14 ms·

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" [

by 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
Inequality continues to rise rapidly. Everyone but the most well off living conditions continue to decline. The wealthy elite need to make stories that distract people from this problem. So they will blame immigrants and "bloated inefficient governments" for the problem. And will push anti-immigration and "personal liberty" and "more free markets" as the solution. Instead of the obvious problem that Inequality is rising and we need to substantially raise taxes on the rich and reduce them for everyone else to close the runaway gap.
- amazingamazing 2y ago
  what level of income and/or wealth constitutes rich and how much should they be taxed?
  - schmidtleonard 2y ago
    What percent of your money comes from labor vs capital appreciation? Which is the hand that feeds you? Below $1M NW, you are probably labor. Above $10M NW, you are probably capital. These thresholds come from asking the question "does a conservative estimation of the passive income from these assets replace a wage?" -- below $1M, no, above $10M, yes, feel free to adjust by playing with the assumptions or plugging in wacky edge cases. The point is that incentives determine so much about politics and the incentives of each individual tend to heavily favor one side or the other which tends to translate into politically relevant policy preferences that favor one side or the other. The tax code is comically tilted in favor of capital. We should fix that. Unearned income shouldn't be taxed less than earned income, for a start. Also, if I can pay property tax on my house, mega-billionaires can pay property tax on their stock pile. But these are details, and focusing too much on details can be a distraction from the root issue: the tax code is comically tilted in favor of capital, and we should fix that.
    - mempko 2y ago
      This is a great answer, thanks!
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
torben-friis 2y ago
I wonder if there is some sort of breach of fiduciary duty or securities fraud claim here. This move seems likely to alienate subscribers (both for potentially being against their ideology, and more importantly, for implying lack of freedom of expression that customers would demand from a newspaper). It is also likely to lose them talent. The move seems to benefit bezos personally by using the newspaper as a mouthpiece, even if the newspaper itself as a business is damaged in the process.
- zepton 2y ago
  Jeff Bezos completely owns the Washington Post - there aren't any external shareholders that could be harmed, or are owed a fiduciary duty.
  - torben-friis 2y ago
    Ah, my bad, I thought it was public and he had the majority.
- tolerance 2y ago
  You used some big terms that I just had to take a cursory glance at to get the meaning of but it sounds like if what you’re describing ever picked up steam it would set an ill precedent and benefit the spirit of polarization that I think you’re trying to oppose.
starfezzy 2y ago
Implying any publication with a financier/owner and an editorial staff doesn't always and necessarily present the views of those who control it...? Was anyone genuinely under th delusion that it was any different when it was Bezos' benefit to placate the progressives?
- crazygringo 2y ago
  > doesn't always and necessarily present the views of those who control it...? Of course it doesn't. > Was anyone genuinely under th delusion that it was any different It wasn't a delusion, it was. It's generally been the policy of editorial pages to print a diverse set of opinions pieces that contradict each other. And that aren't under control of the owner, look up the term "editorial independence". This isn't a question of being "under a delusion", it's simply how American newspapers have traditionally operated because it was good for business. Media owners have generally prioritized making money, not "presenting their views".
  - starfezzy 2y ago
    Imagine believing that, not only after living past age 5 where you start to develop a complex model of reality beyond "what seems simple and straightforward is true", but after growing into full adulthood and recognizing what is widely known to be profitable in "news"—which is selling a narrative to a target audience. This is so elementary that anyone can see it. It's commonly mentioned in precisely the mainstream "respectable" publications like WaPo. There's almost certainly industry jargon and marketing models for it, and technical terminology and decades of documentation about it, if I were to ask any LLM what the words and concepts are.
mc32 2y ago
[flagged]
- lmz 2y ago
  Hell, look at how grey the parent comment is.
  - ummonk 2y ago
    Getting downvoted for stating something blatantly false isn’t censorship.
    - mc32 2y ago
      Are you saying those topics were covered fairly and honestly by legacy media but also including Twitter(before it became X) and Facebook? Maddow still pretends that all of the former were false stories and Russian disinformation when it’s been established the contrary was true. Additionally USaid is now known to have assisted with the actual disinformation
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
pj_mukh 2y ago
Also, doesn't this just turn WaPo into WSJ that harps on these pillars everyday? This doesn't seem like a very sound market decision either. It's always funny to hear about media bias with obvious very large alternatives available. It was very eery hearing about the Media's supposed Liberal biases through the 2020 and 2024 election campaigns with Fox News fully dominating viewership numbers [1]. And now here we go again with print media. [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/cable-news/ https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/cable-news...
- silisili 2y ago
  I think it's conflating a bit two ideas. Number of outlets vs number of viewers. I feel an argument could be made for either case, selectively. If we assume, for example sake, the country is exactly 50% left and 50% right, it makes sense that Fox, as the sole 'big' right wing news would dominate ratings. Then you have CNN and MSNBC as left leaning outlets, so they outnumber Fox, but split viewership. According to the link above, if they merged, they'd have about the same viewership as Fox, which makes sense.
  - schmidtleonard 2y ago
    CNN is not relentlessly partisan in the same way that Fox and MSNBC are. Keep pushing on that Overton window, though. It's a good hustle.
    - EasyMark 2y ago
      right I agree. Fox and MSNBC are relentlessly one-sided, though if you fact check the two you'll find that Fox is -heavily- the leader in misinformation. CNN has actually gotten quite a bit more centric and it's easy to spot partisan people who act like they're shills for the Democrats. Another good source is AP News and BBC .
      - kernal 2y ago
        The only host that is centric is Scott Jennings. The other hosts are clearly far left.
rayiner 2y ago
[flagged]
- mmooss 2y ago
  > nationwide riots That wasn't what was happening. Suppressing protest with soldiers - which is usually justified by dictators with the excuse of 'order' - is extreme and anti-freedom.
  - cynicalkane 2y ago
    That was what was happening. In Minnesota, the governer and future Democratic VP candidate, Tim Walz, sent in the national guard to stop it. The paradox of government force, and the need to manage that paradox, has been one of the foundational questions -- the foundational question to some -- of liberal philosophy since its first writers. Freedom isn't just freedom from the government, it's also freedom from others who might hurt you and destroy the place you live. It's worth pointing out the Minneapolis police department completely abandoned the city to let burn.
    - krsdcbl 2y ago
      supposedly idealistically opposed parties doing something that is in the sense of the argument doesn't prove the argument. Walz might very well have been just as wrong
  - rayiner 2y ago
    There were riots. Every store window in my wife’s office block was broken. During the Freddie Gray riots Governor Hogan called in the Maryland national guard and it was the most popular thing he ever did: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/04/27/402639082/seven-officers-hurt-in-clashes-with-baltimore-police https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/04/27/402639082...
    - mmooss 2y ago
      A few smashed windows is not a riot, nor nationwide riots, nor requiring doing what Cotton advocated. Popularity is certainly not at all a reason to suppress liberty. I witnessed some of the 'riots'; what I saw was perfectly safe except for a very small physical area - maybe spots of, very approximately, 50 sq ft - and even there you were probably safe. There was no danger to the public, some danger to some windows. I've seen worse in team victory celebrations. I saw much worse at the Capitol, where they were beating people and some died.
mmooss 2y ago
> "Personal liberties" appears to be a new construction that is conspicuously different from "civil liberties" What have Bezos or Lewis said that indicate 'personal liberties' differ from 'civil liberties'? I don't see it in the cited article.
- frereubu 2y ago
  Civil liberties are generally liberties that are explicitly guaranteed, e.g. in a constitution, while personal liberties are generally anything that's not explicitly banned, so there's a definite shift of emphasis.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    > personal liberties are generally anything that's not explicitly banned I haven't heard that. Where does that definition come from, and where did Bezos embrace the definition and reject civil liberties?
    - hackyhacky 2y ago
      > Where does that definition come from, and where did Bezos embrace the definition and reject civil liberties? Good question. This use of the term has become a popular dog whistle [0] in right-wing circles. It would take a bit of research to see how it was coined in its current form. They know that when you say "personal liberty," you really mean "my liberty is more important than your civil rights." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)
      - mmooss 2y ago
        That's interesting. I didn't know how it was being used.
      - Acrobatic_Road 2y ago
        All you did was link to the wikipedia article on dog whistling. Do you have a source that actually substantiates your claim about the phrase "personal liberties"?
matrix87 2y ago
> At the end of the day I expect the quality of discourse to dip I expect it to stay exactly the same It was already like this before, it's just afaik the pillars weren't publicly acknowledged What were the previous pillars? Social justice and progressive ideology. "Diversity of opinion" matters now all of sudden?
- lazyeye 2y ago
  Exactly.
alephnerd 2y ago
> "Personal liberties" Over the past few weeks, it's felt like this term has become a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)". It's tough as someone who is a strong proponent for strong civil liberties seeing their philosophy's verbiage being co-opted as such (but the former PM/PMM in me respects game) > 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. In Turkiye, Hungary, a lot of Latin America (notably Mexico, Brazil), Russia in the early 2010s, CEE EU member states (Yes Czechs and Poles, continue to be high and mighty on HN and Reddit until Babis and PiS win again the next couple months thanks to your parents in Brno or Wroclaw), Israel, South Korea, and India, this meant the rise of independent blogs and media - sort of like what Substack is trying but failing to do. Plenty of senior journalists who felt over-muzzled would split off and form their own independent blog companies and those increasingly supplemented legacy press orgs amongst leadership, because even an illiberal democracy, you need some unbiased info. Of course, unlike the US, plenty of journalists in those countries have bar licenses and know how to parry judicial overreach. It also meant the opposition had balls and wasn't afraid to lie if needed as well. Politics is a brawl, not a Socratic session in a Gov94 Seminar, but these are also countries where junior party members from opposing parties beating each up with fists or a tire iron is a rite of passage.
- rurp 2y ago
  Is Substack really failing? I don't have any particular insight into the business as a whole but I do see quite a few prominent political writers on there who seem happy with their traffic and reach.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    As a business they are doing decent (kick myself for not participating in one of their earlier rounds, and potentially turbocharging my career). But from the standpoint of an independent news organization, they suck. If you as an independent commentator are tied to a centralized platform, you are a feature to be sold, and will be muzzled or deprecated if needed.
hammock 2y ago
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=civil+liberties%2Cpersonal+liberty&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&case_insensitive=true&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=civil+libertie...
psychlops 2y ago
It's only the opinion section. It just seems like a pivot to a business paper, perhaps shifting to more competition with the WSJ.
jrm4 2y ago
It's high time we stop being surprised by the seeming oblivousness/stupidity of our rich folks. Say it with me: "Domain-Specific Knowledge."

by lsy 2y ago

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

Inequality continues to rise rapidly. Everyone but the most well off living conditions continue to decline. The wealthy elite need to make stories that distract people from this problem. So they will blame immigrants and "bloated inefficient governments" for the problem. And will push anti-immigration and "personal liberty" and "more free markets" as the solution. Instead of the obvious problem that Inequality is rising and we need to substantially raise taxes on the rich and reduce them for everyone else to close the runaway gap.

amazingamazing 2y ago
what level of income and/or wealth constitutes rich and how much should they be taxed?
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  What percent of your money comes from labor vs capital appreciation? Which is the hand that feeds you? Below $1M NW, you are probably labor. Above $10M NW, you are probably capital. These thresholds come from asking the question "does a conservative estimation of the passive income from these assets replace a wage?" -- below $1M, no, above $10M, yes, feel free to adjust by playing with the assumptions or plugging in wacky edge cases. The point is that incentives determine so much about politics and the incentives of each individual tend to heavily favor one side or the other which tends to translate into politically relevant policy preferences that favor one side or the other. The tax code is comically tilted in favor of capital. We should fix that. Unearned income shouldn't be taxed less than earned income, for a start. Also, if I can pay property tax on my house, mega-billionaires can pay property tax on their stock pile. But these are details, and focusing too much on details can be a distraction from the root issue: the tax code is comically tilted in favor of capital, and we should fix that.
  - mempko 2y ago
    This is a great answer, thanks!
  - robertlagrant 2y ago

torben-friis 2y ago

I wonder if there is some sort of breach of fiduciary duty or securities fraud claim here. This move seems likely to alienate subscribers (both for potentially being against their ideology, and more importantly, for implying lack of freedom of expression that customers would demand from a newspaper). It is also likely to lose them talent. The move seems to benefit bezos personally by using the newspaper as a mouthpiece, even if the newspaper itself as a business is damaged in the process.

zepton 2y ago
Jeff Bezos completely owns the Washington Post - there aren't any external shareholders that could be harmed, or are owed a fiduciary duty.
- torben-friis 2y ago
  Ah, my bad, I thought it was public and he had the majority.
tolerance 2y ago
You used some big terms that I just had to take a cursory glance at to get the meaning of but it sounds like if what you’re describing ever picked up steam it would set an ill precedent and benefit the spirit of polarization that I think you’re trying to oppose.

starfezzy 2y ago

Implying any publication with a financier/owner and an editorial staff doesn't always and necessarily present the views of those who control it...? Was anyone genuinely under th delusion that it was any different when it was Bezos' benefit to placate the progressives?

crazygringo 2y ago
> doesn't always and necessarily present the views of those who control it...? Of course it doesn't. > Was anyone genuinely under th delusion that it was any different It wasn't a delusion, it was. It's generally been the policy of editorial pages to print a diverse set of opinions pieces that contradict each other. And that aren't under control of the owner, look up the term "editorial independence". This isn't a question of being "under a delusion", it's simply how American newspapers have traditionally operated because it was good for business. Media owners have generally prioritized making money, not "presenting their views".
- starfezzy 2y ago
  Imagine believing that, not only after living past age 5 where you start to develop a complex model of reality beyond "what seems simple and straightforward is true", but after growing into full adulthood and recognizing what is widely known to be profitable in "news"—which is selling a narrative to a target audience. This is so elementary that anyone can see it. It's commonly mentioned in precisely the mainstream "respectable" publications like WaPo. There's almost certainly industry jargon and marketing models for it, and technical terminology and decades of documentation about it, if I were to ask any LLM what the words and concepts are.

mc32 2y ago

[flagged]

lmz 2y ago
Hell, look at how grey the parent comment is.
- ummonk 2y ago
  Getting downvoted for stating something blatantly false isn’t censorship.
  - mc32 2y ago
    Are you saying those topics were covered fairly and honestly by legacy media but also including Twitter(before it became X) and Facebook? Maddow still pretends that all of the former were false stories and Russian disinformation when it’s been established the contrary was true. Additionally USaid is now known to have assisted with the actual disinformation
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

pj_mukh 2y ago

Also, doesn't this just turn WaPo into WSJ that harps on these pillars everyday? This doesn't seem like a very sound market decision either. It's always funny to hear about media bias with obvious very large alternatives available. It was very eery hearing about the Media's supposed Liberal biases through the 2020 and 2024 election campaigns with Fox News fully dominating viewership numbers [1]. And now here we go again with print media. [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/cable-news/ https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/cable-news...

silisili 2y ago
I think it's conflating a bit two ideas. Number of outlets vs number of viewers. I feel an argument could be made for either case, selectively. If we assume, for example sake, the country is exactly 50% left and 50% right, it makes sense that Fox, as the sole 'big' right wing news would dominate ratings. Then you have CNN and MSNBC as left leaning outlets, so they outnumber Fox, but split viewership. According to the link above, if they merged, they'd have about the same viewership as Fox, which makes sense.
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  CNN is not relentlessly partisan in the same way that Fox and MSNBC are. Keep pushing on that Overton window, though. It's a good hustle.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    right I agree. Fox and MSNBC are relentlessly one-sided, though if you fact check the two you'll find that Fox is -heavily- the leader in misinformation. CNN has actually gotten quite a bit more centric and it's easy to spot partisan people who act like they're shills for the Democrats. Another good source is AP News and BBC .
    - kernal 2y ago
      The only host that is centric is Scott Jennings. The other hosts are clearly far left.

rayiner 2y ago

[flagged]

mmooss 2y ago
> nationwide riots That wasn't what was happening. Suppressing protest with soldiers - which is usually justified by dictators with the excuse of 'order' - is extreme and anti-freedom.
- cynicalkane 2y ago
  That was what was happening. In Minnesota, the governer and future Democratic VP candidate, Tim Walz, sent in the national guard to stop it. The paradox of government force, and the need to manage that paradox, has been one of the foundational questions -- the foundational question to some -- of liberal philosophy since its first writers. Freedom isn't just freedom from the government, it's also freedom from others who might hurt you and destroy the place you live. It's worth pointing out the Minneapolis police department completely abandoned the city to let burn.
  - krsdcbl 2y ago
    supposedly idealistically opposed parties doing something that is in the sense of the argument doesn't prove the argument. Walz might very well have been just as wrong
- rayiner 2y ago
  There were riots. Every store window in my wife’s office block was broken. During the Freddie Gray riots Governor Hogan called in the Maryland national guard and it was the most popular thing he ever did: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/04/27/402639082/seven-officers-hurt-in-clashes-with-baltimore-police https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/04/27/402639082...
  - mmooss 2y ago
    A few smashed windows is not a riot, nor nationwide riots, nor requiring doing what Cotton advocated. Popularity is certainly not at all a reason to suppress liberty. I witnessed some of the 'riots'; what I saw was perfectly safe except for a very small physical area - maybe spots of, very approximately, 50 sq ft - and even there you were probably safe. There was no danger to the public, some danger to some windows. I've seen worse in team victory celebrations. I saw much worse at the Capitol, where they were beating people and some died.

mmooss 2y ago

> "Personal liberties" appears to be a new construction that is conspicuously different from "civil liberties" What have Bezos or Lewis said that indicate 'personal liberties' differ from 'civil liberties'? I don't see it in the cited article.

frereubu 2y ago
Civil liberties are generally liberties that are explicitly guaranteed, e.g. in a constitution, while personal liberties are generally anything that's not explicitly banned, so there's a definite shift of emphasis.
- mmooss 2y ago
  > personal liberties are generally anything that's not explicitly banned I haven't heard that. Where does that definition come from, and where did Bezos embrace the definition and reject civil liberties?
  - hackyhacky 2y ago
    > Where does that definition come from, and where did Bezos embrace the definition and reject civil liberties? Good question. This use of the term has become a popular dog whistle [0] in right-wing circles. It would take a bit of research to see how it was coined in its current form. They know that when you say "personal liberty," you really mean "my liberty is more important than your civil rights." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)
    - mmooss 2y ago
      That's interesting. I didn't know how it was being used.
    - Acrobatic_Road 2y ago
      All you did was link to the wikipedia article on dog whistling. Do you have a source that actually substantiates your claim about the phrase "personal liberties"?

matrix87 2y ago

> At the end of the day I expect the quality of discourse to dip I expect it to stay exactly the same It was already like this before, it's just afaik the pillars weren't publicly acknowledged What were the previous pillars? Social justice and progressive ideology. "Diversity of opinion" matters now all of sudden?

lazyeye 2y ago
Exactly.

alephnerd 2y ago

> "Personal liberties" Over the past few weeks, it's felt like this term has become a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)". It's tough as someone who is a strong proponent for strong civil liberties seeing their philosophy's verbiage being co-opted as such (but the former PM/PMM in me respects game) > 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. In Turkiye, Hungary, a lot of Latin America (notably Mexico, Brazil), Russia in the early 2010s, CEE EU member states (Yes Czechs and Poles, continue to be high and mighty on HN and Reddit until Babis and PiS win again the next couple months thanks to your parents in Brno or Wroclaw), Israel, South Korea, and India, this meant the rise of independent blogs and media - sort of like what Substack is trying but failing to do. Plenty of senior journalists who felt over-muzzled would split off and form their own independent blog companies and those increasingly supplemented legacy press orgs amongst leadership, because even an illiberal democracy, you need some unbiased info. Of course, unlike the US, plenty of journalists in those countries have bar licenses and know how to parry judicial overreach. It also meant the opposition had balls and wasn't afraid to lie if needed as well. Politics is a brawl, not a Socratic session in a Gov94 Seminar, but these are also countries where junior party members from opposing parties beating each up with fists or a tire iron is a rite of passage.

rurp 2y ago
Is Substack really failing? I don't have any particular insight into the business as a whole but I do see quite a few prominent political writers on there who seem happy with their traffic and reach.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  As a business they are doing decent (kick myself for not participating in one of their earlier rounds, and potentially turbocharging my career). But from the standpoint of an independent news organization, they suck. If you as an independent commentator are tied to a centralized platform, you are a feature to be sold, and will be muzzled or deprecated if needed.

hammock 2y ago

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=civil+liberties%2Cpersonal+liberty&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&case_insensitive=true&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=civil+libertie...

psychlops 2y ago

It's only the opinion section. It just seems like a pivot to a business paper, perhaps shifting to more competition with the WSJ.

jrm4 2y ago

It's high time we stop being surprised by the seeming oblivousness/stupidity of our rich folks. Say it with me: "Domain-Specific Knowledge."