to the pilot, “You should move aside — let me do this!” https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-interview-axel-springer-ceo-amazon-trump-blue-origin-family-regulation-washington-post-2018-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-interview-axel-sp...

godelski 2y ago

> I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no.’ This is a concerning statement. It's the kind which is made by those who believe they are being generous and fair while they aren't. This is how people surround themselves with "yes men". I fear that is connected to the predicament we are in, and this infection exists in many corporations. It's hard to fight. We want validation while many "yes men" are just trying to survive (but some are manipulative). But this always results in the death of a business. Too big to fail just means a slow death because the environment discourages competition. Ironically the environment Bezos is creating while claiming to be encouraging. It might even be sincere. As adults we still feel young, is this also true for businesses?

mozzieman 2y ago
It is just Bezos corp speak way of saying he fired him without sounding negative.
- righthand 2y ago
  It is also Bezos corp speak for “Who wouldn’t want to be a dog on my lap? I’ve got room.”
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    Now I’m imagining that basset hound clown car video where they all pile out of one doghouse but on his lap.
- godelski 2y ago
  > Bezos corp speak Yes? Double speak is created to mask normal speech. Being masked with what? I think we agree on the answer here.
adamisom 2y ago
>This is how people surround themselves with "yes men" >But this always results in the death of a business I think you are conflating a "business yes man" with a "newspaper angle yes man". It is fine for a major newspaper to endorse certain values, and distance themselves from others! It's fine because it's a big country with a lot of newspapers!

mjfl 2y ago

People who oppose these moves like "I don't like when visible billionaires own our news services, I much prefer the invisible ones" bewilder me.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

idiotsecant 2y ago

Another indicator that the time of capitalism is over and the time of techno-feudalism has begun. All hail the algorithm, may it be satisfied.

analog31 2y ago

My opinion is that "personal liberties and free markets" is effectively a safe refuge from having to directly confront the reality of what's happening right now.

hackyhacky 2y ago
> My opinion is that "personal liberties and free markets" effectively steers the Post away from engaging with issues of immediate concern. Why? I'd say those issues are of immediate concern to many, especially insofar as they are used as euphemisms to describe the goals of the American political right.
- analog31 2y ago
  Exactly. It allows him to speak in tongues while the right wing carries on with its agenda. Oops, I edited my post while you were responding. I'll let your quote represent what I originally wrote, which I think was in the same spirit. Sorry about that.

karaterobot 2y ago

I don't think it's unusual for an owner to exert influence over the opinion section. Bezos is a hypocrite for saying he wouldn't take a heavy hand with the paper when he bought it, and for pretending now that he's doing this for any other reason than not being willing to forego political favors. He sucks, and can't be trusted. But that's also always been true of the opinion sections of newspapers, which in the end are just a wordier version of the poorly-reasoned hot takes you can get for free just by reading this comment.

SanjayMehta 2y ago

From an outsider’s perspective it’s hard see any difference in the viewpoints of the NYT, WaPo and the WSJ.

breaker-kind 2y ago

it is so, so demoralizing to see how lacking in critical thought so many of you are. i choose to hope those who leave such callous comments are stupid 20-somethings like me, but i know it isn't true. you are adults. you are the ones in charge, you have been alive for thrice as long as me, and it's left you addled, heartless, and stupid. soon, not soon, but sooner than me, you will die, alone and filled with regret, in tatters, scorched by the fires you dismissed. morons.

Ylpertnodi 2y ago
Tilting at windmills.

vcryan 2y ago

I assumed owning a newspaper is some sort of billionaire trophy. I haven't read newspaper in like 30 years and I can't imagine why I ever would in the future. Same goes for the digital properties. If you are actually paying attention to any particular issue it's pretty clear how nonsensical most reporting is. How badly do you need to be misinformed?

robomartin 2y ago

This, and reading through many of the comments on this thread, remind me of Politico's excellent article (from 2017) on the subject of how media evolved into what it was then (and what it is today). Until I read this article I did not understand how we got here. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bubble-real-journalism-jobs-east-coast-215048/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub... I won't spoil it. It is well worth reading. I'll just say that I firmly believe in the protections afforded to the press by the US constitution. I also believe those who penned these protections never intended for them to be used and abused as they have been for years.

williamDafoe 2y ago

Once you screw up there is a temptation to screw up more and more in the same way ....

pmkary 2y ago

Remember the days when he had just bought the paper and said: "No I have nothing to do with it, they just needed the money", me neither, such silly things I say...

NoGravitas 2y ago

We've been saying for a while that "Democracy dies in darkness" wasn't just a motto, but a business plan. This is just accelerating it and making it explicit.

culebron21 2y ago

A recent Russian joke: Bezos comes out of the oval office and mumbles: "dumb old asshole!" Zuckerberg overhears it and reports to Trump. Next meeting, Trump asks him: - Who did you mean by "dumb old asshole", comrade Bezos? - Biden, of course, comrade president. - And who did YOU mean by that, comrade Zuckerberg? (hint: this is a re-purposed joke about Stalin)