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Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- antegamisou 1y agoAny billionaire-regulated (N"P"R my ass) major news media company accusing other billionaire-owned major news media companies of bias is being hypocritical.
- morshu9001 1y agoArticle start mentions WaPo not endorsing Harris, as if they're supposed to. I was glad hearing it, but turns out it's only because they have a new master due to Bezos-Trump ties. Wonder about LA Times too, they used to also endorse Dems.
- scottlamb 1y ago> Article start mentions WaPo not endorsing Harris, as if they're supposed to. I was glad hearing it, but turns out it's only because they have a new master due to Bezos-Trump ties. Right: it's not just that they didn't endorse Harris. [1] It's that they had a 36-year tradition of endorsing a presidential candidate, had planned to endorse Harris, and then were overridden by their owner in a way that became really public. I expect the editorial positions (or lack thereof) to be chosen by senior journalists, not billionaires. My subscription may or may not be among the 300,000 cancellations mentioned in the story. I turned off autorenew nearly a year ago; my subscription expires in a few days. [1] Though I did feel that endorsement would be appropriate. I voted for her, and everything that's happened since has only confirmed to me that she would have been a far better choice than Trump.
- morshu9001 1y agoI agree she would've been the better choice, but a supposedly unbiased newspaper can't also make such an endorsement, they had to pick one.
- scottlamb 1y agoTo me an unbiased newspaper is one that confines their opinions to the op/ed section, striving for neutrality/objectivity elsewhere. Are you saying this section shouldn't exist at all? Or that it should be limited to...what, something other than politics?
- morshu9001 1y agoEditorials are ok if they showcase a variety of viewpoints, even if it's not balanced. If the board collectively decides on a single candidate, I think most people get the impression that this reflects the newspaper as a whole. Especially endorsing the same party for nearly 50 years to the point where it's expected as a sign of allegience, and non-allegience if they stop. It meant a lot.
- 11101010001100 1y agoThis is the sort of stuff that happens when someone who had one good idea long ago has run out of good ideas.
- axpy906 1y agoI am both bemused and disappointed that the top comments are all political. Kind of plays into what Billionaires like Bezos would want - the commoners bickering and not united.
- WalterBright 1y agoEvery media company is subject to the bias of the person or entity that owns it.
- yubblegum 1y agoRather incredible that this needs to be pointed out, specially given the history of press ownership in this nation. Rosebud! /g
- WalterBright 1y agoYeah, I'm bemused at all the "I'm shocked, shocked to hear that the owner influences the content!"
- HEmanZ 1y agoOnly tangentially related, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what media format for consumption would inherently produce the least biased, most informed public. After reading “Amusing Ourselves to Death” last week I’m convinced that in a democracy, political media consumption format is destiny (or at least shapes the equilibrium) and has more to do with the information bias in the system (when that system consists of profit maximizing news sources). Current major models seem fundamentally less biased (on average) as a form of media than either television or social media. And they have a built-in incentive not to be too biased in the long run (maybe, this is just a vague thought): being too biased makes you have more incorrect predictions. Could the right kind AI consumable media reverse the trend of ever more biased media?
- xp84 1y ago> The decision to cancel the Harris editorial led to more than 300,000 cancellations by digital subscribers. This is what it’s really (still) about. Partisans are mad that the publisher of this paper didn’t let them rubber-stamp Team Blue - regardless of the incredibly deep flaws of the candidate[1]. Note that not endorsing Harris didn’t mean endorsing the also deeply flawed and corrupt Trump. I voted for neither of those hacks and endorsing either would have been an embarrassment. [1] coronating a nominee - without a primary - who was known to be so deeply disliked by so vast a majority of the Democratic voters that she had dropped out of the 2020 race before Iowa should have been a huge red flag to anyone.
- embedding-shape 1y ago> When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post. - https://archive.is/flIDl https://archive.is/flIDl It kind of shocks me how someone seemingly can understand those things, but then continue to try to helm the ship. You know you're having a negative impact, why stay at that point, unless you have some ulterior motive? I don't feel like Washington Post becoming a shadow of itself is any surprise, when even the owner is aware of the effect they have on the publication, yet do absolutely nothing to try to change it. Disclaimer: former subscriber, part of the exodus that left when the publication became explicitly "pro-capitalism" under the guise of "personal liberties" or something like that.
- JohnMakin 1y agoIt’s part of the centi billionaire class power grab playbook. each one of them for the most part has some major media interests. if you can control and dictate the narrative, for a while no one can protest you, and maybe they won’t notice for a while that their futures are being robbed to enrich a handful of extremely vain white men. by the time they do, it’s likely too late.
- AndrewKemendo 1y agoThis is called “managing the narrative” It’s a classic hallmark technique of advanced psychopaths wherein you agree with reality but don’t change it because as long as you acknowledge it, most people assume you’ll “do your best.” So all you have to do is acknowledge it, and as long as there’s nobody who can force you to do anything then there’s no obvious way to address it without escalation - that escalation being the reason then for claiming you’re attacked and then you have carte blanche to “simply defend yourself” Do that long enough and people get tired and move on and you just cemented your place further
- davisr 1y agoIf you think this kind of reporting is cool, you should donate to https://fair.org https://fair.org. Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) has been exposing two-faced news for decades. They are worthy of your attention.
- pyuser583 1y agoFair has its own issues - or did last I checked which was a while ago. They used to claim reporters were biased towards the right. That used to be a left-wing claim, but it’s no longer credible. Something like 90% of reporters are left-wing. Maybe they’ve reformed, and aren’t in the business of providing partisan talking points anymore.
- jquery 1y ago>90% of reporters are left wing Citation very much needed. Also, what percent of reporting news organization owners are left wing?
- bpt3 1y agoThey're so far left that nearly everyone seems right wing to them. It's a persistent problem for people on the fringes of the political spectrum. I guess if they were aware of this, they probably wouldn't be on the fringe in the first place.
- kridsdale3 1y agoAnd now that Zuck has nuked Facebook AI Research org, they get their acronymic exclusivity back.
- zargon 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAIR_(Mormon_apologetics_organization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAIR_(Mormon_apologetics_organ...
- BeetleB 1y agoI second that. When I was a news junkie, I would love reading their (occasional) posts. Glad they're still around.
- placardloop 1y agoThe title makes it seem like this is a major or systemic issue, but the article content essentially says this was a one-off, potentially a mistaken omission that was fixed within 24 hours. The article itself even states that the Post routinely discloses its ties to Bezos in its reporting and this was an anomaly. I used to read the Post (I’m not a subscriber anymore) but I do distinctly remember seeing such a disclosure all over the place. Is this an attempt at outrage clicks? Edit: people saying I didn’t read the article apparently didn’t read it themselves. From the article: > The Post has resolutely revealed such entanglements to readers of news coverage or commentary in the past … since 2013, those of Bezos, who founded Amazon and Blue Origin. Even now, the newspaper's reporters do so as a matter of routine. So at minimum the article disagrees with itself, but it seems the outrage bait is working hook line and sinker. Edit 2: To try and be a little clearer here: the article is trying to (but in my opinion doing a really poor job of) make a distinction between the disclosures that the non-editorial WaPo authors do, and the disclosures that the editorial authors do, with the assertion that the editorial authors are worse at it.
- arusahni 1y agoThere are two additional recent ones mentioned in the article: > On Oct. 15, the Post heralded the military's push for a new generation of smaller nuclear reactors. "No 'microreactor' currently operates in the United States, but it's a worthy gamble that could provide benefits far beyond its military applications," the Post wrote in its editorial. > A year ago, Amazon bought a stake in X-energy to develop small nuclear reactors to power its data centers. And through his own private investment fund, Bezos has a stake in a Canadian venture seeking nuclear fusion technology. and > Three days after the nuclear power editorial, the Post weighed in on the need for local authorities in Washington, D.C., to speed the approval of the use of self-driving cars in the nation's capital. The editorial was headlined: "Why D.C. is stalling on self-driving cars: Safety is a phony excuse for slamming the brakes on autonomous vehicles." > Fewer than three weeks before, the Amazon-owned autonomous car company Zoox had announced D.C. was to be its next market. Edit to respond to your edit: these are the opinion pages, not reporting.
- afavour 1y agoThe article does not say this was a one-off: > On at least three occasions in the past two weeks Bezos announced a relaunch of the Opinion section earlier in the year, I don't think it's unreasonable to wonder if there has been a policy change. Three times in two weeks is a lot. > potentially a mistaken omission that was fixed within 24 hours potentially, yes. Responsible news organizations post correction notices when they make an omission like this, but WaPo did not (despite having a history of doing so, again, a notable change in practice)
- skybrian 1y agoMy initial reaction to the White House ballroom was “the next president should tear it down and put it back the way it was, just on principle.” I was surprised by that editorial and thought it made a good (or at least arguable) point that it’s needed and the next president will be glad to have it, instead of doing large official gatherings in tents. I’m more neutral on it now. I don’t really know what facilities the White House needs, but think the case should be made on practical grounds. Perhaps some other writer could go into that in more depth? But as editorials go, it didn’t seem like a bad one, and I don’t think adding a disclaimer about a conflict changes that much. Separately, raising money through corporate “donations” seems like a huge loophole for corruption.
- mey 1y agoIs the Whitehouse fit for purpose in the modern age? Probably not. Is it a symbol of the country? Yes. Messing with that symbol on what seems to be a whim funded by corporate interests rather than doing something public and methodical is disgusting. Especially with a government shutdown. We aren't even getting bread and circuses, just Nero at this point.
- buellerbueller 1y agoSorry you're getting downvoted, but you're commenting on an article about conflicts of interest, among the crowd with the conflicts of interest. Silicon Valley, Venture Capital: they're the sociopaths whose current project is "disrupting" democratic governance.
- mey 1y agoThank you for your concern, but there is thankfully more to life than fake internet points.
- eszed 1y agoIt's a much more fitting symbol now than it was before.
- webdoodle 1y agoCitizen's United destroyed journalism by making it for profit propaganda for the wealthy, but its always been under attack. Journalism has always been under attack from the wealthy robber barons of the time. Rockefeller famously bought out the magazine/newspaper that muckraker Ida Tarbell wrote for after she wrote a damning book about Standard Oil. However, it only hardened her and other muckrakers, who later led to the break up of Standard Oil, term limits, and other restrains on the abuse of power. I find the parallels between then and now quite striking. Except today's boogeymen have rebranded and call themselves tech billionaires. They got ahead of muckrakers by owning journalism, media, and social media, and have used there Pinkertons (Trust and Safety Teams) to censoring anyone who speaks out against them. There are good journalists out there though. I think a modern equivalent of Ida Tarbell may be Whitney Webb for writing One Nation under Blackmail about the Epstein Files. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_Tarbell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_Tarbell https://unlimitedhangout.com/ https://unlimitedhangout.com/
- pessimizer 1y ago[flagged]
- astrange 1y agoYou might have forgotten what US healthcare was like before the ACA. The ACA was good. It successfully bent the cost curve and now you don't immediately get banned from health insurance for life if you get cancer. > Romneycare It's called that because the Democratic legislature forced him to pass it, not because he liked it.
- dragonwriter 1y agoIt was modeled fairly directly on a proposal drafted as a federal alternative to the Clinton healthcare plan by lobbyists for the insurance industry and embraced by Republican national leadership in that context (which they then stopped talking about once the Clinton plan went down in flames.)
- terminalshort 1y ago
- clircle 1y agoDo we really hold editorials to the same standard as the rest of the news? These are opinion pieces, you should expect bias, no?
- mmooss 1y agoYou can have bias without losing honesty and accuracy. The latter is the problem.
- eviks 1y agoYou should respect bias in the news as well, so pick a different criterion. Also the substance of bias doesn't become irrelevant just because you expect bias.
- delfinom 1y agoPeople are upset over the wrong bias lol
- embedding-shape 1y agoRegardless if it's in the opinions sections, if the author/publisher has clear biases, especially financial ones, they're disclosed somewhere in/next to the piece.
- next_xibalba 1y agoI just can’t believe people even read editorials. In the news outlets I read, they are clearly marked and it makes an easy and instant “skip”.
- balozi 1y agoThere is a reason they publish opeds right next to hard news. Its not by accident.
- insane_dreamer 1y agoBecause the editorial authors are employees of the news organization, they must disclose the conflict of interest between their employer and its owner or parent organization and the matter they are reporting on. Let's say an editorial piece says "AWS is the best cloud service" but fails to disclose that its owner also owns AWS, that would be a breach of journalistic ethics. Similar case here.
- coliveira 1y agoThe ideal solution is to stop reading newspapers/sites owned by Bezos. I give the WP zero credibility for anything that is not factual. Even then they will distort the facts with opinions that are aligned to Bezos.
- ilamont 1y agoWSJ is not owned by Jeff Bezos, but by another billionaire Rupert Murdoch. By all means skip the Wall Street Journal's sneering editorials, but don't ignore the reporting. For example, the Theranos scandal was blown open by the WSJ's John Carreyrou. They've done good reporting on Tesla, Epstein, Amazon, and others.
- mmooss 1y agoHow do you see the WSJ as not biased, when it's owned by Murdoch, who openly interferes in and biases Fox News, as has been demonstrated numerous times including in massive losses in court. Do you think Murdoch wouldn't do that at the WSJ? With that signal and the editorial page, I think it's wishful thinking to think the rest isn't biased - people just don't want to lose that institution. Much can be done without the reader knowing - omissions, slant, etc. In the end, you must trust them to a degree.
- rtpg 1y agoThe core idea with this stuff is you can know about the bias and read with that in mind. You can treat even the facts with doubts, and understanding that the descriptions used can be influenced by what the writers believe. You can come away and consciously say "I know nothing more about the world than I did before reading this article, except for what Murdoch thinks about this". And sometimes you'll see something that is "merely" true and you can absorb that information. Or mentally correct based on the biases. Information collection works even when the person presenting the information has an agenda! It's often possible to mentally unbias reporting when you have a good understanding of the paper's tendancies, and then pull out useful information!
- coliveira 1y agoI 100% agree, but need to add that npr also has financial ties to very powerful oligarchs that need to be disclosed. For example, here is what I get when researching the largest donors to npr: "NPR's largest single donor was the estate of Joan B. Kroc, who left a bequest of over $200 million in 2003. Other major donors include foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which have contributed millions to specific projects, as well as the Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation"
- senderista 1y agoAnd they constantly mention those donors during their news programs!
- archagon 1y agoEstate bequeathals and foundation grants are a far cry from direct ownership and editorial control by a single oligarch.
- coliveira 1y agoFar cry or not, they're also funded by oligarchs as well.
- archagon 1y agoIt sounds to me like they're funded by estates and foundations, not directly by oligarchs. (In fact, most of the names in your comment are long dead.) And in any case, there's no evidence that any of these organizations are reaching in and demanding direct control over NPR's editorial direction. You are attempting to draw a parallel where there simply is none.
- istjohn 1y agoDonations from multiple foundations, most of which were created by people long dead, are hardly comparable to ownership by a wealthy, living business magnate.
- mhb 1y agoI’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust. https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...
- samtp 1y agoSo a proud 2 time Trump voted says that NRP lost America's trust because they attacked Trump too many times to a new outlet founded by Bari Weiss? Then after resigning from NPR goes on to work for that same outlet? Forgive me if I find his opinion and the article useless.
- mhb 1y agoYou don't seem to have refuted anything he has written.
- neaden 1y agoWhat does this have to do with the article?
- morshu9001 1y agoArticle is NPR's
- drak0n1c 1y agoThe hollowing out of the readership by ideologically partisan staff is what led to publications becoming overly dependent on the subsidy of wealthy owners, rather than a wider pool of paid subscribers.
- morshu9001 1y agoNever thought of it this way before. Maybe, but are there papers that remained balanced without losing too many subscribers? Tech age has been overall tough for them.
- fdschoeneman 1y agoI agree that Bezos should have disclosed his links to the construction through Amazon, but I also think every single reporter for NPR, including and especially the one who wrote this, should disclose their personal, family, and political relationships to political parties and politicians before reporting on them. One standard.
- seattle_spring 1y agoYou're saying that the rank-and-file employees of a public radio station should be held to the same standard as billionaire owners of private news media conglomerates?
- axpy906 1y agoProbably relates to some of the political controversies surrounding the source NPR here: https://grokipedia.com/page/NPR_controversies https://grokipedia.com/page/NPR_controversies
- jgeada 1y agoRight, because the guy earning a normal salary has as much influence as the billionaire that is rubbing shoulders with and paying bribes to the decision makers, and also controls the editorial policy, salary and employment of the newspaper in question. Sometimes quantity of money has a quality all of its own.
- ideonexus 1y agoThe Saturday editorial "Trump's undertaking is a shot across the bow at NIMBYs everywhere," was the final straw for me. I can forgive an editorial defending Trump's actions--no matter how misguided, but the fact that the WaPo did not disclose Bezos' personal interests in the matter infuriated me bitterly. According to NPR, they corrected the omission on Sunday, but I'm done. That subscription money now goes to my local NPR station. Anytime NPR covers anything related to Microsoft, they always provide the disclosure of receiving funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. That is what legitimate news sources are supposed to do.
- IIAOPSW 1y agoIts impressive how well Bezos has convinced everyone to stop trusting WaPo rather than WaPo convincing everyone to trust Bezos. A paper owned by a wealthy financial interest was hardly unique or novel at the time he took them over, and no one would have been more concerned about it than they already were, and all he had to do was not be overt in his influence and bias of it, but he couldn't refrain.
- JeremyNT 1y ago> Its impressive how well Bezos has convinced everyone to stop trusting WaPo rather than WaPo convincing everyone to trust Bezos. A paper owned by a wealthy financial interest was hardly unique or novel at the time he took them over, and no one would have been more concerned about it than they already were, and all he had to do was not be overt in his influence and bias of it, but he couldn't refrain. My hypothesis is that his current heavy handed editorial intervention is designed to convince only a single person: the President of the United States. It's presumably worth burning the paper's reputation in order to curry favor with a mercurial and vengeful autocrat who controls the power of the federal government's purse. In 3 (or 7?) years, perhaps he will reevaluate.
- netsharc 1y ago[flagged]
- p_j_w 1y agoI think many people, even here, are infected with “It can’t happen here.”
- serial_dev 1y agoThe best predictor of future events is past experience. Every US president in history has left office peacefully, the most probable outcome is that future presidents will too. Similarly, some people always think that the current president will crown himself a king and the Other Party will never ever be able to get into power. And these people have been so far always wrong. I’m not saying it can’t happen this time, but in my opinion, it is unlikely. The real skeptical in me says it doesn’t even matter, no matter who you vote for, you’ll get John McCain.