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The article does not say this was a one-off: > On at least three occasions in the past two weeks Bezos announced a relaunch of the Opinion section earlier in

The article does not say this was a one-off: > On at least three occasions in the past two weeks Bezos announced a relaunch of the Opinion section earlier in the year, I don't think it's unreasonable to wonder if there has been a policy change. Three times in two weeks is a lot. > potentially a mistaken omission that was fixed within 24 hours potentially, yes. Responsible news organizations post correction notices when they make an omission like this, but WaPo did not (despite having a history of doing so, again, a notable change in practice)

terminalshort 1y ago
In journalism you can safely assume that the truth is the absolute minimum claim that can possibly fit with the exact words used.
tpmoney 1y ago
Do Editorial and Opinion sections of news papers do "conflict of interest" disclosures as a matter of course? It seems like it should be assumed that an Opinion article is expressly a biased article, written by someone with an interest in the topic at hand. If the NY Times wrote an editorial on schools or on medicaid, I wouldn't really expect to see a line disclosing the number of editorial staff members with children in the school systems or with family members receiving medicaid. And this is an honest question, I don't know what the WP standard for their Editorial and Opinion pages were prior to Bezos' ownership, nor what the broader industry standard was before say 2016.
- overfeed 1y ago
  > And this is an honest question, I don't know what the WP standard for their Editorial and Opinion pages were prior to Bezos' ownership, nor what the broader industry standard was before say 2016. Fortunately, the NPR journalists do know, as the article states: >> The Post has resolutely revealed such entanglements to readers of news coverage or commentary in the past[...]
  - tpmoney 1y ago
    Great, and that's followed by > Even now, the newspaper's reporters do so as a matter of routine. So, we know they "resolutely revealed" this in the past (but that is of course not the same word as "unfailingly" or even "always"), and we know that they continue to do so even to this day "as a matter of routine". But neither of those tells us anything about the current frequency compared to the past frequency. Likewise it tells us nothing about whether the "matter of routine" changed since before Bezos took ownership. Similarly it says nothing about the wider industry. Oh sure, they tell us: > Newspapers typically manage the perception with transparency. And they tell us that viewing it as a conflict of interest is "conventional", but again no information about how the WPs frequency (either before or after Bezos took ownership) compares to the industry as a whole, nor whether that frequency has actually changed. Again some numbers would be instructive here. The article says "at least 3 times in the last 2 weeks" this has occurred (and apparently been subsequently corrected). But how many times was it necessary in the last 2 weeks? If the WP published 4 articles in the last 2 weeks that would have normally had one of these disclosures, missing 3 out of 4 is a different thing than if the WP published 200 such articles in the last 2 weeks. I know it's always been a lot to ask our news reporters to actually do some fact gathering, but it hardly seems unreasonable to ask for any sort of comparative information when asserting there is a change people should be concerned about.
    - overfeed 1y ago
      > Great, and that's followed by > Even now, the newspaper's reporters do so as a matter of routine. What's the issue with the follow up? The headline says "WaPo no longer does B". I quoted the bit that says "in the past, WaPo used to resolutely do A and B" to answer your question about whether we should expect B at all, and your riposte is "the NPR article continues to say WaPo still does A". The NPR article is about WaPo stopping B, and now you have a historical baseline for B. I'm not interested in the pivot to arguing about whether news articles ought to share raw data; the way it works now is via editors, editorial standards and fact-checkers that determine if the facts support the wording. Ultimately, news outfits like NPR and the Washington Post live and die by their reputations. edit: more thoughts on quantification "Resolutely" is a stout word, IMO, which to me is a word one might be talked down to using when they mean "always" but do not have the time to prove before the publishing deadline, or need to add linguistic error-bars. If it were an option in a survey, I'd place it higher than "almost always" and just below "always"

terminalshort 1y ago

In journalism you can safely assume that the truth is the absolute minimum claim that can possibly fit with the exact words used.

tpmoney 1y ago

Do Editorial and Opinion sections of news papers do "conflict of interest" disclosures as a matter of course? It seems like it should be assumed that an Opinion article is expressly a biased article, written by someone with an interest in the topic at hand. If the NY Times wrote an editorial on schools or on medicaid, I wouldn't really expect to see a line disclosing the number of editorial staff members with children in the school systems or with family members receiving medicaid. And this is an honest question, I don't know what the WP standard for their Editorial and Opinion pages were prior to Bezos' ownership, nor what the broader industry standard was before say 2016.

overfeed 1y ago
> And this is an honest question, I don't know what the WP standard for their Editorial and Opinion pages were prior to Bezos' ownership, nor what the broader industry standard was before say 2016. Fortunately, the NPR journalists do know, as the article states: >> The Post has resolutely revealed such entanglements to readers of news coverage or commentary in the past[...]
- tpmoney 1y ago
  Great, and that's followed by > Even now, the newspaper's reporters do so as a matter of routine. So, we know they "resolutely revealed" this in the past (but that is of course not the same word as "unfailingly" or even "always"), and we know that they continue to do so even to this day "as a matter of routine". But neither of those tells us anything about the current frequency compared to the past frequency. Likewise it tells us nothing about whether the "matter of routine" changed since before Bezos took ownership. Similarly it says nothing about the wider industry. Oh sure, they tell us: > Newspapers typically manage the perception with transparency. And they tell us that viewing it as a conflict of interest is "conventional", but again no information about how the WPs frequency (either before or after Bezos took ownership) compares to the industry as a whole, nor whether that frequency has actually changed. Again some numbers would be instructive here. The article says "at least 3 times in the last 2 weeks" this has occurred (and apparently been subsequently corrected). But how many times was it necessary in the last 2 weeks? If the WP published 4 articles in the last 2 weeks that would have normally had one of these disclosures, missing 3 out of 4 is a different thing than if the WP published 200 such articles in the last 2 weeks. I know it's always been a lot to ask our news reporters to actually do some fact gathering, but it hardly seems unreasonable to ask for any sort of comparative information when asserting there is a change people should be concerned about.
  - overfeed 1y ago
    > Great, and that's followed by > Even now, the newspaper's reporters do so as a matter of routine. What's the issue with the follow up? The headline says "WaPo no longer does B". I quoted the bit that says "in the past, WaPo used to resolutely do A and B" to answer your question about whether we should expect B at all, and your riposte is "the NPR article continues to say WaPo still does A". The NPR article is about WaPo stopping B, and now you have a historical baseline for B. I'm not interested in the pivot to arguing about whether news articles ought to share raw data; the way it works now is via editors, editorial standards and fact-checkers that determine if the facts support the wording. Ultimately, news outfits like NPR and the Washington Post live and die by their reputations. edit: more thoughts on quantification "Resolutely" is a stout word, IMO, which to me is a word one might be talked down to using when they mean "always" but do not have the time to prove before the publishing deadline, or need to add linguistic error-bars. If it were an option in a survey, I'd place it higher than "almost always" and just below "always"