FAIR has always been like this since the 80s. I don't really expect these media watchdogs to be "neutral" though; it's enough that they only call out bias against their favored positions. If there are enough such orgs across the spectrum then they serve their purpose.
"Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view this site properly."
it always makes me sad when i see this. you are not reaching your target audience. fyi this seems to be a cloudflare thing. i see it everywhere. The World Wide Web seems to be going down a dark path. perhaps i do need to update my browser, but why should that matter for just reading a news site. it's like someone wants you to not have access unless you buy a new macbook(or maybe a chromebook). maybe i should just install Chrome already? i just feel like this Big Tech has crossed the line with their customers a long time ago at this point.
btw, fair.org looks interesting. i never heard of them before. Thanks!
does it similarly make you sad if your operating system tells you to update for new security patches or indicators?
the sheer volume of browser exploits - including in-the-wild exploited zero-click zero days - is frankly insane. intentionally leaving yourself unprotected is a bad choice that should be shoved back in your face, often.
> i see it everywhere.
i see it nowhere. update your software! and don't use chrome.
Browse the web with Tor via an up-to-date Firefox. You will run into this page over and over again. Speaking from experience, don't feel like looking it up on CF's docs.
edit: Just ran into the same page on Chromium 141.0.7390.122 without Tor or a VPN, but with NoScript, JShelter, and uBlock extensions enabled. It looks like JShelter + NoScript can trigger it.
This is the page you get:
> Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view this site properly.
and software monoculture is widely considered a security threat, and so by pushing software monoculture, you yourself are pushing to weaken internet security. GP should potentially be applauded (if he's not using for example IE6)
i’m genuinely fascinated by your thought process here.
how did we go from “update your software; don’t use chrome” to “you are pushing software monoculture and weakening internet security”?
as for “they were not informing him of an insecurity”, this seems to be deliberately obtuse. virtually every major browser includes (and references in their release notes!) fixes for vulnerabilities in stable version updates.
>how did we go from “update your software; don’t use chrome” to “you are pushing software monoculture and weakening internet security”?
given the audience here, i think it's more likely that OP/GP is running an up to date browser that is of an alternate architecture that has not "mainstreamed" all of google and hollywood's ad and drm friendly CSS HTML
How do you believe their reporting differs from reality? They're writing about rising authoritarianism and those who submit to it, which is a fact of the world happening today. They use the term "toady" in its literal definition. FAIR has anti-bias and counter-spin, aka "a bias towards reality."
I've never seen Manhattan Institute, Hudson Institute, or Cato Institute using the term Toady even if technically correct. It is a term almost exclusively used by the left, typically more anti-authoritarian. Maybe you have some libertarian types using it as well.
> It is a term almost exclusively used by the left
What a strange claim.
If you search the sites you cite, all of them have at least one use of "toady" or "toadies" (which only gets a few hits on fair.org as well). Meanwhile go check the national review and they seem to love the word. Maybe recheck your priors.
Why would right-wing leaning think tanks be complaining about right wing authoritarianism they’re in favor of? You’d expect them to trot out this verbiage if a populist left wing politician with authoritarian vibes came to power.
It's not quite that simple, or at least not yet. For example the Cato Institute still seems inclined pretty much towards the rule of law and against autocracy. Perhaps "Yarvin-ists" are in power, but they don't control every voice on the right.
I recall seeing the statement "Profanity is the attempt of a weak mind to express itself forcefully." Well, these childish insults and put-downs seem to me to be the same. They may sense that they don't have the intellectual horsepower to have a serious discussion about the issue, so they just insult.
Alternatively, they're not trying to have a serious conversation about the issue. They're talking to their own in-group, not to the other side, not even to those who are neutral or undecided. Instead, they're just telling their own in-group how right they are and how stupid the others are. They aren't trying to engage at all; they've given up on that. This is a deeply non-serious response - if the situation is as bad as you claim it is, why are you not trying to persuade at least the neutrals? Why are you instead doing things that make you look childish to everyone except your in-group?
I agree with everything you said, but it doesn't seem to resonate with the masses based on voting patterns here.
They don't need to have a serious conversation to succeed. Their supporters visit their site, get their dopamine hit from being told their viewpoint is correct, and they feel empowered to lash out at any dissent so the cycle continues.
They're the equivalent of a left-wing Fox News, but get very angry when that is pointed out.
Is this an argument for sophistry or propaganda? Everyone having biases doesn't preclude people from rightly pointing out bad things in the world, like creeping authoritarianism and the undermining of democracies, anymore than it did in the lead up to WW2.
Really we're all just interested in what your line for calling a person a fascist is, and what you would call the folks who did this?
"When the Pentagon announced that reporters would only be credentialed if they pledged not to report on documents not expressly released by official press handlers, free press advocates, including FAIR (9/23/25), denounced the directive as an assault on the First Amendment.
The impact of this rule cannot be understated—any reporter agreeing to such terms is essentially a deputized public relations lackey."
If you can't write with basic clarity because that makes your progressive, you might want to investigate your own bias.
Yeah, my line for calling someone fascist is not “restricting reporters access to the Pentagon”. It cheapens the word and all that it represents.
There is a wide gulf between writing with basic clarity and injecting opinions like “so and so is a toady”. I would love to see media outlets attempt to describe just the facts with as little opinion as possible. FAIR clearly does not meet that bar.
It is a necessary but not sufficient condition. But this is not that. This is, “you don’t have unfettered access to personnel and facilities.” Fascism would be “if you print that we will arrest you and maybe shut your operation down.” And maybe a paramilitary squad of goons will fire bomb your offices in the meantime. This will read as snark, but I swear it is not: read about the truly fascist regimes of history. The difference is night and day.
We've all read about them. The key lesson in every one of those stories is this: don't wait for the entire building to burn down before you pull a fire alarm.
They weren't revoked from unfettered access to the Pentagon. They were revoked from all access to the Pentagon. It's hard to be a democratic society when the institutions that make democracy possible are hindered wherever possible.
Fascism is an ideology, an approach towards government. Banning reporters from the Pentagon and the White House can be both legal and fascistic.
>So it gives the appearance of “opinionated news is good, so long as the opinions are correct.”
All news is opinionated news and some opinions are objectively better than others. For example, the simple act of choosing which story to cover is an opinionated choice and if a news outlet decided to cover a random high school teacher the same way they cover the POTUS, that would be an objectively incorrect editorial opinion.
Your understanding of the word objective differs markedly from my own.
I don’t disagree with the general spirit of what you mean. But I would love to see news outlets, and so called watch dogs, pursue the unobtainable dream of objectivity and neutrality over all others. Calling people toadies and democratically elected administrations “fascists” falls far, far short of that dream.
Some people are of the opinion that the world is flat, I would say it's objectively round. That is the context in which I'm using that word. I'm not using it to describe 100% consensus, because there will always be someone who disagrees with something.
News without opinion is objectively impossible because the act of reporting the news is inherently governed by an opinion on what is worthy to report. Pretending otherwise is just pulling the wool over your own eyes.
Yeah, yeah, true objectivity is objectively impossible. We know.
The thing is, this isn't binary. There's a sliding scale between "totally objective" and "totally biased". When you eliminate the (unattainable) standard of "total objectivity", then reporters and news organizations move more toward biased. And the difference matters. You used to be able to get news that at least tried to be unbiased, that wasn't openly pushing a narrative. That made it possible to form a more accurate (though not totally accurate) view of what was actually going on.
>You used to be able to get news that at least tried to be unbiased, that wasn't openly pushing a narrative. That made it possible to form a more accurate (though not totally accurate) view of what was actually going on.
Part of the problem with this line of thought it that a lot of bias is not intentional. There was never a moment in history in which you could pick up a newspaper with nothing but completely unbiased facts inside. Even today, most news sources aren't intentionally misleading even if they might be biased. Recognizing these inherent and subtle biases are required in order to know "what was actually going on".
There was this thing called "yellow journalism". It was very much not trying to be unbiased.
Most US 20th century journalism tried to be better than that. And, by trying, they were better than yellow journalism. Yes, there was still bias. But the difference between, say, 20% bias and 80% bias made a real difference.
So maybe today we're at 40% bias instead of 80% bias. It's still worse than it was, and the difference still matters. (And, by the way, one of the ways it matters is in peoples' trust of the media. We don't need people who are obviously trying to manipulate us; we already have enough of those.)
Except, the news calling, for example, Bush Jr a "War criminal" is exactly objective.
His Casus Belli was false, and he knew that. We invaded sovereign countries illegally.
Would you read news that openly called him a war criminal? Reality gets extreme all the time. If you police the language more than the reality, you are just making the problem worse. You are forcing people to pretend reality isn't so bad just so you do not have to fix reality.
Guess what? Reality is bad right now. We are bombing boats off the coast of south America and posturing like we are going to war with them and bailing out Argentina because of political rhetoric and affiliations and corruption, and we wasted over $150 billion harassing brown people and sending American citizens to foreign prisons and maybe catching a few people who overstayed their visas or walked over our border.
And yet you tone police the people trying to inform you of that.
Was GW Bush convicted of any war crimes? If not, then he isn't a war criminal.
You can argue that he should be, and I probably would agree with you, but an organization supposedly dedicated to unearthing biases in the media should not inject their opinions into their own reporting.
I would say that an organization that needs to be highly objective should not call him one.
They can certainly point out that he was the leader of a group that was systematically killing millions of people with physical or cultural attributes he deemed undesirable and people will reach the same obvious conclusion about him.
> They can certainly point out that he was the leader of a group that was systematically killing millions of people with physical or cultural attributes he deemed undesirable and people will reach the same obvious conclusion about him.
Because of thousands upon thousands of documented accounts from eyewitnesses and participants?
I'm aware of what you're trying to do, but there is a difference between stating a generally accepted fact that has a tiny faction of dissenters (e.g. the earth is round) and something that is not and is therefore considered an opinion.
>Because of thousands upon thousands of documented accounts from eyewitnesses and participants?
Then why can't you accept the "thousands upon thousands of documented accounts from eyewitnesses and participants" of him committing war crimes?
>I'm aware of what you're trying to do, but there is a difference between stating a generally accepted fact that has a tiny faction of dissenters (e.g. the earth is round) and something that is not and is therefore considered an opinion.
I think war crimes are bad. There is no "fact" involved in that statement, it is purely a value judgment and therefore an opinion. Yet I think it is inarguably a better opinion than believing that war crimes are good. Would you disagree?
Because the definition of a war criminal is something who was convicted of a war crime, not being accused of committing them or observed doing something that could be considered one.
You can't fact check opinions, no matter how morally superior they are to another one, so I don't know what your point is there.
Which are verified to meet a specific standard through a conviction in this case, which is the exact opposite of the scenario that generated the quote above.
Is an accused murderer still considered a murderer if they are not convicted of the crime?
This idea that something can't be confirmed as true unless a court says it is bizarre and totally antithetical to the idea of journalism. Journalists are not court stenographers.
Sometimes it is entirely reasonable to call someone a murderer even if they lack a conviction. I have no problem saying John Wilkes Booth murdered Lincoln. I have no problem saying Hitler committed war crimes. These are simply facts of history and your policing of language is implicitly arguing against those facts. So I'm going to ask you directly and I won't reply if you don't directly answer this question, do you believe that Hitler committed war crimes?
The idea that a criminal conviction needs to occur for someone to be called a criminal in the media should not be remotely controversial. Journalists certainly can and do perform research that can lead to arrests and/or convictions, but are effectively a mouthpiece for the court stenographer once a trial is underway.
An unbiased reporter would (and nearly all journalist actually do) say something like "accused <insert criminal charge here> <insert name here> <insert rest of sentence here>" at any point in a criminal proceeding prior to the jury handing down a guilty verdict.
The fact that you only seem to be able to generate examples of extremely high profile situations where the alleged perpetrator was killed while evading capture (by themselves or law enforcement) only strengthens my argument.
Or they could just say Hitler committed war crimes but killed himself before he could be put on trail. Because that's what he did. It's not an opinion.
He ordered the actions of a number of people who were convicted of war crimes. He himself was never tried because he was already dead. Still, in that case, I think we can say that yes, he was.
Fair 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.
They'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.
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.
I think many people (and the parent comment) are getting played because they don't realize the game and its stakes:
'Trust' is an issue under the old rules, in a context where an essentially democratic, free society was desired by all and where therefore public trust and a well-informed public mattered.
The new rules are about power alone, which is essentially anti-democratic. Bezos has power and he demonstrates it - demonstration is essential under the new rules - by mocking and thumbing his nose at trust and at informing the public. He uses his power to bend public opinion his way; lots of people still read the Post, and in a post-truth world, truth doesn't matter to many of them. He doesn't care about trust, and he actively and intentionally demonstrates it.
It's the context of post-truth philosophy: Words are about power, they are weapons; they are not about truth, expression, or information.
The worship (rather than distrust) of power, post-truth, it all leads to the non-democratic outcome.
IMO, the rules haven't changed at all, shit has always been bad. Ask any Black American. The silver lining to all this open corruption is that even the most milquetoast centrists of 2020 are turning into people calling for actual consequences for the corruption going on in our government.
As unpopular as Bush was in 2008, not very many people seriously thought he would be or even should be arrested. I think the patience of good people is getting severely tested in 2025 though, I think by 2028, or sooner, people will be demanding scalps.
>What, of the things I described, have Black Americans experienced more than others?
in a context where an essentially democratic, free society was desired by all, black people were systematically shut out from, (redlining, the gi bill, etc.). Like how you were supposed to trust that stop-and-frisk and the broken window policing policies were not thinly veiled attempts to over-police black neighborhoods because the paper you read or the politician you voted for told you so... but the people that were the victims knew otherwise.
> 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.
I do enjoy the theory that everyone was cynically posturing for 4 years during Biden and are now _also_ cynically posturing for Trump, because it aligns with a belief that a lot of powerful people seem to have extremely malleable beliefs.
It is a bit more interesting than "everyone took their mask off the day after the election". Plenty of hard-line right wing people in the world, of course, but at one point if you're that deep in the right all the posturing pre-2024 would be really hard to do. But if it's all cynical then any amount of posturing makes sense!
Bezos is calculating his years remaining with regards to Blue Origin and that a given President can cause severe disruption to the pathway Bezos has in mind for his organization. I'm sure his ideal would be to finely balance WaPo's reputation and his need to placate the current President, and I'm also certain with Trump it's not doable (so he'll sacrifice some of WaPo's reputation to keep progress going on Blue Origin during the Trump years).
The 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.
> You being alive today is the best predictor of you being alive tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year.
An unprecedented glioblastoma diagnosis would predict otherwise. When the facts in evidence become extraordinary, one must adapt the adage accordingly.
That's the point: you can "prove" anything by saying "the best predictor of future events is past experience" and then pointing to the obvious wrong past experience from which to extrapolate.
I'm unsure where you thought we were talking about "proving" anything with these statements? Forming illogical counter-examples doesn't show that the original premise was false, just that one can form clearly wrong examples of this.
No one has ever lived 150 years. Therefore there is nothing that can be predictive of living 150 years. One is starting with something that is known to be incorrect and then working backwards to phrase it in a similar way.
What do you do when the model you know to be best ("past experience") consistently fails to predict anything after an agent of chaos is introduced to the mix? Do you still stand by it? Can you really say past experience consistently predicted the events of this year alone?
If you're in the middle of a nuclear winter do you still insist summer is just a few months away based on past experience? And if you hear someone saying it will you believe it's anything other than disingenuous or ignorant?
I'm not sure how you can say every President left office peacefully when four of them left by way of being assassinated, but I do see that's not quite the point you're trying to make. I'm not sure why we'd be so narrow as to only examine US history, rather than history at large unless we're operating under some guise of American Exceptionalism.
Nixon?
Very technically left office peacefully but he would have been impeached and removed had he not.
Strange to note that his crimes would hardly warrant mention in the context of the current occupant of the oval office.
That's a very... pre-1748 kind of philosophy. Hume, Keynes, Russell, Popper and others have written at length about the limitations of prediction from past experience. You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
Even if we accept that extrapolation is the best you can do, you'd still need to justify why the domain of "past experience" is exactly wide enough to generalise across current and previous US presidencies, but not so wide as to include even one of the numerous populist strongman takeovers in non-US political history. Proof by American Exceptionalism, perhaps?
This is why black swan events can be so devastating.
I saw another comment here about a month ago that said many people tend to round a very small risk down to zero risk. The comments were related to driving and the risk of serious injury or death that most people discount, but I think it also applies to other areas of risk in life, too, for many people.
Exceptional events are low probability by definition, and thus people tend to ignore the possibility, assuming instead that the status quo will continue to exist.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully, the most probable outcome is that future presidents will too.
That is false. On January 6th 2021 the sitting president fomented a mob to violently keep him in power.
If we’re going off your rule of past events being the best prediction for future events then we should all be shitting ourselves over the fact that this guy isn’t leaving peacefully
> The best predictor of future events is past experience.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully
Considering the current US President tried to have his VP and Congress killed by an angry mob if they didn't hand over a second presidential term to him, we should expect the same this time, but better organized and with ~8 years of planning.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully, the most probable outcome is that future presidents will too.
I think you are forgetting a date that happened on the 6th day after the start of 2021. I would most certainly not call that pieceful in any way shape or form (and yes, I count that as part of leaving office, being the certification of the next president). By your logic this would mean that it is unlikely that he will peacefully leave office.
> 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.
As far as I know, this is the first time a president has completely disregarded civility, declared marshall law under false pretenses (not false alarm, specifically false pretenses), talked about crowning himself king, and various forms of rigging future elections.
So the fact that some people (allegedly) thought Clinton/Bush/Obama/Biden would crown themselves is pretty irrelevant.
>> The best predictor of future events is past experience.
That's why you're currently reading HN with Internet Explorer on your IBM desktop running OS/2 2025.
The adage about history as an indicator only applies to the steady state. It compeltely breaks down when with events that are so rare as to be unpredictable when they have extreme - good or bad - consequences.
ex:
"The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology."
And I would argue the world today isn't even close to the edge of the spectrum when it comes to lack of predictability or how extreme the outcomes may be.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully,
That's not how I would describe Jan 6 2021 not to mention Trump's other efforts to subvert the election results, and refusal to accept the results to this day.
> 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.
Really? When has there been such a public outcry before? There have never been "No Kings" protests before, because they weren't needed. Even if you hated Reagan, Clinton or Obama, you knew he wasn't going to try to run for a third term, whereas Trump keeps publicly saying he might.
Not when you take into account how Trump has behaved in his second term and that there's an authoritarian playbook he's following that has worked in other contemporary countries like Hungary. What other president has refused to acknowledged they lost an election, and refused to acknowledge that they're not permitted a third term by the Constitution? There are former Trump officials from his first term who warned about his reelection.
What's going to doom US democracy is all the people in denial that an authoritarian coup could and is happening in America.
It's amazing how much he's turned it into a cult of personality to the point that things like states rights, free markets and Federal overreach no longer matter.
Please don't use epithets like this on HN. Snark, swipes, name-calling are all explicitly against the guidelines. We're trying for curious conversation here, not whatever this is.
Iunno, I'm willing to give Trump a fair shake but none of those descriptors seem particularly wrong to me. Trump runs on quid-pro-quo politics, for better and worse.
It stands to reason that the most blatantly-corrupt people in America are now in a race to the bottom to buy out their pardon and negotiate protectionist foreign policy.
I am fairly certain he decided to and is executing "do better" - nevertheless the 1 or 2 people with net worths of 100's of billions have different opinions on what "better" looks like than the other 8 billion of us.
I would bet that something like 80 or 90% of Washington Post subscribers don’t know who owns the paper, and I would save you the same thing about the Wall Street Journal.
Think about the world's poorest man, and how disconnected he is from the rest of humanity. Now think of the world's richest man. They are equally disconnected.
Hmm, the initial comment was disconnection from realty, not humanity. Most likely, reality as, all this daily throttle that recalls you that you are not the center of the universe and you have to been to its laws which were not fine tuned to please human desire if you want to accomplish anything. In that sense most humans are closer to the poorest man.
The 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.
The same week that WaPo announced their new editorial policy, I added a uBlock Origin rule to delete the opinion sidebar. It's basically ads run by Jeff Bezos now. There's no reason to expose oneself to it.
Their news reporting is, for now, still decent (and retains its familiar slant).
The editorial section is really embarrassing. It wasn't really great before but now so many "Editorial Board" pieces are some of the most fact-free power-praising pieces.
I rolled my eyes at the "democracy dies in darkness" stuff but that was at least something.
It's fun to jump into the comments, they added voting to the comments and Wapo editorials are really not coming off well.
We have a similar, Murdoch-owned newspaper, The Australian. The news is actually OK, but the editorials and the choice of front-page headlines are some of the most tendentious conservative bullshit you can imagine.
The news part of Fox News was essentially fine for a long time. When Trump got angry about their election coverage of Arizona (they correctly called it for Biden), the response was to reorganize the department, and that ceased being true.
Trump was annoyed enough that he started threatening to start a Trump TV network and poach their stars.
WSJ 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.
How 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.
The 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!
Those are very good points and I agree to a degree ... but ...
You overestimate your and my ability to not get fooled, even when reading and thinking critically. In studies, more educated people are more easily fooled because they think they can detect it.
> "I know nothing more about the world than I did before reading this article, except for what Murdoch thinks about this".
Right, but how is that worth your time? It's not worth my time. There are still plenty much more trustworthy sources out there.
If I'm stuck reading a WSJ article, I do the same as you. But why not find something better?
Adding to my prior comment: The more important the subject is, the more likely they will try to manipulate you.
> Right, but how is that worth your time? It's not worth my time. There are still plenty much more trustworthy sources out there.
Very good point, you don't _need_ to read this stuff, and you can go towards things that are "better".
I find that Wapo has decently comprehensive coverage on some issues. The journalists draw "wrong" conclusions, and I just no-op that, but I've found it helpful, and there's often more detail than provided in other places. But I generally do some subsequent research after reading most of their articles. But maybe there's something else I could be reading instead.
The Washington Post has its own ownership problems, as you probably know. The NY Times is an obvious option (that I assume you've considered). If you want a signal of trust, look at their opinion section which is spread across most of the spectrum, unlike WSJ and Wapo; they do have their own biases IME - anti-Trump, anti-progressive, pro-Israel.
The Financial Times is good but insanely expensive. The Economist has a clear bias they are open about and is excellent but not really journalism - they don't give both sides a voice, dig up facts; the provide (succinct, sophisticated, lively) analysis. The Guardian obviously has a leftward bias but seem intellectually honest to me.
The Associated Press and Reuters, but they output too much. Curated news feeds can be very good, especially at finding a range of sources.
These newspapers manipulate not just with opinion, but also with the selection of what to focus on. They want you to care about certain things and not to know or even hear about others. It is a game of molding perceptions daily.
Yes, this is part of the exercise. Gotta think creatively about universes where what's written is what's written and where you could find other information. Primary sourcing is way easier than the past!
It's better when you have newspapers you can trust to do this in a way you like for you, but absent that... time to read a couple different articles
> 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
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.
Yeah, this was always the tell. If he truly cared about journalism and wanted to use his money to support it he could very easily place WaPo in some sort of trust he has no power over. And yet, despite publicly admitting the conflict of interest, he hasn’t. Only one reason why you do that and it's because you intend to make the most of your control.
It's worth reading former WashPost editor Marty Baron's memoirs for a little more insight about Bezos's priorities. Back when Bezos was married to MacKenzie Scott, she was a surprisingly strong voice about how to do things. (The slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness" got approved after her blessing.) Lately, my sense is that his new wife, Lauren Sanchez, has more of an interest in the Post than Bezos does.
So he's basically the absentee owner of a property that's more interesting to the women in his life than to him. Current management at the paper is probably eager to make sure that the paper doesn't embarrass (or "complexify") his bigger business priorities. Their desire to mollify may be excessive. I've seen such things happen inside large organizations.
It seems like the problem with WaPo is that it’s constantly losing money, and has been since well before Bezos bought it. This makes it difficult to be hands-off for (at least) two reasons: he can’t just put it in a conventional trust, because he has to constantly give the organization money (which is abnormal for such a trust), and (secondly) in order to be sustainable, WaPo needs to be significantly changed so that it stops hemorrhaging money.
In fairness, when it comes to surviving the modern media landscape the Guardian seems to be good at online, but has the distinct advantage of the UK having no other remotely left leaning broadsheets or even middle market tabloids. Since Lebvedev destroyed the Independent, it's basically the Guardian or the Mirror which is a trashy rag, and the nominal centrist papers are owned by Murdoch and the Daily Mail General Trust.
Not sure how that translates into US media context.
The second lesson from UK media is that the Daily Mail General Trust is usually assumed to be a vehicle for whatever the owning dynasty wants, despite encompassing multiple newspapers with different editorial stances (this is also certainly historically accurate: in the 1930s the man who set up the trust was writing letters to the PM offering editorial support in exchange for being allowed to veto any government appointments the PM wanted to make). So I don't think a trust structure alone will make people believe Bezos has no influence over it.
Anecdotally, The Guardian has a lot of U.S. readers. I regularly read and donate to The Guardian. Their U.S. and California coverage is very good and seems to be continually improving.
Axios has an article about The Guardian's success in the U.S., but I don't have access behind the paywall.
Not sure what the verb was that is missing here, but The Guardian has offices in the US, reporters across the country, articles written solely for its US audience. If you only care about who owns it, then I guess it still counts as an overseas operation, but in most other senses, it really isn't. Also, by that metric, Fox News is an overseas entity.
> It’s been owned by the Scott Trust since the 1930s
It's now The Scott Trust Ltd. In 2008 they wound up the original trust and transferred assets to a limited company which has gutted a lot of what it was. They sold off local papers to Maxwell's empire, their radio interests and Autotrader. They even sold off their properties to private equity.
They sold off the Observer, essentially The Guardian's Sunday edition, which was condemned as a betrayal of the OG trust. The original trust was bound by deed to pursue it's mission but the limited company can sell off the Guardian or change it's purpose with a 75% board vote.
If I have $10m in the bank and I live off the interest I am, in a sense, losing money while being able to stay solvent for the rest of my life. I don't see a reason why a newspaper couldn't apply the same principle.
You will still have $10 mil, but at an average inflation rate of 3% that will be worth half in 24 years, and 1/4th in 28. So you will have less and less of a newspaper. And that's if none of your investments go bad. This kind of logic doesn't work for long time horizons.
Coming Soon: WaPo Marketplace. Search for a story and get 10000 results from writers in China like LIOPOSFO and XIGISNN that look almost like the genuine article!
That's because even if he realizes the conflict of interest having a massive media outlet at your disposal is just too powerful a temptation to ignore for these fat cats.
There was an ulterior motive and the impact was deliberate.
Further down the article:
> O'Neal was brought in by Bezos this summer after the corporate titan tore up his paper's opinion section.
> Bezos said he wanted a tight focus on two priorities: personal liberties and free markets. The top opinion page editor resigned. A raft of prominent columnists and contributors resigned or departed as well. Some were let go.
The Post is a plaything to him that has a disproportionate impact on the rest of the world. We’ve created systems that allow a few individuals to control resources beyond the wildest dreams of the monarchs of days past. Whether it is about power, control, self-aggrandizement, or simply a special interest to him, there is no accountability at the end of the day, and we are all excellent at justifying and rationalizing our decisions to ourselves. I don’t think there has to be an ulterior motive per se, it’s simply human nature.
the temptation is to take him at his word for what he wants and then ask why he doesn't do the obvious thing to get it. try something different: assume he wants what he gets and then ask yourself why he might want that. it's shocking how often that tends to make things very clear.
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
It’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.
The Post was always terrible, always extremely conservative, and always blatantly mixed editorial in with its news reporting (unlike most other outlets in the past.) A bunch of anti-Trump people decided it was movement liberal because it didn't like Trump (like every other Republican and Republican outlet until people started voting them out over it.)
WaPo was the most right-wing non-tabloid major paper in the country other than the WSJ before Bezos, the only thing that changed afterwards was that the headlines became more linkbait (5 minutes earlier than every other paper) and their coverage of Bezos properties became lighter.
The idea that the WaPo was ever anything but rabidly capitalist is nonsense.
It's really the people on the far left, who think that way, way more than 10% of the US is progressive or socialist/communist and wonder why they can't win any elections.
Only 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?
The 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.
It is a bit ironic that an article criticizing NPR is hosted on TheFP. Especially considering its owner got promoted to the head of a major mainstream news network by one of the richest people in the world.
Never 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.
So 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.
Honest question, don’t all newspapers do this? Sure there are subjects where they publish articles representing different opinions, but on core issues (to them) there is only so much wiggle room before they will pull an opinion piece.
No, typically a paper with a strong editorial bent would have at least a token voice from The Other Side and ideally the editorial page wouldn’t always be six pieces about the president or his party every day, but that was before we got this clown show renewed for a second season.
Because 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.
Regardless 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.
You 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.
> 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.
The 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.
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.
Wonder about LA Times too, they used to also endorse Dems.
> 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.
To 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?
Editorials 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.
I 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"
Donations from multiple foundations, most of which were created by people long dead, are hardly comparable to ownership by a wealthy, living business magnate.
While the original owners are dead, this doesn't mean the foundation can do whatever "good" you imagine. These foundations are vehicles to keep doing the political bidding of these families and they still operate according to the wishes of the original donors, which are all oriented towards major industries. Or do you really believe people give millions of dollars to whatever cause with zero strings attached?
No. I think you don’t understand. I talking to my own first-hand experience. In my area of work I’ve met these foundations, organizations, and various NGOs. I’ve seen how grant programs etc. operate. There are outliers but in the whole it works.
I don't listen to NPR, but when I watch PBS Newshour they announce all their sponsors at the beginning of every program and mention the fact of their sponsorship again when there's any connection to an individual report. A recent example that springs to mind if the train derailment and subsequent pollution problems in East Palestine, Ohio; the rail firm BNSF sponsors the newshour but this didn't seem to have any impact on the volume or tone of coverage.
The issue is that donors don't have a _controlling interest_ in the organization.
Having said that, I would expect NPR to disclose, if editorializing a piece on Ms Kroc, the donation that Ms Kroc made to NPR (and they likely do that already).
They don't have control, but these foundations certainly have influence. Similarly for major advertisers, which also have influence in what is aired since editors don't want to anything that will alienate major sources of funding.
It 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.
Any billionaire-regulated (N"P"R my ass) major news media company accusing other billionaire-owned major news media companies of bias is being hypocritical.
I 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.
Citizen'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.
You 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.
It 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.)
Citizens United has everything to do with journalism, but not in the way the comment you are replying to says. The CU case was over a film maker who released a political documentary and was banned from advertising it because those adds were political in nature and therefore banned by campaign finance laws. The court correctly ruled that the government had no power to regulate this because of freedom of the press.
I 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.
Right, 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.
You'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?
The 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.
> 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)
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.
> 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[...]
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.
> 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"
The issue is that the followup contradicts the idea that there has been a change of any note. If I tell you in one breath:
"Bernie Sanders has reduced is fighting for civil rights in worrying ways"
And in a second breath tell you that:
"Bernie Sanders has resolutely fought for civil rights in the past and even now does so as a matter of routine"
You would probably find those statements at odds with one another. You quite reasonably might want me to quantify what is different currently from recent and also prior past behavior. You might also reasonably want me to quantify his behavior in "fighting for civil rights" against his contemporaries, both past and current. What I would not expect is for you to take and hold those two statements at face value, finding that a satisfactory report on the state of things.
It's certainly possible that there is no contradiction. It might be true that he was resolute in the past, and routinely did do to date, but in the past month has missed 50 votes on civil rights legislation. But even then you'd probably want to know how many votes he misses as a regular course. You might want to know how many votes he did enter during that same time period. You might want to know whether or not he was sick or otherwise absent for health reasons.
And that's my issue at the moment. The article says "3 times in the last 2 weeks an event happened". It also tells you that the WP "resolutely" (but again notably not "always") does not allow the specific event to happen. It also tells you that the WP "routinely" (but again not "always" and without any relative comparison to "resolutely") does not allow the specific event to happen even to this very day. So why are we supposed to be worried that it happened 3 times in this last 2 weeks? By their own words, it must have happened at other times in the past, or they would have used words like "always" and "unfailingly" to describe both past and current behavior. So what makes these particular 3 times worrying? Have they never failed to do so 3 times in 2 weeks ever in their history? What about 2 times? They don't say, we have no numbers and without numbers or any sort of relative comparison we have no way to gauge whether the current behavior is or is not worrisome.
> Bernie Sanders has resolutely fought for civil rights in the past and even now does so as a matter of routine"
I see where the disconnect is. Please read the sibling thread about the differences between Opinion (responsible for editorials, and subject of the NPR article) and news department (does reporting on actual news journalism). Opinion & News have different org charts under the WaPo banner. In my prior comment, A = disclosures in journalism, B = disclosures in editorials. They are not the same thing in a way that can be applied to a singular Bernie.
> They don't say, we have no numbers and without numbers or any sort of relative comparison we have no way to gauge whether the current behavior is or is not worrisome.
The number of op-eds are a small part on this article about the vibe-shift at the Washington Post: NPR provided additional context with the words of people who used to work there, mentioned thr waves of resignations and subscriber cancellations, noted WaPo declined to comment on this story. Make of that what you may.
> In my prior comment, A = disclosures in journalism, B = disclosures in editorials. They are not the same thing in a way that can be applied to a singular Bernie.
I can see that reading but even with that, comparative numbers are still useful. If we continue to assume that the words in this story were carefully chosen to be what they are (which I think we both are doing that, so I don't think I'm making an out of bounds assumption here), why the "3 times in the past 2 weeks" phrasing? Why not "has stopped" (or even "appears to have stopped" if you want to hedge)? Back to my original question of "is 3 times in the past 2 weeks" 100% of the time? Is it 50%? 1%?
If 3 times is 100% of the number of times it should have happened, how many times did it happen in the 2 weeks prior to that? Or the month prior? Is 3 "conflicted" op-eds in 2 weeks high? normal? low?
Have they missed disclosures in the past? Multiple in a short window? How frequently? How many?
The current incidents were apparently corrected without any specific call out (a practice becoming far too common in the news I agree), how does that compare to previous times when they have corrected a disclosure?
We have no facts to go on. We have information, as you put it:
> about the vibe-shift at the Washington Post ... words of people who used to work there ... [mention of] the waves of resignations and subscriber cancellations, noted WaPo declined to comment on this story.
So we have implications that this means something, and maybe it does, but again we have implications. What I "make of it" is that the Post continues to be in a state of disarray, as it has been for some time now. And that's about all I make of it. And I specifically decline to make anything about "declining to comment" on a story. Second only to the police, you should shut your mouth and say nothing to the press. Everything you say can and will be used against you.
Even now, the newspaper's reporters do so as a matter of routine.
Reporting and editorial are separate units in newspapers; the point being made is that, while reporting continues to properly disclose potential ownership conflicts of interest, editorial and op-ed, following Bezos taking direct control of them, are not doing so.
Of course, the Post is Bezos' toy, and there's no law that says he can't use editorial as a megaphone for his personal interests without disclosing them (or, in fact, even use the reporting side for the same purpose!), but you can't do that and still claim that the paper has any of the Grahams' pedigree left in it, and this is very much a change from Bezos' earlier ownership, in which he largely stayed hands-off on editorial decisions.
Not only does gp seem to have a poor grasp on the differences between Opinion and news reporting, they also fail to correlate the problem with Bezos' ownership, so it seems to them like NPRs article is conflicting with itself when it isn't, in the slightest.
There 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.
It doesn't appear that you read the article at all. It states the first disclosure was added later, and without comment. And there are two other mentions of conflict of interest. Nothing you wrote is true other than that you aren't a subscriber to the Post.
Respectfully, you either skimmed this article to support your point or didn't pay proper attention. I see no ambiguity in this article - none - whatsoever. This is about Bezos's changes to the WaPo opinion pages (including their opinion editorial board), a shift to topics that matter to Bezos, and a clear loss of discipline or intent in conflict of interest disclosures when discussing such topics.
> 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.
What this is saying:
- Previously, WaPo disclosed conflicts of interest.
- They still disclose in their news articles (as opposed to in their editorials).
> So at minimum the article disagrees with itself
No.
> 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.
Everyone else seems to understand but you. By the way, "non-editorial WaPo authors" are called reporters or journalists.
The very second sentence of the article disproves your first sentence.
"On at least three occasions in the past two weeks, an official Post editorial has taken on matters in which Bezos has a financial or corporate interest without noting his stake. In each case, the Post's official editorial line landed in sync with its owner's financial interests."
So, no, this isn't one-off. You need to re-read the article more closely.
It says the news section is more diligent and that the opinion pages/editorial are the ones omitting disclosures repeatedly.
And it wasn't fixed entirely - usually fixes to an article are declared in the article, and they didn't do that when they inserted the disclosure after the fact.
My 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.
The ballroom discussion isn't even part of the topic here, the point is that an article with clear conflict of interest didn't note the conflict of interest, and didn't do a correction until a 3rd party basically forced them to. And it isn't a one-off, it's now a pattern.
This shows that the organization is getting rotten from the inside, otherwise stuff like this is flagged up front, if the journalists and editors there have any journalistic integrity left in them.
> The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal employees from ... accepting voluntary services for the United States, or employing personal services not authorized by law, except in cases of emergency involving the safety of human life or the protection of property. 31 U.S.C. § 1342.
Trump said the project "won't interfere with the current building. … It will be near it but not touching it. It pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of. It’s my favorite place. I love it." Then, he sent in bulldozers to bring the whole thing to the ground.
Trump is also requesting the government, of which he is the head, to cut him a check for nearly a quarter of a billion dollars.
Trump has engaged in illegal impoundment and rescission of funds and programs appropriated and authorized by Congress.
Republicans in Congress and serving on the Supreme Court are failing to check Trump's lawlessness.
Trump has stated that he would like to serve an unconstitutional third term as president. If this comes to pass, it would mark the end of the American democratic experiment.
> it’s needed and the next president will be glad to have it, instead of doing large official gatherings in tents.
This may be true, it's simply the way that it's approached that has my hackles up. This is something that should have been provisioned and approved by congress.
> Separately, raising money through corporate “donations” seems like a huge loophole for corruption.
The US corruption laws are laughably bad. You don't even need this sort of loophole other than to avoid reporting on who's doing the donations.
There's basically nothing that really prevents someone from giving a Justice, Senator, congress person, or the president a yacht, airplane, home, or a "loan" that gets forgiven. The only real limits is that's supposed to be reported (and that foreign governments can't do the same). Yes yes, the bribery law states that you can't pay someone to perform an official act. However, if you simply give them a gift that doesn't count. Even when that person is actively working on official acts that directly impact you.
The crazy thing is that if you are a low rank Congress staffer or other government employee, the anti corruption rules are actually quite strict. It only loosens up the higher you go.
Totally agree. For the average federal employee there are (or at least were) a huge amount of checks in place to weed out corruption. That was sort of the entire point of the inspectors general, to track down and weed out fraud and corruption.
Even for the FBI and most of the other police agencies there was a decent amount of checks in place to make sure they weren't acting out of pocket. It's ICE and the CIA that have had much less restrictions.
The issue is not whether or not the White House needs a new room, it's that the private funding model is an incredibly obvious avenue for bribery. Every single "donor" has immediate business with the federal government, and they've seen how easily Trump will sell pardons or diplomatic favors or merger approvals to anyone who pays him enough. There is no other plausible explanation for the list of funders. If this were an important and practical addition to the building, then the government could pay for it without any corruption necessary.
An honest editorial might say something like "this addition is a good idea, but why are these specific people (including my employer) paying for it"?
It's absolutely bribery, but does it really even bear mentioning compared to the other flagrant forms of bribery going on perfectly legally? Even before Trump turned the corruption levels up to 11, paying retired politicians millions for speeches and massive super PAC donations seem much worse than a project like this where the public actually gets some benefit from it.
Such an article would just be repeating what everyone else already said. The editorial actually said something new (new to me, anyway) that added to the discussion, which seems valuable.
Imagine reading a thoughtful and substantive HN comment about the benefits of a new product, and then later realizing that the commenter failed to mention they are a major investor in the product. You would feel mildly annoyed or misled, right? Now you have to reevaluate the comment and figure out if it was primarily driven by "engineer evaluating a new tool" or "guy who wants to make money", and you'll probably want to find more unbiased reviews before paying for the product.
Now scale your annoyance based on how important you think the White House and presidential power are relative to some random Launch HN post. In this case, knowing the financial motivations of the publisher, was the editorial actually valuable? They say: "this project would not have gotten done, certainly not during his term, if the president had gone through the traditional review process. The blueprints would have faced death by a thousand papercuts." Is this a misleading premise, was there actually a lot of process and red tape preventing a president from doing this renovation the "traditional" way? I have no idea, and since I can't trust this source I have to go find out some other way.
Did they leave out any other important information? They say: "Privately, many alumni of the Biden and Obama White Houses acknowledge the long-overdue need for an event space like what Trump is creating. It is absurd that tents need to be erected on the South Lawn for state dinners, and VIPs are forced to use porta-potties." Is this true? Again I don't know and I can't trust the authors.
Like the HN investor example, we can't tell if this editorial was primarily driven by "observer knowledgeable about the needs of the presidential office" or "guy who wants the president to eliminate the NLRB". It doesn't mean the editorial is wrong, but it does mean it isn't really valuable because you'll have to find other sources to verify its claims.
> later realizing that the commenter failed to mention they are a major investor in the product. You would feel mildly annoyed or misled, right?
I wouldn't really care if the claims they made were correct. An opinion is an opinion (and we are talking about the opinion rather than news section here) and I find that peoples personal emotional and ideological biases are actually a lot stronger than commercial interests in most cases. So really every single editorial should have a disclaimer "this entire article is biased as hell" at the end, but if it applies everywhere do we really need it at all?
A standard conflict-of-interest disclaimer wouldn't be enough to answer the questions I really have:
- How much is the editorial board influenced by Bezos? Is he actually involved in writing each article?
- What are the discussions like? How do they write these articles?
Without knowing that, which would require insider journalism, not just a disclaimer, I don't really know the authors' point of view. It's basically anonymous. I assume Bezos has a hand in it somehow, if only by choosing the editorial staff. A disclaimer doesn't change that.
Opinions written by strangers are always suspect, but they can still be interesting.
Is 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.
The actual White House, yes. Some out building of the compound, no. If you showed me a picture of it a month ago I would have no idea what it was. This whole thing is bribery, no doubt, but compared to all of the other Trump corruption this one is the least bad.
If you think this kind of reporting is cool, you should donate to https://fair.org.
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) has been exposing two-faced news for decades. They are worthy of your attention.
FAIR has its own biases, and these can be quite strong (have a glance at the studies on their website and judge for yourself).
IMO, the Columbia Journalism Review (https://www.cjr.org) is a better source for media criticism.
FAIR has always been like this since the 80s. I don't really expect these media watchdogs to be "neutral" though; it's enough that they only call out bias against their favored positions. If there are enough such orgs across the spectrum then they serve their purpose.
Also Nieman Lab: https://www.niemanlab.org/
Press Gazette (UK): https://pressgazette.co.uk/
A great daily aggregator (with links to more) is Mediagazer: https://mediagazer.com/
Also, Poynter.
https://www.poynter.org/
"Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view this site properly."
it always makes me sad when i see this. you are not reaching your target audience. fyi this seems to be a cloudflare thing. i see it everywhere. The World Wide Web seems to be going down a dark path. perhaps i do need to update my browser, but why should that matter for just reading a news site. it's like someone wants you to not have access unless you buy a new macbook(or maybe a chromebook). maybe i should just install Chrome already? i just feel like this Big Tech has crossed the line with their customers a long time ago at this point.
btw, fair.org looks interesting. i never heard of them before. Thanks!
Works fine here, firefox/linux with ublock origin
Works for me on Firefox / MacOS
does it similarly make you sad if your operating system tells you to update for new security patches or indicators?
the sheer volume of browser exploits - including in-the-wild exploited zero-click zero days - is frankly insane. intentionally leaving yourself unprotected is a bad choice that should be shoved back in your face, often.
> i see it everywhere.
i see it nowhere. update your software! and don't use chrome.
That's just the generic Cloudflare blocking warning. You can use an up to date browser and if they decide to block you, you will see that message.
could you reference something from cloudflare to substantiate that?
Browse the web with Tor via an up-to-date Firefox. You will run into this page over and over again. Speaking from experience, don't feel like looking it up on CF's docs.
edit: Just ran into the same page on Chromium 141.0.7390.122 without Tor or a VPN, but with NoScript, JShelter, and uBlock extensions enabled. It looks like JShelter + NoScript can trigger it.
This is the page you get:
> Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view this site properly.
> Click here for more information
The last line links here: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-challenges/#bro...
Suggests to me if certain challenges fail, or give results in a certain distribution, you'll see that page.
Disabling JShelter and allowing JS lets me use the site properly.
they were not informing him of an insecurity.
and software monoculture is widely considered a security threat, and so by pushing software monoculture, you yourself are pushing to weaken internet security. GP should potentially be applauded (if he's not using for example IE6)
i’m genuinely fascinated by your thought process here.
how did we go from “update your software; don’t use chrome” to “you are pushing software monoculture and weakening internet security”?
as for “they were not informing him of an insecurity”, this seems to be deliberately obtuse. virtually every major browser includes (and references in their release notes!) fixes for vulnerabilities in stable version updates.
>how did we go from “update your software; don’t use chrome” to “you are pushing software monoculture and weakening internet security”?
given the audience here, i think it's more likely that OP/GP is running an up to date browser that is of an alternate architecture that has not "mainstreamed" all of google and hollywood's ad and drm friendly CSS HTML
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Please, do explain to everyone what you think is biased about it, and why.
it makes him look bad
Their headlines include lines about marching against fascists and calling people toadies. This would indicate their bias is rather left.
How do you believe their reporting differs from reality? They're writing about rising authoritarianism and those who submit to it, which is a fact of the world happening today. They use the term "toady" in its literal definition. FAIR has anti-bias and counter-spin, aka "a bias towards reality."
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/toady (noun) : one who flatters in the hope of gaining favors : sycophant
I've never seen Manhattan Institute, Hudson Institute, or Cato Institute using the term Toady even if technically correct. It is a term almost exclusively used by the left, typically more anti-authoritarian. Maybe you have some libertarian types using it as well.
> It is a term almost exclusively used by the left
What a strange claim.
If you search the sites you cite, all of them have at least one use of "toady" or "toadies" (which only gets a few hits on fair.org as well). Meanwhile go check the national review and they seem to love the word. Maybe recheck your priors.
It would be used by the right too, if they weren’t toadies.
Why would right-wing leaning think tanks be complaining about right wing authoritarianism they’re in favor of? You’d expect them to trot out this verbiage if a populist left wing politician with authoritarian vibes came to power.
It's not quite that simple, or at least not yet. For example the Cato Institute still seems inclined pretty much towards the rule of law and against autocracy. Perhaps "Yarvin-ists" are in power, but they don't control every voice on the right.
You can identify and complain about right wing (or left wing) authoritarianism without hurling insults.
A publication failing to do so is a key indication of bias in a specific direction.
Not just bias. I see at least two options.
I recall seeing the statement "Profanity is the attempt of a weak mind to express itself forcefully." Well, these childish insults and put-downs seem to me to be the same. They may sense that they don't have the intellectual horsepower to have a serious discussion about the issue, so they just insult.
Alternatively, they're not trying to have a serious conversation about the issue. They're talking to their own in-group, not to the other side, not even to those who are neutral or undecided. Instead, they're just telling their own in-group how right they are and how stupid the others are. They aren't trying to engage at all; they've given up on that. This is a deeply non-serious response - if the situation is as bad as you claim it is, why are you not trying to persuade at least the neutrals? Why are you instead doing things that make you look childish to everyone except your in-group?
I agree with everything you said, but it doesn't seem to resonate with the masses based on voting patterns here.
They don't need to have a serious conversation to succeed. Their supporters visit their site, get their dopamine hit from being told their viewpoint is correct, and they feel empowered to lash out at any dissent so the cycle continues.
They're the equivalent of a left-wing Fox News, but get very angry when that is pointed out.
Everyone thinks they have “a bias towards reality”. I have yet to see this actually be true!
Everyone has biases, whether conscious or unconscious, and trying to claim otherwise is a massive red flag on its own IMO.
ok fine. i prefer a bias towards not enslaving and/or eliminating an entire population because of religious/racial/cultural differences.
Is this an argument for sophistry or propaganda? Everyone having biases doesn't preclude people from rightly pointing out bad things in the world, like creeping authoritarianism and the undermining of democracies, anymore than it did in the lead up to WW2.
Would you say the bias was rather left if this was the 1930s?
Really we're all just interested in what your line for calling a person a fascist is, and what you would call the folks who did this?
"When the Pentagon announced that reporters would only be credentialed if they pledged not to report on documents not expressly released by official press handlers, free press advocates, including FAIR (9/23/25), denounced the directive as an assault on the First Amendment.
The impact of this rule cannot be understated—any reporter agreeing to such terms is essentially a deputized public relations lackey."
If you can't write with basic clarity because that makes your progressive, you might want to investigate your own bias.
Yeah, my line for calling someone fascist is not “restricting reporters access to the Pentagon”. It cheapens the word and all that it represents.
There is a wide gulf between writing with basic clarity and injecting opinions like “so and so is a toady”. I would love to see media outlets attempt to describe just the facts with as little opinion as possible. FAIR clearly does not meet that bar.
In what scenario does a fascist not restrict freedom of the press as one of their steps?
It is a necessary but not sufficient condition. But this is not that. This is, “you don’t have unfettered access to personnel and facilities.” Fascism would be “if you print that we will arrest you and maybe shut your operation down.” And maybe a paramilitary squad of goons will fire bomb your offices in the meantime. This will read as snark, but I swear it is not: read about the truly fascist regimes of history. The difference is night and day.
We've all read about them. The key lesson in every one of those stories is this: don't wait for the entire building to burn down before you pull a fire alarm.
It doesn't read as snark, it reads as a god of the gaps argument from all the people wishing we weren't doing what we are doing.
They weren't revoked from unfettered access to the Pentagon. They were revoked from all access to the Pentagon. It's hard to be a democratic society when the institutions that make democracy possible are hindered wherever possible.
Fascism is an ideology, an approach towards government. Banning reporters from the Pentagon and the White House can be both legal and fascistic.
So you're admitting that the right is fascist.
We already knew that, but it's so nice of you to admit it.
I mean, if the ground truth was that fascism did not exist and no people were toadies, sure.
OTOH, posting something that only makes sense in that context in 2025 would indicate a bias that is rather Right.
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>So it gives the appearance of “opinionated news is good, so long as the opinions are correct.”
All news is opinionated news and some opinions are objectively better than others. For example, the simple act of choosing which story to cover is an opinionated choice and if a news outlet decided to cover a random high school teacher the same way they cover the POTUS, that would be an objectively incorrect editorial opinion.
Real objectivity would be like BBC calling terrorists “militants”.
Your understanding of the word objective differs markedly from my own.
I don’t disagree with the general spirit of what you mean. But I would love to see news outlets, and so called watch dogs, pursue the unobtainable dream of objectivity and neutrality over all others. Calling people toadies and democratically elected administrations “fascists” falls far, far short of that dream.
Some people are of the opinion that the world is flat, I would say it's objectively round. That is the context in which I'm using that word. I'm not using it to describe 100% consensus, because there will always be someone who disagrees with something.
News without opinion is objectively impossible because the act of reporting the news is inherently governed by an opinion on what is worthy to report. Pretending otherwise is just pulling the wool over your own eyes.
Yeah, yeah, true objectivity is objectively impossible. We know.
The thing is, this isn't binary. There's a sliding scale between "totally objective" and "totally biased". When you eliminate the (unattainable) standard of "total objectivity", then reporters and news organizations move more toward biased. And the difference matters. You used to be able to get news that at least tried to be unbiased, that wasn't openly pushing a narrative. That made it possible to form a more accurate (though not totally accurate) view of what was actually going on.
>You used to be able to get news that at least tried to be unbiased, that wasn't openly pushing a narrative. That made it possible to form a more accurate (though not totally accurate) view of what was actually going on.
Part of the problem with this line of thought it that a lot of bias is not intentional. There was never a moment in history in which you could pick up a newspaper with nothing but completely unbiased facts inside. Even today, most news sources aren't intentionally misleading even if they might be biased. Recognizing these inherent and subtle biases are required in order to know "what was actually going on".
There was this thing called "yellow journalism". It was very much not trying to be unbiased.
Most US 20th century journalism tried to be better than that. And, by trying, they were better than yellow journalism. Yes, there was still bias. But the difference between, say, 20% bias and 80% bias made a real difference.
So maybe today we're at 40% bias instead of 80% bias. It's still worse than it was, and the difference still matters. (And, by the way, one of the ways it matters is in peoples' trust of the media. We don't need people who are obviously trying to manipulate us; we already have enough of those.)
Except, the news calling, for example, Bush Jr a "War criminal" is exactly objective.
His Casus Belli was false, and he knew that. We invaded sovereign countries illegally.
Would you read news that openly called him a war criminal? Reality gets extreme all the time. If you police the language more than the reality, you are just making the problem worse. You are forcing people to pretend reality isn't so bad just so you do not have to fix reality.
Guess what? Reality is bad right now. We are bombing boats off the coast of south America and posturing like we are going to war with them and bailing out Argentina because of political rhetoric and affiliations and corruption, and we wasted over $150 billion harassing brown people and sending American citizens to foreign prisons and maybe catching a few people who overstayed their visas or walked over our border.
And yet you tone police the people trying to inform you of that.
Was GW Bush convicted of any war crimes? If not, then he isn't a war criminal.
You can argue that he should be, and I probably would agree with you, but an organization supposedly dedicated to unearthing biases in the media should not inject their opinions into their own reporting.
> Was GW Bush convicted of any war crimes? If not, then he isn't a war criminal.
No, if he wasn't convicted, he is not a convict and a government grounded in the rule of law cannot treat him as a criminal.
Conviction doesn't retroactively create the crime.
No. But until then he is only an accused war criminal.
That is a silly standard. Hitler was never convicted of war crimes, would you object to someone calling him a war criminal?
I would say that an organization that needs to be highly objective should not call him one.
They can certainly point out that he was the leader of a group that was systematically killing millions of people with physical or cultural attributes he deemed undesirable and people will reach the same obvious conclusion about him.
> They can certainly point out that he was the leader of a group that was systematically killing millions of people with physical or cultural attributes he deemed undesirable and people will reach the same obvious conclusion about him.
How do you know this?
Because of thousands upon thousands of documented accounts from eyewitnesses and participants?
I'm aware of what you're trying to do, but there is a difference between stating a generally accepted fact that has a tiny faction of dissenters (e.g. the earth is round) and something that is not and is therefore considered an opinion.
>Because of thousands upon thousands of documented accounts from eyewitnesses and participants?
Then why can't you accept the "thousands upon thousands of documented accounts from eyewitnesses and participants" of him committing war crimes?
>I'm aware of what you're trying to do, but there is a difference between stating a generally accepted fact that has a tiny faction of dissenters (e.g. the earth is round) and something that is not and is therefore considered an opinion.
I think war crimes are bad. There is no "fact" involved in that statement, it is purely a value judgment and therefore an opinion. Yet I think it is inarguably a better opinion than believing that war crimes are good. Would you disagree?
Because the definition of a war criminal is something who was convicted of a war crime, not being accused of committing them or observed doing something that could be considered one.
You can't fact check opinions, no matter how morally superior they are to another one, so I don't know what your point is there.
From the Cambridge Dictionary[1]:
>war criminal
>noun
>someone who commits war crimes:
>- He was a Nazi war criminal.
"Commits" not "convicted". If I had to summarize my point it would be "you're objectively wrong".
[1] - https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/war-c...
And how exactly is it confirmed that someone commited them?
As someone once said "Because of thousands upon thousands of documented accounts from eyewitnesses and participants".
Which are verified to meet a specific standard through a conviction in this case, which is the exact opposite of the scenario that generated the quote above.
Is an accused murderer still considered a murderer if they are not convicted of the crime?
This idea that something can't be confirmed as true unless a court says it is bizarre and totally antithetical to the idea of journalism. Journalists are not court stenographers.
Sometimes it is entirely reasonable to call someone a murderer even if they lack a conviction. I have no problem saying John Wilkes Booth murdered Lincoln. I have no problem saying Hitler committed war crimes. These are simply facts of history and your policing of language is implicitly arguing against those facts. So I'm going to ask you directly and I won't reply if you don't directly answer this question, do you believe that Hitler committed war crimes?
The idea that a criminal conviction needs to occur for someone to be called a criminal in the media should not be remotely controversial. Journalists certainly can and do perform research that can lead to arrests and/or convictions, but are effectively a mouthpiece for the court stenographer once a trial is underway.
An unbiased reporter would (and nearly all journalist actually do) say something like "accused <insert criminal charge here> <insert name here> <insert rest of sentence here>" at any point in a criminal proceeding prior to the jury handing down a guilty verdict.
The fact that you only seem to be able to generate examples of extremely high profile situations where the alleged perpetrator was killed while evading capture (by themselves or law enforcement) only strengthens my argument.
I already answered your direct question.
Or they could just say Hitler committed war crimes but killed himself before he could be put on trail. Because that's what he did. It's not an opinion.
He ordered the actions of a number of people who were convicted of war crimes. He himself was never tried because he was already dead. Still, in that case, I think we can say that yes, he was.
the institution of democracy should not require a neutral point of view.
Or NPR…
https://www.npr.org/donations/support
Fair 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.
>90% of reporters are left wing
Citation very much needed. Also, what percent of reporting news organization owners are left wing?
They'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.
I second that. When I was a news junkie, I would love reading their (occasional) posts.
Glad they're still around.
And now that Zuck has nuked Facebook AI Research org, they get their acronymic exclusivity back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAIR_(Mormon_apologetics_organ...
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.
I think many people (and the parent comment) are getting played because they don't realize the game and its stakes:
'Trust' is an issue under the old rules, in a context where an essentially democratic, free society was desired by all and where therefore public trust and a well-informed public mattered.
The new rules are about power alone, which is essentially anti-democratic. Bezos has power and he demonstrates it - demonstration is essential under the new rules - by mocking and thumbing his nose at trust and at informing the public. He uses his power to bend public opinion his way; lots of people still read the Post, and in a post-truth world, truth doesn't matter to many of them. He doesn't care about trust, and he actively and intentionally demonstrates it.
It's the context of post-truth philosophy: Words are about power, they are weapons; they are not about truth, expression, or information.
The worship (rather than distrust) of power, post-truth, it all leads to the non-democratic outcome.
IMO, the rules haven't changed at all, shit has always been bad. Ask any Black American. The silver lining to all this open corruption is that even the most milquetoast centrists of 2020 are turning into people calling for actual consequences for the corruption going on in our government.
As unpopular as Bush was in 2008, not very many people seriously thought he would be or even should be arrested. I think the patience of good people is getting severely tested in 2025 though, I think by 2028, or sooner, people will be demanding scalps.
> IMO, the rules haven't changed at all, shit has always been bad. Ask any Black American.
What, of the things I described, have Black Americans experienced more than others?
> even the most milquetoast centrists of 2020 are turning into people calling for actual consequences for the corruption going on in our government.
I see the opposite: Look at congressional and other Dem leaders - they talk about economics and healthcare despite everything else going on.
>What, of the things I described, have Black Americans experienced more than others?
in a context where an essentially democratic, free society was desired by all, black people were systematically shut out from, (redlining, the gi bill, etc.). Like how you were supposed to trust that stop-and-frisk and the broken window policing policies were not thinly veiled attempts to over-police black neighborhoods because the paper you read or the politician you voted for told you so... but the people that were the victims knew otherwise.
> 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.
I do enjoy the theory that everyone was cynically posturing for 4 years during Biden and are now _also_ cynically posturing for Trump, because it aligns with a belief that a lot of powerful people seem to have extremely malleable beliefs.
It is a bit more interesting than "everyone took their mask off the day after the election". Plenty of hard-line right wing people in the world, of course, but at one point if you're that deep in the right all the posturing pre-2024 would be really hard to do. But if it's all cynical then any amount of posturing makes sense!
Bezos is calculating his years remaining with regards to Blue Origin and that a given President can cause severe disruption to the pathway Bezos has in mind for his organization. I'm sure his ideal would be to finely balance WaPo's reputation and his need to placate the current President, and I'm also certain with Trump it's not doable (so he'll sacrifice some of WaPo's reputation to keep progress going on Blue Origin during the Trump years).
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I think many people, even here, are infected with “It can’t happen here.”
The 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.
> The best predictor of future events is past experience.
I have never died before, not once in my life. The most likely outcome is that I will live forever.
> I have never died before, not once in my life. The most likely outcome is that I will live forever.
They didn't say that this is always true for every situation forever. They said "The best predictor of future events is past experience".
Keyword is "best".
You being alive today is the best predictor of you being alive tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year.
> You being alive today is the best predictor of you being alive tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year.
An unprecedented glioblastoma diagnosis would predict otherwise. When the facts in evidence become extraordinary, one must adapt the adage accordingly.
Okay, so "me being alive today is the best predictor of me being alive in 150 years".
Nope. Everyone who is alive 150 years ago is dead. So the best predictor of being dead 150 years from now is to be alive currently (or already dead).
That's the point: you can "prove" anything by saying "the best predictor of future events is past experience" and then pointing to the obvious wrong past experience from which to extrapolate.
I'm unsure where you thought we were talking about "proving" anything with these statements? Forming illogical counter-examples doesn't show that the original premise was false, just that one can form clearly wrong examples of this.
No one has ever lived 150 years. Therefore there is nothing that can be predictive of living 150 years. One is starting with something that is known to be incorrect and then working backwards to phrase it in a similar way.
Trump has also never left office peacefully, so there is nothing that can be predictive of him doing so.
What do you do when the model you know to be best ("past experience") consistently fails to predict anything after an agent of chaos is introduced to the mix? Do you still stand by it? Can you really say past experience consistently predicted the events of this year alone?
If you're in the middle of a nuclear winter do you still insist summer is just a few months away based on past experience? And if you hear someone saying it will you believe it's anything other than disingenuous or ignorant?
> The best predictor of future events is past experience.
In the absence of any other data, sure. But we have lots of other data here. The first being that he didn't leave peacefully last time.
I'm not sure how you can say every President left office peacefully when four of them left by way of being assassinated, but I do see that's not quite the point you're trying to make. I'm not sure why we'd be so narrow as to only examine US history, rather than history at large unless we're operating under some guise of American Exceptionalism.
Nixon? Very technically left office peacefully but he would have been impeached and removed had he not. Strange to note that his crimes would hardly warrant mention in the context of the current occupant of the oval office.
That's a very... pre-1748 kind of philosophy. Hume, Keynes, Russell, Popper and others have written at length about the limitations of prediction from past experience. You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
Even if we accept that extrapolation is the best you can do, you'd still need to justify why the domain of "past experience" is exactly wide enough to generalise across current and previous US presidencies, but not so wide as to include even one of the numerous populist strongman takeovers in non-US political history. Proof by American Exceptionalism, perhaps?
> The best predictor of future events is past experience
Except for the most impactful things.
This is why black swan events can be so devastating.
I saw another comment here about a month ago that said many people tend to round a very small risk down to zero risk. The comments were related to driving and the risk of serious injury or death that most people discount, but I think it also applies to other areas of risk in life, too, for many people.
Exceptional events are low probability by definition, and thus people tend to ignore the possibility, assuming instead that the status quo will continue to exist.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully, the most probable outcome is that future presidents will too.
That is false. On January 6th 2021 the sitting president fomented a mob to violently keep him in power.
If we’re going off your rule of past events being the best prediction for future events then we should all be shitting ourselves over the fact that this guy isn’t leaving peacefully
> The best predictor of future events is past experience.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully
Considering the current US President tried to have his VP and Congress killed by an angry mob if they didn't hand over a second presidential term to him, we should expect the same this time, but better organized and with ~8 years of planning.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully, the most probable outcome is that future presidents will too.
I think you are forgetting a date that happened on the 6th day after the start of 2021. I would most certainly not call that pieceful in any way shape or form (and yes, I count that as part of leaving office, being the certification of the next president). By your logic this would mean that it is unlikely that he will peacefully leave office.
>> Every US president in history has left office peacefully,
The events of January 6th 2021 suggest otherwise.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully,
Every president except the currently sitting one. Yes, past behaviour is often a good predictor for future behaviour.
> 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.
As far as I know, this is the first time a president has completely disregarded civility, declared marshall law under false pretenses (not false alarm, specifically false pretenses), talked about crowning himself king, and various forms of rigging future elections.
So the fact that some people (allegedly) thought Clinton/Bush/Obama/Biden would crown themselves is pretty irrelevant.
>> The best predictor of future events is past experience.
That's why you're currently reading HN with Internet Explorer on your IBM desktop running OS/2 2025.
The adage about history as an indicator only applies to the steady state. It compeltely breaks down when with events that are so rare as to be unpredictable when they have extreme - good or bad - consequences.
ex:
"The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology."
And I would argue the world today isn't even close to the edge of the spectrum when it comes to lack of predictability or how extreme the outcomes may be.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully,
That's not how I would describe Jan 6 2021 not to mention Trump's other efforts to subvert the election results, and refusal to accept the results to this day.
> 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.
Really? When has there been such a public outcry before? There have never been "No Kings" protests before, because they weren't needed. Even if you hated Reagan, Clinton or Obama, you knew he wasn't going to try to run for a third term, whereas Trump keeps publicly saying he might.
Your comment appears to ignore reality.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully
I guess you consider the J6 riot/insurrection "peaceful"? You're probably in a minority if you think that way.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully, the most probable outcome is that future presidents will too.
Trump did not leave office peacefully last time. The most probable outcome is that he will not leave office peacefully next time.
Not when you take into account how Trump has behaved in his second term and that there's an authoritarian playbook he's following that has worked in other contemporary countries like Hungary. What other president has refused to acknowledged they lost an election, and refused to acknowledge that they're not permitted a third term by the Constitution? There are former Trump officials from his first term who warned about his reelection.
What's going to doom US democracy is all the people in denial that an authoritarian coup could and is happening in America.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully
Have they memory-holed "Jan 6, 2021" from your history books?
I think the solution should ideally be not electing Trump (or whomever) in a free and fair election. What solution are you suggesting?
Does it matter? Trump has destroyed what little good there was in the Republican Party.
It's amazing how much he's turned it into a cult of personality to the point that things like states rights, free markets and Federal overreach no longer matter.
I imagine, post-Trump, it will take possibly a decade for a cohesive conservative party in the U.S. to re-establish itself.
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> Why there is so much of TDS on hacker news?
Please don't use epithets like this on HN. Snark, swipes, name-calling are all explicitly against the guidelines. We're trying for curious conversation here, not whatever this is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Iunno, I'm willing to give Trump a fair shake but none of those descriptors seem particularly wrong to me. Trump runs on quid-pro-quo politics, for better and worse.
It stands to reason that the most blatantly-corrupt people in America are now in a race to the bottom to buy out their pardon and negotiate protectionist foreign policy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezo...
He even wrote an editorial saying "the news media isnt trusted, we have to do better".
Then he decided he didnt want to do better.
> Then he decided he didnt want to do better.
I am fairly certain he decided to and is executing "do better" - nevertheless the 1 or 2 people with net worths of 100's of billions have different opinions on what "better" looks like than the other 8 billion of us.
I’m not convinced the layperson is aware.
I would bet that something like 80 or 90% of Washington Post subscribers don’t know who owns the paper, and I would save you the same thing about the Wall Street Journal.
I didn't know who owned WaPo until Bezos started putting his thumb on the scale.
These billionaires don't have a solid feedback loop back to reality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBZTHxZvOwg - this show was soooo good...
I genuinely wouldn't be surprised to see Musk or Thiel make those exact same arguments.
Think about the world's poorest man, and how disconnected he is from the rest of humanity. Now think of the world's richest man. They are equally disconnected.
The world's poorest man probably has tens millions of peers within an order of magnitude of "poorness".
The world's richest man has at most a few hundred.
Exact numbers as of today: Elon Musk has $500b. 32 other people have at least $50b. 827 people have at least $5b.
So I overestimated a few hundred, and it's actually a few dozens.
Roughly half of Americans have a negative net worth.
Hmm, the initial comment was disconnection from realty, not humanity. Most likely, reality as, all this daily throttle that recalls you that you are not the center of the universe and you have to been to its laws which were not fine tuned to please human desire if you want to accomplish anything. In that sense most humans are closer to the poorest man.
The 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.
The same week that WaPo announced their new editorial policy, I added a uBlock Origin rule to delete the opinion sidebar. It's basically ads run by Jeff Bezos now. There's no reason to expose oneself to it.
Their news reporting is, for now, still decent (and retains its familiar slant).
The editorial section is really embarrassing. It wasn't really great before but now so many "Editorial Board" pieces are some of the most fact-free power-praising pieces. I rolled my eyes at the "democracy dies in darkness" stuff but that was at least something.
It's fun to jump into the comments, they added voting to the comments and Wapo editorials are really not coming off well.
We have a similar, Murdoch-owned newspaper, The Australian. The news is actually OK, but the editorials and the choice of front-page headlines are some of the most tendentious conservative bullshit you can imagine.
This seems to exist in almost every democratic country now, and it seems to work on quite a few voters.
I am always wondering about the hacks writing these pieces, in what place do you have to be mentally to be, essentially, a paid propagandist?
The news part of Fox News was essentially fine for a long time. When Trump got angry about their election coverage of Arizona (they correctly called it for Biden), the response was to reorganize the department, and that ceased being true.
Trump was annoyed enough that he started threatening to start a Trump TV network and poach their stars.
WSJ 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.
How 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.
The 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!
Those are very good points and I agree to a degree ... but ...
You overestimate your and my ability to not get fooled, even when reading and thinking critically. In studies, more educated people are more easily fooled because they think they can detect it.
> "I know nothing more about the world than I did before reading this article, except for what Murdoch thinks about this".
Right, but how is that worth your time? It's not worth my time. There are still plenty much more trustworthy sources out there.
If I'm stuck reading a WSJ article, I do the same as you. But why not find something better?
Adding to my prior comment: The more important the subject is, the more likely they will try to manipulate you.
> Right, but how is that worth your time? It's not worth my time. There are still plenty much more trustworthy sources out there.
Very good point, you don't _need_ to read this stuff, and you can go towards things that are "better".
I find that Wapo has decently comprehensive coverage on some issues. The journalists draw "wrong" conclusions, and I just no-op that, but I've found it helpful, and there's often more detail than provided in other places. But I generally do some subsequent research after reading most of their articles. But maybe there's something else I could be reading instead.
The Washington Post has its own ownership problems, as you probably know. The NY Times is an obvious option (that I assume you've considered). If you want a signal of trust, look at their opinion section which is spread across most of the spectrum, unlike WSJ and Wapo; they do have their own biases IME - anti-Trump, anti-progressive, pro-Israel.
The Financial Times is good but insanely expensive. The Economist has a clear bias they are open about and is excellent but not really journalism - they don't give both sides a voice, dig up facts; the provide (succinct, sophisticated, lively) analysis. The Guardian obviously has a leftward bias but seem intellectually honest to me.
The Associated Press and Reuters, but they output too much. Curated news feeds can be very good, especially at finding a range of sources.
These newspapers manipulate not just with opinion, but also with the selection of what to focus on. They want you to care about certain things and not to know or even hear about others. It is a game of molding perceptions daily.
Yes, this is part of the exercise. Gotta think creatively about universes where what's written is what's written and where you could find other information. Primary sourcing is way easier than the past!
It's better when you have newspapers you can trust to do this in a way you like for you, but absent that... time to read a couple different articles
wsj newsroom is probably the best national reporting entity, but sure
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> 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
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.
Yeah, this was always the tell. If he truly cared about journalism and wanted to use his money to support it he could very easily place WaPo in some sort of trust he has no power over. And yet, despite publicly admitting the conflict of interest, he hasn’t. Only one reason why you do that and it's because you intend to make the most of your control.
It's worth reading former WashPost editor Marty Baron's memoirs for a little more insight about Bezos's priorities. Back when Bezos was married to MacKenzie Scott, she was a surprisingly strong voice about how to do things. (The slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness" got approved after her blessing.) Lately, my sense is that his new wife, Lauren Sanchez, has more of an interest in the Post than Bezos does.
So he's basically the absentee owner of a property that's more interesting to the women in his life than to him. Current management at the paper is probably eager to make sure that the paper doesn't embarrass (or "complexify") his bigger business priorities. Their desire to mollify may be excessive. I've seen such things happen inside large organizations.
That doesn't solve the problem (because it can't be solved). Someone is in control, and the paper will be biased in their interest.
It seems like the problem with WaPo is that it’s constantly losing money, and has been since well before Bezos bought it. This makes it difficult to be hands-off for (at least) two reasons: he can’t just put it in a conventional trust, because he has to constantly give the organization money (which is abnormal for such a trust), and (secondly) in order to be sustainable, WaPo needs to be significantly changed so that it stops hemorrhaging money.
I’d say the UK’s Guardian newspaper is a useful example here. It’s been owned by the Scott Trust since the 1930s:
https://www.theguardian.com/about/history
And it has survived without continual extra investment. Possible that WaPo is just managed badly.
In fairness, when it comes to surviving the modern media landscape the Guardian seems to be good at online, but has the distinct advantage of the UK having no other remotely left leaning broadsheets or even middle market tabloids. Since Lebvedev destroyed the Independent, it's basically the Guardian or the Mirror which is a trashy rag, and the nominal centrist papers are owned by Murdoch and the Daily Mail General Trust.
Not sure how that translates into US media context.
The second lesson from UK media is that the Daily Mail General Trust is usually assumed to be a vehicle for whatever the owning dynasty wants, despite encompassing multiple newspapers with different editorial stances (this is also certainly historically accurate: in the 1930s the man who set up the trust was writing letters to the PM offering editorial support in exchange for being allowed to veto any government appointments the PM wanted to make). So I don't think a trust structure alone will make people believe Bezos has no influence over it.
Anecdotally, The Guardian has a lot of U.S. readers. I regularly read and donate to The Guardian. Their U.S. and California coverage is very good and seems to be continually improving.
Axios has an article about The Guardian's success in the U.S., but I don't have access behind the paywall.
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/06/the-guardian-us-expansion
Better resource:
https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2025/09/11/Guardian_Annual_Report...
I'm one of them. I don't love that I have to overseas to find reliable news on my own country.
Not sure what the verb was that is missing here, but The Guardian has offices in the US, reporters across the country, articles written solely for its US audience. If you only care about who owns it, then I guess it still counts as an overseas operation, but in most other senses, it really isn't. Also, by that metric, Fox News is an overseas entity.
I don't know about that.
> It’s been owned by the Scott Trust since the 1930s
It's now The Scott Trust Ltd. In 2008 they wound up the original trust and transferred assets to a limited company which has gutted a lot of what it was. They sold off local papers to Maxwell's empire, their radio interests and Autotrader. They even sold off their properties to private equity.
They sold off the Observer, essentially The Guardian's Sunday edition, which was condemned as a betrayal of the OG trust. The original trust was bound by deed to pursue it's mission but the limited company can sell off the Guardian or change it's purpose with a 75% board vote.
> And it has survived without continual extra investment.
It has not. The Guardian loses millions every year. I think it made money one year in the late 90s iirc.
Their revenue is growing though, and they are expanding.
https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2025/09/11/Guardian_Annual_Report...
If I have $10m in the bank and I live off the interest I am, in a sense, losing money while being able to stay solvent for the rest of my life. I don't see a reason why a newspaper couldn't apply the same principle.
You will still have $10 mil, but at an average inflation rate of 3% that will be worth half in 24 years, and 1/4th in 28. So you will have less and less of a newspaper. And that's if none of your investments go bad. This kind of logic doesn't work for long time horizons.
Bezos has so much money that he could simply drop a billion or five into the trust and never need to see any return from it.
It's almost like trying to run a newspaper the same way you run a for-profit online marketplace isn't the greatest of ideas. Who could've known...
Coming Soon: WaPo Marketplace. Search for a story and get 10000 results from writers in China like LIOPOSFO and XIGISNN that look almost like the genuine article!
LIOPOSFO actually got banned from the platform unfortunately. They did get a new writer named LIOPOSFI who is very similar though.
Fortunately, they all come from the same LLM article factory as the western-branded ones. So, no loss.
No, they will come from Deepseek and have very different opinions on Taiwan
What’s the relation between Journalism, Facts and Truth? I’d like a three-way Venn diagram to understand if there are any overlaps.
That's because even if he realizes the conflict of interest having a massive media outlet at your disposal is just too powerful a temptation to ignore for these fat cats.
I think they took the wrong lesson from that Mark Twain quote
>Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel
There was an ulterior motive and the impact was deliberate.
Further down the article:
> O'Neal was brought in by Bezos this summer after the corporate titan tore up his paper's opinion section.
> Bezos said he wanted a tight focus on two priorities: personal liberties and free markets. The top opinion page editor resigned. A raft of prominent columnists and contributors resigned or departed as well. Some were let go.
It's not ulterior if he said it
The Post is a plaything to him that has a disproportionate impact on the rest of the world. We’ve created systems that allow a few individuals to control resources beyond the wildest dreams of the monarchs of days past. Whether it is about power, control, self-aggrandizement, or simply a special interest to him, there is no accountability at the end of the day, and we are all excellent at justifying and rationalizing our decisions to ourselves. I don’t think there has to be an ulterior motive per se, it’s simply human nature.
> We’ve created systems that allow a few individuals to control resources beyond the wildest dreams of the monarchs of days past.
That didn't happen without vigorous help from the "servants of the people".
> I don’t think there has to be an ulterior motive per se, it’s simply human nature.
It's both, of course. Ulterior motives and human nature aren't mutually exclusive, in fact they overlap quite a lot given the chance.
the temptation is to take him at his word for what he wants and then ask why he doesn't do the obvious thing to get it. try something different: assume he wants what he gets and then ask yourself why he might want that. it's shocking how often that tends to make things very clear.
This 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
Don't ask what you can do for your property; ask what your property can do for you.
It’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.
I feel like Bezos has well more than $10M, $1B/100 (centi). Perhaps you were looking for "hecto" (SI prefix for 100)?
No:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_centibillionaires
> Washington Post becoming a shadow of itself
The Post was always terrible, always extremely conservative, and always blatantly mixed editorial in with its news reporting (unlike most other outlets in the past.) A bunch of anti-Trump people decided it was movement liberal because it didn't like Trump (like every other Republican and Republican outlet until people started voting them out over it.)
WaPo was the most right-wing non-tabloid major paper in the country other than the WSJ before Bezos, the only thing that changed afterwards was that the headlines became more linkbait (5 minutes earlier than every other paper) and their coverage of Bezos properties became lighter.
The idea that the WaPo was ever anything but rabidly capitalist is nonsense.
I would say that the Washington Post was pretty centrist before Bezos decided to target MAGA readers.
They were planning to endorse Kamala Harris before Bezos quashed it.
Amazing that they have any paid subscribers after this happened.
> always extremely conservative
You have a pretty idiosyncratic definition of "conservative"
In the past the articles were reasonably objective. The editorial section was always to the right of Attila the Hun.
Who knew that Attila the Hun was basically the ancient version of Elizabeth Warren?
the definition of conservative has changed drastically over the last couple decades.
The typical "we have two right wing parties." It's a stupid pedantic thing people on the left like to do.
Because "left" and "right" only have meaning within a particular nation's politics.
It's really the people on the far left, who think that way, way more than 10% of the US is progressive or socialist/communist and wonder why they can't win any elections.
Yes, I should have said that instead of just "left". Most center left Democrats don't do this.
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Only 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?
This is the sort of stuff that happens when someone who had one good idea long ago has run out of good ideas.
I’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-tru...
What does this have to do with the article?
The 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.
It is a bit ironic that an article criticizing NPR is hosted on TheFP. Especially considering its owner got promoted to the head of a major mainstream news network by one of the richest people in the world.
Then it's irony all the way down. Or just admitting that news takes money.
News can take money while also having a reputation. You won't catch me dead cross-referencing AP with Fox editorials or tabloid slop from The Sun.
Never 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.
Forgot to add that people more often like to read things they agree with, especially if we're talking about paying subscribers.
Article is NPR's
So 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.
You don't seem to have refuted anything he has written.
Every media company is subject to the bias of the person or entity that owns it.
Rather incredible that this needs to be pointed out, specially given the history of press ownership in this nation. Rosebud! /g
Yeah, I'm bemused at all the "I'm shocked, shocked to hear that the owner influences the content!"
Do we really hold editorials to the same standard as the rest of the news? These are opinion pieces, you should expect bias, no?
An individual editorial? No. At the meta level when an outlet only allows a specific direction of bias, that doesn't feel like a good idea to accept.
Honest question, don’t all newspapers do this? Sure there are subjects where they publish articles representing different opinions, but on core issues (to them) there is only so much wiggle room before they will pull an opinion piece.
No, typically a paper with a strong editorial bent would have at least a token voice from The Other Side and ideally the editorial page wouldn’t always be six pieces about the president or his party every day, but that was before we got this clown show renewed for a second season.
Because 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.
Regardless 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.
I 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”.
You 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.
You can have bias without losing honesty and accuracy. The latter is the problem.
People are upset over the wrong bias lol
There is a reason they publish opeds right next to hard news. Its not by accident.
> 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.
The 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.
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.
Wonder about LA Times too, they used to also endorse Dems.
> 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.
I 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.
To 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?
Editorials 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.
I 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"
Donations from multiple foundations, most of which were created by people long dead, are hardly comparable to ownership by a wealthy, living business magnate.
While the original owners are dead, this doesn't mean the foundation can do whatever "good" you imagine. These foundations are vehicles to keep doing the political bidding of these families and they still operate according to the wishes of the original donors, which are all oriented towards major industries. Or do you really believe people give millions of dollars to whatever cause with zero strings attached?
Yes, they do. Billions per year across a wide variety of organizations.
You just don't understand how money works. Foundations are as political as any other organization in the capitalist world.
No. I think you don’t understand. I talking to my own first-hand experience. In my area of work I’ve met these foundations, organizations, and various NGOs. I’ve seen how grant programs etc. operate. There are outliers but in the whole it works.
Joan Kroc's donation had zero strings attached.
They do disclose them when they are relevant to a story. For example, https://www.npr.org/2025/10/08/nx-s1-5564684/macarthur-overd... and https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/04/15/nx-s1.... They also mention them very frequently on air, anybody who has listened to NPR for more than like ten minutes probably heard them mention the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
You can see a full list of donors in their latest annual report: https://media.npr.org/documents/about/annualreports/2024%20A...
I don't listen to NPR, but when I watch PBS Newshour they announce all their sponsors at the beginning of every program and mention the fact of their sponsorship again when there's any connection to an individual report. A recent example that springs to mind if the train derailment and subsequent pollution problems in East Palestine, Ohio; the rail firm BNSF sponsors the newshour but this didn't seem to have any impact on the volume or tone of coverage.
NPR does the same.
And they constantly mention those donors during their news programs!
The issue is that donors don't have a _controlling interest_ in the organization.
Having said that, I would expect NPR to disclose, if editorializing a piece on Ms Kroc, the donation that Ms Kroc made to NPR (and they likely do that already).
They don't have control, but these foundations certainly have influence. Similarly for major advertisers, which also have influence in what is aired since editors don't want to anything that will alienate major sources of funding.
Estate bequeathals and foundation grants are a far cry from direct ownership and editorial control by a single oligarch.
Far cry or not, they're also funded by oligarchs as well.
It 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.
Any billionaire-regulated (N"P"R my ass) major news media company accusing other billionaire-owned major news media companies of bias is being hypocritical.
I 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.
Citizen'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://unlimitedhangout.com/
[flagged]
You 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.
It 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.)
Citizens United has everything to do with journalism, but not in the way the comment you are replying to says. The CU case was over a film maker who released a political documentary and was banned from advertising it because those adds were political in nature and therefore banned by campaign finance laws. The court correctly ruled that the government had no power to regulate this because of freedom of the press.
I 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.
Right, 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.
You'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?
Probably relates to some of the political controversies surrounding the source NPR here: https://grokipedia.com/page/NPR_controversies
The 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.
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)
In journalism you can safely assume that the truth is the absolute minimum claim that can possibly fit with the exact words used.
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.
> 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[...]
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.
> 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"
The issue is that the followup contradicts the idea that there has been a change of any note. If I tell you in one breath:
"Bernie Sanders has reduced is fighting for civil rights in worrying ways"
And in a second breath tell you that:
"Bernie Sanders has resolutely fought for civil rights in the past and even now does so as a matter of routine"
You would probably find those statements at odds with one another. You quite reasonably might want me to quantify what is different currently from recent and also prior past behavior. You might also reasonably want me to quantify his behavior in "fighting for civil rights" against his contemporaries, both past and current. What I would not expect is for you to take and hold those two statements at face value, finding that a satisfactory report on the state of things.
It's certainly possible that there is no contradiction. It might be true that he was resolute in the past, and routinely did do to date, but in the past month has missed 50 votes on civil rights legislation. But even then you'd probably want to know how many votes he misses as a regular course. You might want to know how many votes he did enter during that same time period. You might want to know whether or not he was sick or otherwise absent for health reasons.
And that's my issue at the moment. The article says "3 times in the last 2 weeks an event happened". It also tells you that the WP "resolutely" (but again notably not "always") does not allow the specific event to happen. It also tells you that the WP "routinely" (but again not "always" and without any relative comparison to "resolutely") does not allow the specific event to happen even to this very day. So why are we supposed to be worried that it happened 3 times in this last 2 weeks? By their own words, it must have happened at other times in the past, or they would have used words like "always" and "unfailingly" to describe both past and current behavior. So what makes these particular 3 times worrying? Have they never failed to do so 3 times in 2 weeks ever in their history? What about 2 times? They don't say, we have no numbers and without numbers or any sort of relative comparison we have no way to gauge whether the current behavior is or is not worrisome.
> Bernie Sanders has resolutely fought for civil rights in the past and even now does so as a matter of routine"
I see where the disconnect is. Please read the sibling thread about the differences between Opinion (responsible for editorials, and subject of the NPR article) and news department (does reporting on actual news journalism). Opinion & News have different org charts under the WaPo banner. In my prior comment, A = disclosures in journalism, B = disclosures in editorials. They are not the same thing in a way that can be applied to a singular Bernie.
> They don't say, we have no numbers and without numbers or any sort of relative comparison we have no way to gauge whether the current behavior is or is not worrisome.
The number of op-eds are a small part on this article about the vibe-shift at the Washington Post: NPR provided additional context with the words of people who used to work there, mentioned thr waves of resignations and subscriber cancellations, noted WaPo declined to comment on this story. Make of that what you may.
> In my prior comment, A = disclosures in journalism, B = disclosures in editorials. They are not the same thing in a way that can be applied to a singular Bernie.
I can see that reading but even with that, comparative numbers are still useful. If we continue to assume that the words in this story were carefully chosen to be what they are (which I think we both are doing that, so I don't think I'm making an out of bounds assumption here), why the "3 times in the past 2 weeks" phrasing? Why not "has stopped" (or even "appears to have stopped" if you want to hedge)? Back to my original question of "is 3 times in the past 2 weeks" 100% of the time? Is it 50%? 1%?
If 3 times is 100% of the number of times it should have happened, how many times did it happen in the 2 weeks prior to that? Or the month prior? Is 3 "conflicted" op-eds in 2 weeks high? normal? low?
Have they missed disclosures in the past? Multiple in a short window? How frequently? How many?
The current incidents were apparently corrected without any specific call out (a practice becoming far too common in the news I agree), how does that compare to previous times when they have corrected a disclosure?
We have no facts to go on. We have information, as you put it:
> about the vibe-shift at the Washington Post ... words of people who used to work there ... [mention of] the waves of resignations and subscriber cancellations, noted WaPo declined to comment on this story.
So we have implications that this means something, and maybe it does, but again we have implications. What I "make of it" is that the Post continues to be in a state of disarray, as it has been for some time now. And that's about all I make of it. And I specifically decline to make anything about "declining to comment" on a story. Second only to the police, you should shut your mouth and say nothing to the press. Everything you say can and will be used against you.
Even now, the newspaper's reporters do so as a matter of routine.
Reporting and editorial are separate units in newspapers; the point being made is that, while reporting continues to properly disclose potential ownership conflicts of interest, editorial and op-ed, following Bezos taking direct control of them, are not doing so.
Of course, the Post is Bezos' toy, and there's no law that says he can't use editorial as a megaphone for his personal interests without disclosing them (or, in fact, even use the reporting side for the same purpose!), but you can't do that and still claim that the paper has any of the Grahams' pedigree left in it, and this is very much a change from Bezos' earlier ownership, in which he largely stayed hands-off on editorial decisions.
Not only does gp seem to have a poor grasp on the differences between Opinion and news reporting, they also fail to correlate the problem with Bezos' ownership, so it seems to them like NPRs article is conflicting with itself when it isn't, in the slightest.
There 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.
It doesn't appear that you read the article at all. It states the first disclosure was added later, and without comment. And there are two other mentions of conflict of interest. Nothing you wrote is true other than that you aren't a subscriber to the Post.
Respectfully, you either skimmed this article to support your point or didn't pay proper attention. I see no ambiguity in this article - none - whatsoever. This is about Bezos's changes to the WaPo opinion pages (including their opinion editorial board), a shift to topics that matter to Bezos, and a clear loss of discipline or intent in conflict of interest disclosures when discussing such topics.
> 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.
What this is saying:
- Previously, WaPo disclosed conflicts of interest.
- They still disclose in their news articles (as opposed to in their editorials).
> So at minimum the article disagrees with itself
No.
> 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.
Everyone else seems to understand but you. By the way, "non-editorial WaPo authors" are called reporters or journalists.
> So at minimum the article disagrees with itself, but it seems the outrage bait is working hook line and sinker.
No, because they aren't doing so for Amazon and Blue. That's the entire point. Find an Amazon article with a disclosure on it.
The very second sentence of the article disproves your first sentence.
"On at least three occasions in the past two weeks, an official Post editorial has taken on matters in which Bezos has a financial or corporate interest without noting his stake. In each case, the Post's official editorial line landed in sync with its owner's financial interests."
So, no, this isn't one-off. You need to re-read the article more closely.
It says the news section is more diligent and that the opinion pages/editorial are the ones omitting disclosures repeatedly.
And it wasn't fixed entirely - usually fixes to an article are declared in the article, and they didn't do that when they inserted the disclosure after the fact.
My 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.
The ballroom discussion isn't even part of the topic here, the point is that an article with clear conflict of interest didn't note the conflict of interest, and didn't do a correction until a 3rd party basically forced them to. And it isn't a one-off, it's now a pattern.
This shows that the organization is getting rotten from the inside, otherwise stuff like this is flagged up front, if the journalists and editors there have any journalistic integrity left in them.
Trump doesn't have the right to tear down the White House. It doesn't belong to him. It needs to go through a design approval process.
By law, any money spent by the executive needs to come from Congressional appropriation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act
> The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal employees from ... accepting voluntary services for the United States, or employing personal services not authorized by law, except in cases of emergency involving the safety of human life or the protection of property. 31 U.S.C. § 1342.
Trump said the project "won't interfere with the current building. … It will be near it but not touching it. It pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of. It’s my favorite place. I love it." Then, he sent in bulldozers to bring the whole thing to the ground.
Trump is also requesting the government, of which he is the head, to cut him a check for nearly a quarter of a billion dollars.
Trump has engaged in illegal impoundment and rescission of funds and programs appropriated and authorized by Congress.
Republicans in Congress and serving on the Supreme Court are failing to check Trump's lawlessness.
Trump has stated that he would like to serve an unconstitutional third term as president. If this comes to pass, it would mark the end of the American democratic experiment.
> it’s needed and the next president will be glad to have it, instead of doing large official gatherings in tents.
This may be true, it's simply the way that it's approached that has my hackles up. This is something that should have been provisioned and approved by congress.
> Separately, raising money through corporate “donations” seems like a huge loophole for corruption.
The US corruption laws are laughably bad. You don't even need this sort of loophole other than to avoid reporting on who's doing the donations.
There's basically nothing that really prevents someone from giving a Justice, Senator, congress person, or the president a yacht, airplane, home, or a "loan" that gets forgiven. The only real limits is that's supposed to be reported (and that foreign governments can't do the same). Yes yes, the bribery law states that you can't pay someone to perform an official act. However, if you simply give them a gift that doesn't count. Even when that person is actively working on official acts that directly impact you.
“ The US corruption laws are laughably bad”
The crazy thing is that if you are a low rank Congress staffer or other government employee, the anti corruption rules are actually quite strict. It only loosens up the higher you go.
Totally agree. For the average federal employee there are (or at least were) a huge amount of checks in place to weed out corruption. That was sort of the entire point of the inspectors general, to track down and weed out fraud and corruption.
Even for the FBI and most of the other police agencies there was a decent amount of checks in place to make sure they weren't acting out of pocket. It's ICE and the CIA that have had much less restrictions.
> You don't even need this sort of loophole other than to avoid reporting on who's doing the donations.
There is no loophole. What Trump is doing is flatly illegal.
https://www.gao.gov/legal/appropriations-law/resources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act
The issue is not whether or not the White House needs a new room, it's that the private funding model is an incredibly obvious avenue for bribery. Every single "donor" has immediate business with the federal government, and they've seen how easily Trump will sell pardons or diplomatic favors or merger approvals to anyone who pays him enough. There is no other plausible explanation for the list of funders. If this were an important and practical addition to the building, then the government could pay for it without any corruption necessary.
An honest editorial might say something like "this addition is a good idea, but why are these specific people (including my employer) paying for it"?
It's absolutely bribery, but does it really even bear mentioning compared to the other flagrant forms of bribery going on perfectly legally? Even before Trump turned the corruption levels up to 11, paying retired politicians millions for speeches and massive super PAC donations seem much worse than a project like this where the public actually gets some benefit from it.
Such an article would just be repeating what everyone else already said. The editorial actually said something new (new to me, anyway) that added to the discussion, which seems valuable.
Imagine reading a thoughtful and substantive HN comment about the benefits of a new product, and then later realizing that the commenter failed to mention they are a major investor in the product. You would feel mildly annoyed or misled, right? Now you have to reevaluate the comment and figure out if it was primarily driven by "engineer evaluating a new tool" or "guy who wants to make money", and you'll probably want to find more unbiased reviews before paying for the product.
Now scale your annoyance based on how important you think the White House and presidential power are relative to some random Launch HN post. In this case, knowing the financial motivations of the publisher, was the editorial actually valuable? They say: "this project would not have gotten done, certainly not during his term, if the president had gone through the traditional review process. The blueprints would have faced death by a thousand papercuts." Is this a misleading premise, was there actually a lot of process and red tape preventing a president from doing this renovation the "traditional" way? I have no idea, and since I can't trust this source I have to go find out some other way.
Did they leave out any other important information? They say: "Privately, many alumni of the Biden and Obama White Houses acknowledge the long-overdue need for an event space like what Trump is creating. It is absurd that tents need to be erected on the South Lawn for state dinners, and VIPs are forced to use porta-potties." Is this true? Again I don't know and I can't trust the authors.
Like the HN investor example, we can't tell if this editorial was primarily driven by "observer knowledgeable about the needs of the presidential office" or "guy who wants the president to eliminate the NLRB". It doesn't mean the editorial is wrong, but it does mean it isn't really valuable because you'll have to find other sources to verify its claims.
> later realizing that the commenter failed to mention they are a major investor in the product. You would feel mildly annoyed or misled, right?
I wouldn't really care if the claims they made were correct. An opinion is an opinion (and we are talking about the opinion rather than news section here) and I find that peoples personal emotional and ideological biases are actually a lot stronger than commercial interests in most cases. So really every single editorial should have a disclaimer "this entire article is biased as hell" at the end, but if it applies everywhere do we really need it at all?
disclaimer: this comment is biased as hell
A standard conflict-of-interest disclaimer wouldn't be enough to answer the questions I really have:
- How much is the editorial board influenced by Bezos? Is he actually involved in writing each article?
- What are the discussions like? How do they write these articles?
Without knowing that, which would require insider journalism, not just a disclaimer, I don't really know the authors' point of view. It's basically anonymous. I assume Bezos has a hand in it somehow, if only by choosing the editorial staff. A disclaimer doesn't change that.
Opinions written by strangers are always suspect, but they can still be interesting.
Is 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.
It's a much more fitting symbol now than it was before.
Correct ... they should leave the East Wing in rubble, just as a representative symbol for future generations.
> Is it a symbol of the country? Yes
The actual White House, yes. Some out building of the compound, no. If you showed me a picture of it a month ago I would have no idea what it was. This whole thing is bribery, no doubt, but compared to all of the other Trump corruption this one is the least bad.
Sorry 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.
Thank you for your concern, but there is thankfully more to life than fake internet points.