Regardless of its impact on the election, this decision ends the Washington Post a serious news organization. Prior to this, you could reasonably trust it as a decent source, if questionable on tech & Amazon stories due to the ownership bias. After this, it's clear that Bezos purchased it with intent to push his own views. It's no longer a reliable source for news, it's just a mouthpiece for Amazon & Bezos's other companies.
Sad to see an important newspaper die in this way. I hope the people that do good work there are able to find new employment.
or perhaps because Blue Origin hopes to do business with the Government? Just a thought. A non issue for the NYTimes but for the owners of WaPo and LA Times…
I think they, like even some on the left, have reasoned that Trump will only be there for four years. That's it. He's gone, or in jail. That's four years they know who their opponent will be and the Democratic Party can prepare. Thinking a long game, it is possible the left has given up and said fine, let's get it over with.
I haven't met a single person on the left with the mindset you described. I'm not saying they don't exist, I just can't imagine it represents more than a fraction of a percent of the left. It seems like more on the left believe that if Trump is elected, we are unlikely to see another fair election.
>It seems like more on the left believe that if Trump is elected, we are unlikely to see another fair election.
Don't listen to what they say, Look at what they do.
Breaking Points back in July, while discussing the Trump-Biden debate <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV8ULfwTneE> (which I highly recommend watching; it's the single best sum-up), pointed out two things for those who claim (to believe) the above:
* If TrumpNaziKKK being reelected means "no more elections ever", shouldn't Democrats have originally chosen someone other than a living corpse as his opponent?
* While discussing how the many plans among Democrats like Newsom, Whitmer, etc. (and their successors) for 2028 were disrupted/forced up by the potential to replace Biden (before Kamala's abrupt coronation), they again pointed out the paradox of on the one hand claiming that Trump will abolish elections, and on the other hand having plans for running to replacing Trump in 2028.
Read this June New York Times interview of Whitmer. <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/22/magazine/gretchen-whitmer...> Strange, how she doesn't say (despite being very specific about things like the plot against her) that "if Trump wins, there won't be elections in 2028 and all non-MAGAtards will be executed by Trumptroopers". You'd think that would be something of sufficient urgency to repeat at every public opportunity. Almost as if actual Democratic leaders don't really believe the rhetoric they have so successfully foisted upon their supporters, including 75% of Redditors.
Yet another example: After discussing Golden's op-ed, Ezra Klein citing other Democrats who privately admit to him <https://x.com/Timodc/status/1811136469911711877> that a) they don't believe Trump is an "existential threat to democracy", and don't know why others say that, and b) that's why they aren't speaking out about Biden stepping down, because they believe the damage to their own careers from doing so is a greater threat than Trump winning
Yet another example, perhaps the most prominent of all: Biden telling George Stephanopoulos that if he loses to Trump then, well, "I'll feel, as long as I gave it my all and I did as goodest as I know I can do, that's what this is about". If he was the only person who can save the country from Orange Hitler, would that really be the extent of Biden's reaction? Really?!?
mate, you're assuming that the democrats are well enough organised to actually think like that, let alone execute a plan so complicated.
They clearly are a party divided by old timers, radicals and the rest. Biden has a retinue of close advisers who loose power when he looses office (either by mental ability or loosing) They have the influence to damage anyone taking a swipe at the "king". Obvious disloyalty is toxic in politics. (even more so in trump circles. even though hes not very loyal to you)
Trying to pry a leader out of their seat, when there are no clear charismatic upstarts is fucking hard, even more so when your party is in paralysis because they are loosing in the polls.
THe democrats bungled it. and you have Harris.
Youre citing sources saying that the democrats will plan x,y & z, and they are keeping it a secret.
They can't keep a secret. Look how much warning we had about Biden being yeeted. _months_ of low lying noises and grumbles.
Where as you look at trump and he says: "I'm going to deport milions"
and
> “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
There isn't really an equivalent from the democrats, because they are disorganised and frankly useless.
Trump has a chance to do this because he's surrounded by pricks who'll let that happen.
FWIW I’m not American. I think it’s more likely than not that Trump is the end of liberal democracy. They had it planned out for Jan. 6. They know how to succeed next time, and they have an even firmer grip on SCOTUS.
I used to fear for what this would mean for Europe (me), but I think it will be incompetence top to bottom. He had a decent crew last time around, but by the end it was Giuliani, MyPillow and the big dick toilets guy.
Isn't it much better from a left-wing perspective to have Trump win the primary and lose the general until he dies? Because if he loses this time, that seems likely to happen.
If that's the case, "some on the left" are absolutely clueless. Watch Trump replace Thomas and Alito with 40 year old justices and lock in a conservative (or worse, MAGA, not that there has been a difference in practice lately) supreme court for the next 30 years.
Trump says...I'm sorry, but I don't believe a damned thing Trump says. This particular claim doesn't pass the sniff test. why would Tim Cook call Donald Trump? Donald Trump is a private citizen with no power to do anything. Donald Trump is an absolute idiot when it comes to anything involving business, except to con and scam people. So no, there's no reason to believe this happened.
Now, if Americans are stupid enough to make Trump president again - well, that's a different scenario because Trump would be president. Then Tim Cook has incentive to try to convince Trump to not thoroughly wreck and destroy the US economy. Tim Cook can wait until after the election to see if he has to cross that bridge.
> This particular claim doesn't pass the sniff test. why would Tim Cook call Donald Trump?
> So no, there's no reason to believe this happened.
Why hasn't he (or any of the other Big tech CEOs who Trump has claimed conversations with) denied it? They just have to put out a statement saying "the conversation never happened". Their silence is deafening.
Why should they be forced to deal with Trump's nonsense? That's giving Trump agency over you and giving him the attention he craves. The best way to deal with a narcissist like Trump is to ignore him. Only an idiot believes Trump's incessant lies and neither I, nor presumably Tim Cook, gives a rat's ass what idiots think of us.
> The best way to deal with a narcissist like Trump is to ignore him.
Not if you want something from the narcissist. Instead you chuff the narcissist up. It's gross, but we've seen them all do it reactively after he was elected in 2016, so why not be proactive this time? None of them (Big tech) are going to lose customers over it, so there's no risk.
> Only an idiot believes Trump's incessant lies and neither I, nor presumably Tim Cook, gives a rat's ass what idiots think of us.
Whatever his cognitive abilities, if elected president, he will have nearly absolute power over foreign trade policy. He could try to use it to exert leverage over the EU to weaken their antitrust enforcement.
As I said previously, Trump only has that power if he becomes president. There's no need to suck up to him now.
If you think Big Tech can't be replaced, then you haven't been paying attention. Google is facing irrelevancy in the age of AI. Netflix subscriptions have been tanking as the world's largest content creators have moved into the streaming space. Facebook's growth is anemic and people are actively trying to use their service less.
Apple's customers trend liberal and Apple already has the challenge of convincing them they need a better camera than the one they bought two years ago, when the one they bought two years ago works just fine and does everything they need. That's why iPhone sales are down - significantly. Same with Mac sales. Good enough is good enough. Facing those challenges, do you really want to go and piss off your customers over something like politics?
Amazon is about the only one that's looking like it has a bright future. That's why Bezos wisely chose not to endorse Harris last week - why would he want to piss off half his customers over politics? Especially heading into the holiday season where he's expecting major sales? Look what politics did to Bud Light.
So no, Big Tech is not safe. They're big because they're smart, and by being smart they know there's no need to kiss Trump's ass before he's president and there's a business need requiring them to do so.
> If you think Big Tech can't be replaced, then you haven't been paying attention.
I never said that. They are not safe. Specifically they are not safe from anti-trust enforcement and the threat that the corporate tax rate will rise to what it was before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, and those are strong motivators for them to get ahead of the political ball.
Big tech is probably also talking to the Harris campaign before the election, to try to negotiate the de-fanging of the FTC and preserving their tax cuts to the extent they can if she wins. Some of Harris wealthy tech donors specifically want Lina Khan removed.
They are smart (and cynical) by covering all their bases. Trump talks about it because he feels (not incorrectly) that name-dropping those conversations helps him.
There is little long-term risk of these corporations losing business over this stuff. Consumers have demonstrated for a long time that they don't care much about the unethical behavior of corporations, especially if changing their consuming behavior affects their lifestyle in any way.
Between now and the election or holiday season, what are Apple, Google and Amazon's customers going to do to boycott? Delay an iPhone purchase? Stop advertising on Google (conceding attention space to competitors)? Shop instead at ... Walmart?
Getting back around to the original topic - none of this substantiates Trump's lie that Tim Cook called him. There is zero reason to believe such a conversation ever took place. Sorry. Trump lies incessantly. At this point the correct approach is to assume what Trump says is a lie and see if there's any reason that wouldn't be the case. In this case, there's no reason at all to believe Trump isn't lying.
As far as what customers may be willing to do, do you think Bud Light drinkers stopped drinking beer? I'm not confident we can rely on past customer behavior to predict future customer behavior in today's political climate. That's the very essence of chaos.
> Sorry. Trump lies incessantly. At this point the correct approach is to assume what Trump says is a lie and see
I agree that most of his statements are lies, but his claim that big corporation CEOs called him is far more plausible than his lie about Haitians eating cats and dogs.
Again, why haven't the CEOs debunked his claims? If anyone else with a similar megaphone to Trump made such false claims, they would immediately release a statement to the contrary. Their lack of rebuttal of his supposedly false claim is incredible telling of how much they hope to gain from him if elected.
> As far as what customers may be willing to do, do you think Bud Light drinkers stopped drinking beer?
Please explain what is the serious non Bigtech option for your next smartphone, or the serious retail alternative to Amazon or Walmart (without trading off convenience - which most consumers will not do).
In contrast, there are a ton of cheap beer alternatives to Bud Light, like Coors, Pabst, etc.
I suspect we largely agree with each other, per your other posts, that corporations will willingly go along with demagogic nationalist authoritarians, as evidenced from Nazi era German corporations through to Russian oligarchs, and possibly in the US going forward.
What we seen to disagree about and are arguing about are the subtleties of the posturing and timing rather than the intent.
There's been so much focus on education as the new fault line in American politics. And though it is huge, and the less educated increasingly do support ultra-conservative policies, I think the even bigger fault line is across genders. And tech workers, though usually well educated, skew dramatically male and those degrees and salaries don't make them immune to the growing culture of male grievance and victimhood.
The effect size is actually pretty similar from what I’ve seen. Both are huge. Tech workers are cross pressured in that they are mostly male and mostly college educated.
> An endorsement of Harris had been drafted by Post editorial page staffers but had yet to be published, according to two sources briefed on the sequence of events who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The decision not to publish was made by The Post’s owner — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — according to the same sources.
To play Devils Advocate for a moment: Why do we need, or even want, a newspaper to endorse a President? How does it not undermine a paper's journalistic ethics to be neutral and fair?
Let's do an extreme example. If one candidate were to say, "I will burn down the Washington Post" would you expect the Washington Post to be neutral? Seems fallacious.
Newspapers have several different departments- a news reporting department, which ostensibly attempts to be neutral and fair (but often isn't), and an editorial department, which is neither neutral, nor fair. The endorsement comes from the editorial side.
I can't answer why we would want newspapers to endorse presidents- except that historically, newspapers played a big role in shaping public opinion (now mostly replaced by social media).
> How does it not undermine a paper's journalistic ethics to be neutral and fair?
Where did you get this? Every news source has some bias, journalists, editors and owners of the media house are not some ideal beings. The good ones are honest about their bias.
As to endorsing a candidate, it's absolutely for the paper to decide. Endorsing a candidate might alienate some readers, not endorsing others.
I actually agree with you, newspapers really shouldn't be doing this. Our major local paper in the Twin Cities basically torched its reputation by endorsing wildly unqualified candidates for city offices (like, one guy they endorsed for Minneapolis city council didn't even live in Minneapolis). They recently decided to stop doing endorsements at all, which I think is the right decision.
But that's not what happened here. The editors did their normal endorsement process, but the owner of the paper stepped in and personally overrode their process for this one particular endorsement. That's a way different story from deciding to stop doing endorsements.
“Had”, not “has”, a long history of not endorsing candidates. They’ve been endorsing since the 80s.
The proper framing is “the owners stepped in to change the policy, to mirror the same policies they had before the 80s”.
Whether that’s right or wrong to do is a separate question. But framing this as though it has been editors going rogue or something is just not what’s happening at all.
> But framing this as though it has been editors going rogue or something is just not what’s happening at all.
Of which I didn't do. Granted, 40 years is a long time. But given that the company has had the policy of not endorsing for over two-thirds of its existence, I believe the "undo" framing is accurate.
I saw that but I'm not sure I see the "long history". From Eisenhower to Carter, then from Carter to now, that's not much of a long history of non-endorsement. The Post is taking a very strong stance here and it will be interesting to see if this stands up in 2028. The LA Times may have left the door open to future endorsements, but not the Post.
Better question: Why now? What changed for them? Was it declining revenue/readers, an overhaul of ethics or process? I can't wait to read the tell all some day about these decisions.
Another point that just occurred to me: Who is the endorsement supposed to influence? I think in America at least, the national media has become so hyper partisan in the eyes of its readers, that an endorsement of a newspaper is really just preaching to the crowd. What difference does that endorsement really make?
At the national level, I don't think it really makes a difference if a newspaper endorses a candidate for President. Those who read and value the opinions of that newspaper are more inclined to vote for the endorsed candidate anyways.
It influences no one, but it sends a pretty loud message to the Democratic party that (now two, LATimes did same thing) normally reliable media orgs have lost confidence in the democrat party’s ability to bring forth a competitive candidate against Donald Trump.
> it sends a pretty loud message to the Democratic party that normally reliable media orgs have lost confidence in the democrat party’s ability to bring forth a competitive candidate against Donald Trump.
It's not two media organizations. Both wrote endorsements of Harris.
Two self-interested billionaires decided that they and their personal fortunes would be better off if those endorsements were not published.
The message this sends to the Democratic party is: suck up to the rich guys if you want power. It's bad for society.
You don’t think this is a recent lesson? Pretty sure every politician already realized this. Since literally forever. Hell, I worked for a company whose wealthy owner had a steady stream of politicians flowing in and out of our offices promising the world for a handout, support, and help. Seemed like every week there was a tour or two for somebody. I have met literally 3 governors, several senators, US reps, state reps, county commissioners, multiple presidential candidates, sheriffs, mayors, wannabes for all and scores of political support staff who excitedly walked in my office while trying to schmooze the old man.
> It's not two media organizations. Both wrote endorsements of Harris.
> Two self-interested billionaires decided that they and their personal fortunes would be better off if those endorsements were not published.
How is it worse than a small cadre of elitist mono-culture editors using the reputation of WaPo for their chosen candidate?
Bezos didn't force WaPo to endorse another candidate, I think it's actually good they don't endorse anyone at all.
That's a really good point I had not considered. It's signaling, I see that. To be withheld when it always been given would seem to be to be a very loud signal. This will be fascinating to examine after the election in a journalism class. I see a PhD thesis on withholding endorsements in the future..
I think it's like wearing a jersey for your favorite sport franchise. It's not meant to influence anyone outside the group but reinforce group cohesion.
Which seems like an even stronger reason for newspapers (or other purportedly unbiased organizations) to not to endorse candidates, no? It seems like it would create (or reinforce) an internal culture inclined to favor one particular side.
A lot of newspapers are/were called the X_location Democrat or the like because historically the newspaper was an arm of the political party. Not as many exist now with the decline of news publishing.
Interesting. So rather than have newspapers that pretend to be neutral, we could instead have explicitly Republican newspapers and explicitly Democratic newspapers? I guess things have sort of been trending in that direction the last few years anyway...
> But that's not what happened here. The editors did their normal endorsement process, but the owner of the paper stepped in and personally overrode their process for this one particular endorsement.
Honestly it’s surprising to me that people really think that the news side of a media company operates with complete autonomy from the business side. They might claim it exists but that’s a fallacy.
I worked at a major daily newspaper 30 years ago and I personally know of two cases in my short tenure there where news stories were killed because they didn’t want to piss off important advertisers. I am also aware of a story involving a family member of one of the executives that was let’s say “barely” reported. Other local media organizations interestingly had much more detail than we carried.
News has always been and will always be first—a business.
The press is free to report on whatever they want. That freedom however is not a mandate that they must report on everything. Newspapers and other media companies have ALWAYS focused on profit. Nothing new there.
Plus in this day and age there is literally no restriction on the flow of public accessible information at least in the US. Even when it was tried recently (twitter, FB, YouTube) during the pandemic the public backlash to that attempts at information control was so great that it might literally sway this election.
like most of the 21st century: Nothing new, just getting more efficient and less subtle with it. 20th century corruption would have had this announced way back in 2023 to make the timing not so obvious at the bare minimium instead of having editorial waste its time on a story that was pulled last minute.
>the public backlash to that attempts at information control was so great that it might literally sway this election.
but nothing much changed. I don't know if public outcry vs output was always this poor, but that certainly seems to have changed over the decades. Too many people uncomfortable enough to complain but not enough to get up and get out.
Two of the three platforms (and the former CEO of one) have publicly admitted what was done at their companies was a mistake and the third has quietly reversed much of the topic controls around pandemic and vaccination content.
Advertisers is one thing, but where's the business sense in not reporting on an executive? That sounds like a little fiefdom, not something that makes "business sense."
Whenever people say stuff like this it reminds me why I'm wary whenever people mention things being business friendly or pro-market because it has a lot to do with protecting certain people who already have a good position over merely following market forces.
Point was that leadership of a media company might make editorial decisions that are in its best interest—whatever that interest might be. Not necessarily profit, but could be personal.
I was referring to the context of the comment to which I was replying, and asking a rhetorical question regarding the relationship between the free speech rights of the press and the implication that the press should be prevented from expressing editorial opinions.
The paper is self-censoring. My confusion is around how the free speech rights of the press are being infringed. As I understand it, the paper willingly gave up its own rights. The point I was trying to make (poorly) is that this seems like less of an issue than, for instance, being compelled by a third party.
I disagree that the paper is self-censoring. Editors wrote and intended to publish endorsements of Kamala Harris. They didn't choose to censor themselves, nor willingly give up anything. The decision was made by management.
That may be less of a problem than government goon-squads raiding the Washington Post but I still think it's a problem.
the article says when trump was president , he interfered and caused bezos’ business to lose a government contract due to the newspaper’s coverage of trump.
I can respect that private corporations have the right to "censor" (I put that in quotes because nowadays literally any moderator action is considered censorship) while disagreeing with specific decisions by corporations to do so. I wouldn't say newspapers shouldn't endorse candidates if they endorsed Trump (as some papers have done,) but I would think that was a bad idea given Trump's animosity towards the press.
I can also distinguish between the value of the press and the value of a social media platform. Banning an account on Twitter doesn't carry the same social weight as banning journalists. To me, while both are legal and within the bounds of free speech, one is distinctly worse for society than the other.
I think people "need" their publications to do this in the sense that the publication may worry about losing readership for not "doing their part to support the morally correct candidates." But you're right. Ideally a publication would report the objective reality and let its readers decide what to make of it.
It's not automatically unethical for a journalist to advocate for something.
I guess if they entirely stopped publishing self authored editorials it might be "neutral" to not publish a particular one. But that isn't what is happening.
A journalist's job is to journal something, nothing more and nothing less.
If a purported journalist wants to influence or otherwise lead his audience somewhere, he is many things (commentator, advocate, activist, influencer, etc.) but he is not a journalist.
That’s a pretty low bar for “activism” in my mind. Activism is more about organizing people, organizing events, coordinating action, raising money, protesting, etc. although good journalism enables activism.
The entire point of journalism is holding powerful people/groups accountable. This is why countries like China hate journalists. Big companies like “journalists” who don’t ask tough questions. But the job of journalism isn’t just to reprint a press release with slightly different phrasing.
These are not journalists, these are the OPINION EDITORS. You know, the op-ed page, the page that contains NO journalism.
It has been a long tradition for the OPINION EDITORS of newspapers to endorse one or more positions of various political races, especially the presidential race.
This is regarding endorsements by the outlet as a whole. If someone wants to go out and publicly endorse a candidate on their own name, nobody's stopping them.
What Bezos did is say, no, you cannot and will never again slap the Washington Post's name onto your personal endorsement. I think that's fair, he owns the brand, and I think it's also good for journalism overall because it's not a journalist's job to push opinions.
Given general hypocrisy, I expect an R endorsement come 2028. When the "swamp" is cleared and Bezo's Ai can write his opinions ghosting as a "journalist" with a respected brand.
When Woodward and Bernstein issued a statement about Bezos's interference, it began, "We respect the traditional independence of the editorial page." Do you know more about journalism at The Washington Post than Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein? Or are they just pedants?
This is a completely wrong and perhaps deliberately misleading impression of journalism and journalists. Healthy journalism absolutely provides critical analysis.
lol....a key tenet of journalism is objective reporting:
Objective Reporting: Journalism aims to report events truthfully, objectively, and fairly, without bias. This involves verifying facts, seeking multiple perspectives, and presenting information clearly.
Activist-journalism is an oxymoron. There are very few journalists anymore.
You can find countless lists describing principles and tenets of journalism that differ from each other.
Accuracy, verification, impartiality, yes, but seeking the truth upsets people, and the usual attack on that is to claim bias, prejudice, activism and “fake news” on the part of the journalist/organization
Journalism and a robust news media are a critical part of democracy. We can’t have a functioning democracy without them, just like we also need an independent judiciary, independent educational institutions and so on. As such, journalists are on the “side” of democracy. It is no accident that fascists and authoritarians attack the news media. They have to in order to gain and keep power.
The correct posture, therefore, of the free press when a charismatic authoritarian is on the cusp of power is opposition. So-called “neutrality” is not just foolish, it betrays their entire reason for being!
"The main thing for journalists is to strictly separate" a journalists personal opinion and political leanings from the news they are reporting. That is possible but it takes a strong editor to say no, you're trying to push your own personal opinion of the facts based on your political beliefs, when it should be up to the reader to decide that.
I don't know for sure, but I suspect that this phenomenon of news media endorsing political candidates is almost entirely unique to the US. Please prove me wrong.
I can't prove you wrong, but I think political alignment of newspapers come in many flavors. Many countries have more parties than two, and as the choice ls less binary, the endorsements can be more subtle.
Making a big song and dance about the entire business of "endorsements" seems to be a very US thing as far as I know. I am of course not familiar with all democracies of the world, but it doesn't seem common anywhere else I've seen.
It was done under the name of the Director of Le Monde, rather than as an unsigned editorial as is common in English language newspapers, but it sure looks similar to my American eyes.
I think there's arguments either way, but I also think as a certain point there is an obligation to point out that Trump is basically an anti American who probably takes more notice of a roll of toilet paper than the constitution. I'd argue that maybe it would behoove an institution of trust to make an endorsement only rarely, but it's also long been part of the means of public discourse for papers to put out opinions and endorsements.
More so than that question, I think it's more obvious to ask "if you're going to have that argument, is the year Trump, the nation destroying clown, is running, the year to suddenly make a change after something like > 3 decades? Especially when it seems like your owner might be making the change because he wants to curry favor for contracts?"
It's a pretty pathetic look, but I don't particularly expect any civic virtue from Bezos, so not shocked.
No doubt this will be portrayed as Bezos reigning in "Democrat" conspiracies and used to normalize Trump by the denizens of that delusional universe.
I'm 100% on board with impartial reporting, with the caveats that a) endorsements are of the Opinion section, and b) the fact of the matter is that only the higher-minded news orgs would attempt impartiality -- so it's really just ceding the argument.
And LATimes and WaPo endorsements almost certainly won't have an effect on this election.
But, this reeks of cowardice. If you wanted to return to the journalistic standard of impartiality, that's a great thing to do when the pressure is low. Feb 2021 would have been perfect.
Less than two weeks before the most contentious election in modern history? And specifically when one candidate has threatened news organizations and their owners with retribution (legal, commercial, extralegal) for stories they don't like?
That's capitulation, not impartiality. If you believe in the mission of journalism, the honorable option would be to anti-endorse any candidate who threatens that mission.
If you don't believe in that mission, then what are you doing operating a newspaper?
To play Devil's Advocate to the Devil's Advocate... I would posit that journalistic neutrality isn't possible: and if that's the case I'd rather the journalist or publication wear their biases on their sleeve.
I can read a biased story, with values very different to my own, and still draw conclusions that are still meaningful. Mind you, I would expect omissions and couching that is flawed, but understanding the thinking of those I oppose is valuable and allows me to see their blind spots (or my own for that matter).
But a news organization or journalist being clear about their values and politics also disposes of the harmful notion that they've actually achieved some sort of objective reading or that they're being complete and well rounded. There's a deceptiveness in that pretense which some readers (watchers) may actually take for truth and not think more critically about what they're consuming than that.
It wouldn’t be interesting or newsworthy to me personally if they had done that.
Given that editorial boards at newspapers like WaPo traditionally do, I find it notable when the billionaire owner steps in to stop them from publishing the endorsement, due to fear of retaliation from one of the candidates.
I guess we need to think about what it means to be “neutral”. If half of Americans believe the earth is flat, is the neutral stance to say it’s unclear? Or is it to figure out what the truth is? In my mind there’s a difference between journalists and pollsters.
Of course with endorsements you can technically bring up the is/aught dichotomy. The facts may be what they are but that doesn’t necessitate any particular action. While this is technically true, I never see anyone complaining about the ethics of testing products and endorsing good ones. Wirecutter is basically doing the same thing with headphones and running shoes. Yet I only ever see pushback on political endorsements.
In short, umpires are neutral and fair but the fact that some teams win a lot more than others doesn’t mean they’re not doing their job.
That’s because if you praise a terrible toaster, life for most Americans is unaffected. If you endorse a political candidate, and nudge the election in one direction or other, roughly 50% of Americans will see that move as hostile.
The principle is the same though, whether you’re recommending candidates or toasters. Just because one has more impact than the other, doesn’t make it less ethical to investigate and recommend.
Your last sentence isn’t grounded in reality. Negatively impacting the lives of millions of people is less ethical than negatively impacting the lives of a few.
It’s a bit more than that in my mind. Political candidates at this point are telling vastly different stories about the reality we live in. The changes they want to make follow from the story they are telling.
It’s not that politicians share a common set of facts and just have differences of opinion about how to best accomplish the same goal. They are telling vastly different stories. In some sense, the more compelling story wins.
So I see a pretty direct connection between facts and political preference.
As do some news organizations; For how long exactly did the news claim that Trump was talking about Nazis when he said there were "Fine people on both sides"?
If I Google "Russian Pee Tape", Business Insider is the 3rd result with claims that the tape most likely exists. 1st being Mashable and 2nd being Buzzfeed.
When he said there were "fine people on both sides", he clarified that he was not speaking about Nazis; however, it is clear (even/especially with his clarification) that he was indeed talking about those on the same side as the Nazis ("both sides"). To many non-Nazi-adjacent folks, simply being on the same side as the Nazis (and not, like, kicking them out of your protest/party/social circle) actually does make you a Nazi too. From that perspective, it's logically impossible for there to be "fine people on both sides", if you admit that one side allows and agrees with Nazis. And are we still debating post-MSG-rally whether Trump believes the Nazis are very fine people?
As for the "Russian Pee Tape", I'll give you that one -- fake news sure exists. (I think if it was real, it would have leaked by now -- no pun intended.)
Endorsements are published by the editorial section which is specifically separated from the rest of the newspaper so to not undermine the neutrality of the journalism in the other sections.
Opinion and analysis has always been part of news publications, and plays an accepted role in adding layers of interpretation onto the raw "facts" that is crucial in making those facts interpretable by readers who aren't expert in the subject matter.
He says things like "I wish I had general's like Hitler's" or his political opponents are the "enemy within" and he would harness the military against them if he gets in power, and that migrants are criminals.
I really don't know how you can equate something as uncontroversial as "1+1=2" with such controversial and divisive statements.
It is a neutral statement that Trump is objectively terrible. By contrast it is propaganda to defend him when he claims 2+2=5, which he does on a regularly basis.
And this doesn't have anything to do with "the left" a ton of conservative Republicans have admitted that Trump is objectively terrible.
You can take that way if you want. But you aren't doing it justice if you just view it as purely cynical deliberate manipulation rather than a true effort at enhancing the reader's understanding.
Essentially they offer a framework of reasoning around the facts presented that the reader can use to make their own evaluation. Like if someone reports that 122,211 electric vehicles were sold last year. Is that a lot? Is that not a lot? You would need to start comparing to previous years, what external factors might be influencing sales. There is intrinsically no way to do that without introducing selective bias about what is considered or not. But the reader at least gets that context to enhance their own understanding.
It seems like the newspaper editorial section really ought to endorse somebody to make their biases clear, if nothing else. What are we to believe, that a bunch of people whose job it is to write opinion pieces don’t have an opinion about the election in their own country? Haha, yeah, sureeee…
The idea that editorial team has some kind of expertise, unavailable to general population, that allows them ecxlusive ability to properly understand current events, seems to have no factual support at all. They are professionals in giving their opinions, it doesn't make their opinions be better that anybody else's. Experience suggests they are usually worse.
> The idea that editorial team has some kind of expertise, unavailable to general population
That doesn't make sense to me - they literally spend all day every day absorbing, summarising and writing about context as their full time job. They are trained formally at assessing, evaluating and questioning facts. You can criticise the end result, but I can't see how it's reasonable to say they aren't far better positioned to have an informed opinion than the average reader who gets up in the morning with no training and tries to understand a slew of facts dumped on them without context.
> all day every day absorbing, summarising and writing about context as their full time job.
Something the people they are writing to and ostensibly on behalf of do not get to enjoy. Perhaps people with grounded perspectives would be more worthwhile. Guest opinions are logical, an actual editorial opinion department? That's just an early retirement plan for writers who don't have what it takes to produce news anymore.
> they literally spend all day every day absorbing, summarising and writing about context as their full time job.
I have no idea what "absorbing" means and how it's different from any random dude spending his day sitting on a couch glued to CNN/MSNBC screen. But the fact that they are professional writers doesn't give them any special quality in the insightfulness of their writings - you can be a professional writer and a complete doofus, to which we have an ample number of examples.
> They are trained formally at assessing, evaluating and questioning facts.
No they are not. Maybe they used to, somewhere in ancient times, but there's no slightest trace of any of it in most of the content produced by major press outlets. If they can do it - which I very much doubt - they certainly aren't bothering to.
> You can criticise the end result
By their fruits you will know them. The end result is the only criteria worth considering.
> I can't see how it's reasonable to say they aren't far better positioned to have an informed opinion
Some of them - with access to sources unavailable to regular people - may be better position to form an informed opinion, if they wanted to. But as soon as that information has been published, they do not have that better position anymore. And in addition to that, what is frequently happening is that they do not just publish the information available to them - instead they distort it and modify it to fit their pre-conceived opinion, and publish that, in hope that the public doesn't know any better (it usually does). If there is any truth to separation of news and opinion sections that we were told so much about it, then by that mere fact the opinion writers don't have any special informational insights - only the news people, working with confidential sources, might.
> the average reader who gets up in the morning with no training
What is that mythical "training"? I see no evidence of any relevant "training" in anything I read in the press. Most of them know how to handle basic grammar and write somewhat coherent text, but any person with basic education can. Beyond that, I don't see any special "training" there. And certainly there is an ample number of people who undergo much more rigorous training about how to handle facts, e.g. when studying hard sciences. Most press opinion writers do not undergo anything like that.
> tries to understand a slew of facts dumped on them without context.
What is that mythical "context" not available to regular people and where does it come from? Is there some secret "context sources" that are only opening if you work for WaPo? What is stored in those "context" treasuries?
I think their existence is a complete fiction. There's just a bunch of people who are getting paid for publishing their opinions because they have a degree saying "journalism" on it or just because they applied to the job and got hired, but they don't have any special insight or "context". I mean, some of them might be just good at thinking and making conclusions (they usually don't survive in the press long) but that would be just random luck. Given the selection pressure, I'd expect lower chance to find such people among professional press than just in a random selection of people with the same class and education level.
Since I can’t reply to the dead child, the concept that you need training to interpret opinions sounds like a way to force people to believe your opinion without actually convincing them. It’s an extension of the “people are stupid, they need to be told what to do” from some years back that a certain party tried to push.
Except in practice their editorial opinions boil down to value judgments that aren’t amenable to such analysis. They weren’t endorsing Harris because of the nuances of tax policy; it’s because they share her views on abortion, immigration, white liability for past racism, etc. These are the subject of moral and political philosophy, not expert analysis.
That’s why WaPo has consistently endorsed the same party—even when that party’s policies have changed dramatically over time. WaPo would endorse Harris regardless of her policies.
> They weren’t endorsing Harris because of the nuances of tax policy; it’s because they share her views on abortion, immigration, white liability for past racism, etc. These are the subject of moral and political philosophy, not expert analysis.
A candidate's social policies may be more important to some people than their fiscal policies. So an analysis of their social policies would be more useful to those readers than an analysis of their fiscal policies.
You can make an expert analysis of a candidate's previous stances and track record on those subjects. Politicians will routinely lie about their previous stances, so that seems like a useful analysis to me.
There’s little meaningful “analysis” to be done about such policies. Just pledging agreement or disagreement with those philosophical beliefs. And that’s why such endorsements by journalists tend to undermine trust.
This doesn't make any sense. Of course social stuff like abortion and immigration first of all matter to readers, and second can amount to actual, written policy with great detail and nuance, and the consequences of such policies are complicated and meaningful.
On abortion, there's now a national patchwork of policy. You could write a damned book analyzing their implementation and consequences.
We’re talking about endorsements. The nuances of those things don’t materially affect who the paper endorses, or readers’ views of those issues, which are rooted in morality and philosophy, not factual intricacies.
Could you point me to such analysis published in WaPo? I mean seriously, it would be nice to have a list of policies that Harris supported before she was VP, during the time she was VP, and now that she is a presidential candidate. Side by side - is the wall stupid or is it necessary? Do we need higher taxes or tax breaks? Do we need to jail marijuana users or leave them alone? Is Israel a genocidal war criminals or our most important ally? Is our immigration policy broken or are we doing the right thing? Is the free speech the foundation of the democracy or dangerous chaos which needs to be controlled? There are a lot of confusion that may be clarified with proper analysts of the candidate's position on such questions.
An article listing analysis like this, with appropriate quotations and explanations would be great. Does WaPo publish stuff like that, consistently, over the length of the campaign? Or would it rather do another "17 reasons why Trump is exactly like Hitler" level analysis?
That would seem to negate the entire point of any editorial column then, right? If we don't care about their opinion, what's the point of reading in the first place?
Well, somebody may care, and by random chance or a strike of luck they may just hire somebody whose opinion is worth hearing... I am just saying we shouldn't assume it upfront just because there's a bunch of guys that is paid for doing it. If there's a blog on the internet and it is interesting, I read it. If not, I ignore it. I don't stand in awe or cower in reverence just because some guy has a blog. Same should be done for opinion pages - it should be afforded reverence only after proving its worth, not upfront.
Well, US is still a somewhat free country, so anybody can publish any opinion they want to publish, anytime they want to. I have nothing against that, in fact, I must admit I am guilty of it myself - I have a blog where I publish my opinions. It would be very hypocritical to me to deny anybody else the vices I enjoy myself. I think just realizing those people aren't better or worse than anybody else and do not deserve any special consideration is enough.
If it were the editor's opinion, how is it any different from the opinion of anybody off the street? Why do the editors get the newspaper platform to publish their opinions?
Opinions aren't meant to be neutral and fair, and it isn't a violation of journalistic ethics to publish them as such.
If they had tried to disguise opinions as journalism by introducing intentional bias and distortion into a story, then that would be a problem. But newspapers have published opinions for ages.
It's rather naive to think that newspapers ought to be neutral (or fair) in everything they produce. What kinds of neutral is desirable? There's neutral tone or neutral political bias -- there are many different ways for a newspaper to be or not be neutral.
Assuming neutrality isn't something that we should expect newspapers to value, then I think transparency is an good alternative. A presidential endorsement can be a good thing in that the newspaper staff are being openly transparent about their political bias.
In practice there is little or no distinction. The list of top articles always includes opinion pieces, the choice of “neutral” fact articles to publish (and the headlines used) signals bias, and on a basic common sense level a newspaper isn’t going to publish an opinion piece that goes against the opinions of their workers/owners. Every time an opinion piece is published that goes against this, it’s a huge brouhaha.
Interestingly on another note, opinion writers are often actually less qualified than you’d expect, because the business model of a newspaper doesn’t really work for accumulating expertise vs. a specialized magazine/Substack / etc. The only way to have consistent opinion pieces is to have a generalist, not a specialist.
The idea is that these people spend their days in the weeds, working over stories and leads, getting to know people personally, absorbing information and insight that doesn't make it to print, seeing the connections and threads between all the things they publish, and are literally professional news people the way many of us here are professional technology people who might have some insight on technology topics.
You can make the case that they might be disingenuous or manipulative in sharing what they claim to be their opinions, or that their opinions reflect cultural indoctrination rather than professional assessment, etc -- and so you don't have to take their endorsements seriously.
But it's not a crazy idea that they have something valuable to share for all the time they spend very close to news and politics, and it's not bad to know what their big picture view of topics and people are as they write and select stories for the rest of the paper as it helps you contextualize them in their subjectivity.
This reminds me of when The New Republic had a bunch of staff quit en masse because the new imported editor was blatantly bullshitting them. He didn’t realize that he was talking to a bunch of professional journalists who knew exactly what being bullshit was like.
Those people working in mass media are going to have massive biases and blind spots the same way tech people do. That’s because news isn’t an accurate representation of reality, it’s representing the most extreme examples and outliers in society. If you have a group of people reading about outliers all day they aren’t going to be grounded in what ordinary people are actually experiencing.
But it’s sold as keeping you informed about the world. When it actually is just about what journalists think.
Like you said, that can be valuable, especially in politics, when one hopes they aid your messaging. But it’s not a moral or even practical imperative to keep up with journalism.
Imagine learning about sports through ESPN commentary and never actually watching a game.
A similar professional blindspot occurred when many engineers thought twitter would collapse when Elon fired all those people. Because they see twitter as a piece of software, not a brand and organization.
I agree with the sentiment, this is just how people work. We aren’t constructing frameworks from first principles, we hear ideas from peers and filter them through our experience. Journalists just insert themselves in that process, using local ethics and archetypes against their audience.
Im sorry you didn’t catch the underlying meaning of my statement. Anybody unable to form an opinion on their own I don’t wish they have the ability to vote.
If you'll pardon me, as a devil's advocate, it could go either way. They have a value but it's difficult to know to whom they owe that value to, the party, the corporations, voters, readers etc. The other is that.. they have value in the act of playback.
One political faction/side knows a publication is favored by one of the two parties. It can use that fact to feed it false information, or truthful, and watch to see how it gets reported, and the reaction of that electorate.
Supposedly some voters are undecided. Perhaps they would be swayed by a persuasive argument; this doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t think critically.
I say supposedly because I find it hard to believe the WaPo endorsement would actually sway anyone.
I find endorsements very valuable when voting in down-ballot elections. A good endorsement includes the reasoning behind the decision. I read the endorsements of multiple outlets and find myself agreeing more with one or the other.
What's the alternative, do comprehensive research on the record of 20 candidates? I don't have time for that. Read the blurbs they write about themselves in the voter's guide? Why should I trust that, they can write anything there.
That’s a bit beside the point in this case. Newspapers are supposed to have a first amendment right to say whatever they want and the key concern is that Bezos spiked the editorial to curry favor with Trump.
The first amendment issue is that he is doing it because of fear that the government will retaliate against his other companies.
A lot of folks are exhorting him to resist in order to protect the norm, but it his true that _his_ choice is caused by first amendment violations, not causing them.
I think you have the directionality backwards. Trump is not currently in office or in control of the government, therefore he doesn't have the ability to constrain Bezos' first amendment free speech rights.
If Bezos chose to constrain his own speech due to some perceived threat to his companies from a possible Trump administration, that's still a private decision (and an exercise of his first amendment right to non-expresssion).
To be a first amendment violation, the government has to constrain speech (via force or threat).
As long as the Post has an editorial page, with people employed to share their opinions, what are they supposed to do?
Opinion and reporting are separate- famously the WSJ reporting is quite strong and their opinion section is ... often wrong- but as long as an opinion section exists that's kinda their job, to share their opinion. If you want to get rid of opinion that might be a reasonable thing (with cable news and the internet no one has a shortage of opinion these days!) but doing it in such a ham-fisted way so close to the election is not a sign of a carefully thought-out business decision, it's a sign of cowardice.
They could share their opinions on the policies of each candidate. That could be great at helping people see perspectives other than their own, so that they can weigh it all up and make their own decision. Doing an endorsement is kind of the opposite of that, because it is essentially telling readers "you don't need to decide, we have done it for you."
Counterpoint: the biggest problem facing opinion journalism today is the competition. Actual news reporting is expensive and slow and sometimes doesn't pan out, isn't very profitable and there isn't that much of it. But you can get opinion everywhere these days- cable TV news, internet streamers, internet articles, it's everywhere. That suggests that there is actually a huge demand for highly opinionated work (and also that it is remarkably cheap to produce), but whether it's something like Daily Kos or Free Beacon or Alex Jones or Newsmax, it seems like everyone can find their own personal brand of opinion journalism that both flatters their own pre-existing opinions and at the same time molds them. Lots of narrowband broadcasting in that space, and the daily papers are really struggling with their goal of broad reach- they are getting outcompeted in each specific niche by a specialty player that caters to a much smaller, more specific set of opinions. (They try to have a diverse range of OpEd columnists, hoping that if you don't agree with Paul Krugman maybe you'll like David French, but that's a hard thing to pull off these days when your competition is just people of one specific ideological wedge.)
In theory your idea would be good, except when I look at the market I don't see anyone actually succeeding at that, which suggests to me that it's not actually a very large market of consumers.
Only in this hyper-partisan world has politics become a liability for business. If a restaurant hosted a candidate it didn't get death threats and calls for boycott 20 years ago. It's hard for some retail businesses to stay out of politics because they get dragged into it. Perhaps another way of looking at it is to not take too seriously when businesses get involved in politics.
It’s a statement of the values of the newspaper. This is what we stand for, and we are endorsing this person because of those values. It tells people about the paper and about the candidate being endorsed.
The issue here is that Trump is a threat to our democratic system of government. It’s not the time to be changing policies and refusing to endorse. It’s a time for taking a stand.
Or.. at the end of the day, the newspaper is a business not a social movement. I have not seen anything about the business aspect of non-endorsement, other than perhaps the cancellations.
The editorial board is separated from the newsroom and consistently writes persuasive opinions in the editorial page. "We think you should vote for X" is not structurally different from anything else that appears on the editorial page.
And it's also bad for business. I think people on either side of the aisle underestimate just how tilted the other side can get when you go against them
Your question is irrelevant. If Bezos or the leadership of the post had an ideological issue with endorsements, they should have decided that 6 months ago or one month from now.
It is blatantly obvious that this decision was done solely for Bezos business interests. Ignoring this and leaning into a theoretical debate to defend the decision is insulting.
The point is that Democratic voters didn't get a chance to have their voice heard. Conducting polling is post-hoc rationalization for Harris being installed by party leaders in unprecedentedly anti-democratic action.
But this is part of the democratic process. If the presidential candidate died a week before election and the VP took his place, we would not be discussing the situation as undemocratic.
When I say democratic, I don't mean the Democratic party's primary process, I mean a process by which people vote to select a leader.
Yes I agree that Joe Biden had the legal authority to step down and appoint Kamala Harris as his successor to run for President. No, I don't think doing that is democratic. What would have followed the democratic process would have been recognize what everyone else knew way in advance and stepping down early enough for potential nominees to run to be the candidate.
There is no way they could have held a second primary in the 28 days between Biden dropping out and the DNC. Polls said Democrats wanted Biden to drop out, Democrats had already elected Harris once, and polls said Democrats were happy with Harris as the nominee. That's about as democratic as you could get given the situation.
Criticizing the Democrats for being anti-democratic here would carry a lot more weight if the Republican nominee wasn't responsible for J6 and the fake electors plot.
The purpose of a primary is to help the party pick a nominee that has a better chance of winning the general, which is, in turn, the purpose of a political party. The mechanism of binding primaries was set up by party leaders after some bad choices (especially in the 1968 Democratic Convention). This time, the prospective candidates decided that a blitz primary wouldn't serve its purpose. If the voters punish them for this decision, then it will have proved a bad one, but it's neither unprecedented nor undemocratic.
What does any of this rambling about Harris and the NBC have to do with the fact that 14 members of Trump's former administration (including one general) have agreed that Trump is an outright fascist in an open letter?
These political threads on HN always make me really sad. A bunch of ostensibly intelligent and educated people who see whats happening and either don’t care or are excited about the prospect.
I gave up. Pax Americana had a good run. The parallels to Germany 1933 and Russia 2003 are simply too loud to ignore at this point.
Indeed. I'm planning to spend the next year looking for a country to emigrate to that hasn't completely lost its mind. How can I stay politically invested in a democratic society that vociferously supports a burgeoning dictator? These are not my people anymore.
> How can I stay politically invested in a democratic society that vociferously supports a burgeoning dictator?
The problem is the lie that either of these candidates is anything like a dictator, not people supporting them. Neither Trump nor Harris is my pick for president, but whoever wins it will still be business as usual in America for four years. The only thing which actually threatens is is fearmongering tearing apart our bonds as countrymen and undermining belief in our system of government.
Not according to general Kelly and 13 other members of Trump’s former administration. (Or Trump himself, who has explicitly said that he wants to be "dictator for a day," have "one really violent day" of police retaliation, throw his political enemies into prison, and who has wished his generals were more like Hitler’s because they barely stopped him from deploying troops on American soil last time around. I mean, come on. This isn't even reading between the lines anymore.)
The manner in which Harris got the nomination, deciding at the convention, isn't atypical and was the norm in earlier American history. The party decides how this goes. There is nothing Constitutionally-mandated about how they do it.
Being that he's stated his desire to be a dictator and has an army of enablers to help him, it's not an unreasonable fear.
Obviously this topic is a third rail here, but I think it's important to say that he upended the political environment and we are in uncharted waters now.
Best case senario and he's just bluffing about deporting people, removing parts of the judicial system, deploying the military on US soil against US citizens.
None of that is healthy. None of that is part of normal democracy.
In previous years, presidential candidates talked about policies, rather than divining meaning from a demented old guy (you may also point to biden on that one, he is still able to answer a question though.)
He's said he wants to be a dictator on day one, has told his supporters that they won't have to vote again after this election, has said he will prosecute his political opponents, has said that Harris voters should be afraid of saying they support her, etc, etc.
Any sign of strength than can be bought (i.e. fake strength), probably already has been bought by Musk and/or others trying for influence the election. They say the sudden betting market swing for Trump from a few weeks ago comes from overseas money (4 people, maybe all the same), but I'd not be surprised if Musk were behind it given that he's out there trying to buy people's votes.
On one hand, overseas money in betting markets has less bias and more neutrality. Example: a man in Australia does not care who wins and is able to see it all as an outsider from above. Regardless of whether he is gay or straight. Foreign politics is not connected to their identity and foreign politics does not map over neatly to domestic politics.
You’re able to see this for yourself when you travel to other countries and talk to people you meet about the politics in their country in person. Suddenly, magically, you’re able to see both or all sides and actually listen instead of selectively listen.
On the other hand, one would say people closer to the issue are the more informed ones and that’s usually correct. A counter point is people closer to the issue are being targeted by more advertising and usually we associate targeted advertising with causing a populace to become more misinformed rather than more informed. The primary media bias every year is calling elections closer than they actually are. Because if the media outlets and the pollsters they hired said any given election wasn’t close, people would check the news less and the media’s primary customers, the advertisers, would be sad about their ads reaching less eyeballs.
What is your opinion about foreign views and foreign bets on foreign elections?
Not sure if you've been following betting action on the US election, but it had closely followed polling up until a few weeks ago, then made a sudden and huge divergence away from polling to "predict" a Trump win.
My best guess is that this "betting action" has nothing to do with people trying to make money by betting on who they think will win - given the scale of divergence from polling results, and the speed at which that happened, this seems more like election interference - people spending money trying to influence the outcome.
I'd have to guess that in this election it's American citizens who see it more realistically. From afar it might seem obvious that Trump will lose (spouting Nazi rhetoric, killing Roe vs Wade, etc), and he'll obviously lose the popular vote, but you need to be very finely attuned to what's going on in the swing states - especially at ground level - to understand who's going to be more successful getting out the vote, etc. If expert US pollsters like Nate Silver can't get it right, then someone the other side of the world if unlikely to either. Anyways, as said, I don't think this money really is betting action - I expect it's just election interference.
Clear favourite. It might be a toin coss still at this moment, but the odds are getting ever-so-slightly worse for Kamala for many days in a row now. So it's about the trend.
On top of that, the growth of the blue firewall in PA is losing steam too early...
If the odds long enough ever so slightly move toward Trump, he is then in my eyes a clear favourite. It's been going on for three weeks now and we have 10 days to go still.
I do hope I'm wrong, but purely looking at the numbers, I don't think I am.
From my corner of rural Michigan, the relative sentiment shift appears to be massively in favor of Harris.
I don't really trust my opinion, and I have a pretty limited perspective on what people in other areas think, but between 2020 and now, there is much increased support for Harris compared to Biden, and much more muted support for Trump 2024 compared to Trump 2020.
With the polling mildly in favor of Harris in key states (but within the margin of error), I wonder how you've drawn your conclusion.
By following polls, and the way they are trending. And the odds seem to be moving daily towards Trump, and while we're still in coin toss territory, if this trend continues for the next 10 days, it's really looking bad for Harris, despite the shift in your area.
If I'm wrong, please let me know, as I'd really like to be proven wrong here.
Well, the election is the thing that is going to resolve the question.
Polls don't really trend though, they tend to settle. Of course significant news can cause people to reevaluate things, but it's probably the case in this election that most people have already made a pretty conclusive decision.
I don’t think you’re wrong. I think you’re looking at the data and that’s what the data is telling you. Some would present alternative data or say “we’ll see during the election.” But I think the real pushback is due to possible knowledge of the future giving people the burden of temporary anxiety, even if it’s only 9 days away.
There are other people who are weary from these elections having gone on for so long now and were long ready for it to all be over months ago.
The whole reason for elections and democracy is for the administration and party in power to have a peaceful decent from power. Because without them, in history the only prior means were to overtake the administration by physical force and peaceful descents from power were rare and uncommon.
That had the negative ramifications of the power being concentrated by people with the strongest weapons, not the people with the best leadership, governance, and the most care towards it’s own populace, citizens, and constituency.
If I’ve answers this in any non-neutral or biased way, please let me know as I’m NPA —- the 3rd largest political affiliation.
Of course not. However they are like 5% more willing to pursue anti-trust action and enforce regulations. Even a small threat like that will be resisted by the ultra wealthy.
The destruction of democracy is a convenient byproduct of their consolidation of power. Fascism in germany was convenient for the wealthy-- even if they weren't the architects of it.
The idea that the rich in America, as a class, want the destruction of democracy, is laughable. Few people want to overturn a system that's making them millions.
If you think a free market is a requirement for capitalism then by definition sure. If you think it is about the distribution of ownership over capital then the free market doesn't matter. Many political scientists refer to the economic model of the USSR as "State Capitalism" because the state owns the means of production.
Would you rather I use a word like "Cronyism" to specify private ownership of capital without free-market competition?
They are the billionaires. Both get massive donations from billionaires, and just as the last few cycles, the Democrats have likely more than doubled the big donor fundraising of the Republicans.
They were under the thumb of the regime. They produced whatever the government told them to produce. They had a predetermined profit margin that the government dictated to them. German capitalists certainly fared relatively well, but their influence and prestige was greatly reduced compared to the past. Nonetheless they took that deal because the alternative was literally communism.
The means of production are still privately owned. What you described is not Capitalism by strict definition, but the owners of capital are still at the top of the food chain in such a system. It's not like lack of competition somehow precludes private ownership.
Which party is ending capitalism? I'm curious, because there's one party saying explicitly that they intend to end the democratic process, one party explicitly stating the goal is the end of the rule of law, and one party saying they want to deploy the military against the supporters of the other political party.
You could make the argument that those positions are fundamentally opposed to capitalism as well, but that's not as explicit.
Regardless, only one party is threatening either of your alternatives, your straw man nonsense about ending capitalism not withstanding.
> Regardless, only one party is threatening either of your alternatives, your straw man nonsense about ending capitalism not withstanding.
Nobody is threatening either of those things. The idea that democracy is under any sort of threat is a pure lie told to you by those who benefit from keeping you scared.
Taylor Swift is a billionaire from record and concert ticket sales alone. Between that and her endorsement of Harris, we're lucky to have one billionaire out there with legitimate wealth, unafraid to use it to effect positive change.
She came from wealth, dude, her parents manufactured her success at a young age. Did you seriously listen to that music and think it was grassroots success from raw talent?
What it is is highly marketable. There's no denying she has talent -- as a savvy businesswoman -- to crack the code of what her audience wants to hear so well she can churn out music that people will pay top dollar to see performed live.
It's just remnants of DEI for former slave holding states. Supposedly they are ideologically opposed to it, but as usual it turns out that only applies when convenient. Practically every conservative achieving office does so thanks to DEI giving huge advantages to rural areas over places where people actually live and business actually happens.
It's relevant on the margins. WaPo not endorsing Harris would be a very negative signal about Harris for fence-sitters and lukewarm voters - this is the paper that hated Trump so much they changed their motto to the apocalyptic "Democracy Dies in Darkness"!
How many fence-sitters and lukewarm voters are following WaPo? It’s the third-most popular newspaper (in the US), but seems to attract people who are either very politically aware, or partisan.
If they had announced in 2022 that the paper would no longer be issuing presidential endorsements because they aren't useful or aren't a good use of resources, I think that would be a reasonable and much less controversial decision. Doing it now, when the paper had already drafted an endorsement of Harris and was about to publish it, is in fact an endorsement of Trump.
That's why this is news, it's not about a paper changing a policy, it's about one billionaire blatantly burying criticism of a fellow billionaire because they are having a personal fight (or they were having a fight and this is how they've resolved it).
This is extremely similar to the sudden announcement of policies by all the major newspapers that they were not going to publish documents that they thought were stolen by foriegn intelligence services from political campaigns: it is a reasonable position to have, and if announced well before the election season started would be completely unobjectionable. Doing it when they announced it, however, is significantly changing the rules in favor of one candidate.
Doing it after the board had already written up a document endorsing a candidate (demonstrating clearly that it was not a policy of anyone but the owner, who decided to be an utter coward at the last minute) sends a clear message that even one of the richest men in the world is scared of possible backlash against him.
Is it censorship when your boss forbids you publishing your personal opinion as the official position of his company?
It's funny reading the comments here but has anyone considered that Bezos may in fact support Trump? Bezos is a billionaire and Harris seeks to target them to fix the deficit.
Its just possible Bezos supports Trump and it makes economic sense too, though its terribly unfashionable to come out and say such a thing.
If all Bezos cared about was having lower taxes for billionaires he could have simply hired a bunch of people who believed in that and had them be the editorial board, and they would endorse whomever he wanted.
The fact that he had the editorial board he had (1), which wrote up an endorsement of Harris several weeks ago for his approval, and then he suddenly decided it was better not to endorse at all? That fits cowardice much more closely than it does pure economic interest.
This isn't government censorship, obviously, but do remember that the only point of the Editorial Board is to write opinion pieces and have them published in the paper. That is their entire job! They aren't reporters, they don't go out and ferret out news. They have opinions, and they write them out and get published in the paper. And they wrote out an endorsement of Harris, and suddenly it was announced (to the board only slightly before it was announced to the rest of the world, according to published reports) that they weren't going to endorse for President any more. That's a fact pattern that leads one strongly to Jeff Bezos' personal cowardice as the most parsimonious explanation.
1: At least before the resignations come in, I expect the board to be very different in a few weeks.
Yes. Censoring is an action, the power dynamic at play is not relevant to whether something is or is not censoring. What you’re asking is “is this specific act of censorship somehow immoral or illegal?” And the answer is no, as I expect you already believe.
But it wasn’t censored for no reason, and it’s entirely reasonable to question the motives that led to this specific act of censorship.
A newspaper isn't a "regular" business. There's a reason why the press has explicit protection in the Constitution. It is a special entity, and now Bezos has killed a 40 year tradition because he's afraid Trump will come after him if he wins. So this is likely a Hail Mary to try and save himself from potential imprisonment and fines from a Trump administration. I would have preferred they just come and support Trump if that's what Bezos wanted instead of waffling.
It is NOT censorship when the owner of a company decides what his company will and will not say. It IS censorship when the government squashes a protest again a possibly falsified election and sentences the protestors to decades in prison on trumped up charges.
This really is an interesting question. You are asking it rhetorically, and it's not like I'm going to argue with the implication, that it "basically doesn't matter", but then one could ask the same about Trump working at McDonald's as a part of his campaign, and pretty much about everything these guys do. Unless it's a major fuckup, it almost doesn't matter, because it doesn't convert anybody but one hypothetical guy who says "you know what, I'll pick a random newspaper right now, and the first guy I'm gonna see, I'll vote for him!"
At some level of approximation it doesn't even matter who the candidate is at all. An established trend in the USA is that the public is divided pretty much 50/50 between 2 colors, and hardly sways no matter what happens. Which makes it all pretty laughable way to make the choice (seeing votes as weights, and God makes a choice using these weights to make a decision) on an important question. If we assume the elections in the USA are "fair", it's pretty much flipping a coin every time. (But then, most people are already settled on the idea that it isn't an important choice, hence the "giant douche and turd sandwich" joke is so relatable.)
So while it largely doesn't matter indeed, at some low enough level any small detail might matter. I don't imagine who is that guy who was going to vote Kamala based on WP endorsement, but, well, maybe there is one. Really, I have no idea.
I'm sure you're mostly right, but there are no doubt a few still on the fence, which can only either be people who have not been exposed to the truth about Trump (e.g. people who only watch Trump sane-washed sources like Fox), or republicans who are well aware of the danger he poses, but are having a hard time accepting that the responsible thing to do is vote against him.
For the few that are still on the fence, then more straight shooting reporting, from any source, can only help.
To me this is a total cop out, and very irresponsible, for the Washington Post to not want to "take sides" and express an opinion. I guess they would've let Hitler win election too, rather than want to "take sides" and say anything bad about him. It's like not wanting to express an opinion on whether a grizzly bear or a hamster would be a better pet for a 5 year old, because you're afraid of upsetting the grizzly bear.
This isn't a normal election, or anything remotely close to it. It'd be lovely if we had TWO relatively normal candidates and could vote for them in our normal partisan ways.
You may have noticed that basically everyone in Trumps first term cabinet has come out and called him things ranging from "moron" to "fascist" to a "danger to the country". This is not normal. It's extremely abnormal. It's a warning to the country.
Given that Trump keeps a copy of Mein Kampf on his bedside table, has said that he wants generals as loyal to him personally (not to the country/constitution) as Hitler's, has said that Hitler did some good things... Uses language from Hitler such as dehumanizing immigrants as not human, talks about the "enemy within"... It seems that Hitler is in fact exactly who we should be talking about when discussing Trump, and exactly the "danger to the country" that Trump represents that Gen.Miller and Gen.Kelly are concerned about.
What policies are unappealing to you from Harris? What policies do you like from Trump? His tariffs , his plan to create internment camps for undocumented residents? His sycophancy for Putin? His willingness to ramp up offensive capabilities for Israel, or his preference for shutting down Ukraine? Or perhaps you like his "tough on dissidents" policy where he is documented to have wanted to use live rounds from active US military on protesters in DC? Are you one of the millions of people who think that Trump will make egg prices go back down to $2 a dozen? Do you think Trump is going to continue the Democratic legacy of making health care more affordable for citizens?
Just trying to gather details.
Edit: I'm gonna have to spin up alternate accounts again for the first time in a decade if I get told one more time to "slow down" my posts.
This election is not a normal election, sadly far from it. It's not business-as-usual about policies, personalities and partly loyalties.
This election is, sadly, about paying heed to the warnings that have been given to you by the cabinet members, incl. military generals, that worked most closely with Trump in his first term, and the senior Republicans who are voting Democrat.
When multiple generals, who have worked directly with/for Trump, tell you that he is a fascist and "danger to the country", then it would be wise to pay attention.
If you care about the future of America, and want to safeguard democracy, then, sadly, you need to step up and vote to keep Trump out of office.
> Is anyone really changing their mind based on some newspaper endorsement? I’m pretty sure everyone knows who they’re gonna vote for at this point.
Clearly Bezos thinks they are[1], otherwise he wouldn't have gone through the trouble of killing it 11 days before an election.
People in this thread are badly conflating the idea of "Newspaper Opinion Journalism is Bad" with "It's OK for an owner to arbitrarily influence newspaper coverage in real time". You can agree with the former and still agree the later is a horrifying precedent.
[1] Or, "Bezos thinks that Trump thinks they are" might be closer to the truth.
It's more about how a presidential candidate has repeatedly made credible threats to go after specific media companies using the power of his office if he wins. That candidate also happens to have a terrifyingly broad idea of what those powers are. That's in the context of a 9-member Supreme Court where 3 are his own appointments and 2 are appointments from a previous president with similarly broad ideas about presidential power.
And no, not everyone knows how they're going to vote, as crazy as that seems, but I agree that newspaper endorsements are a tiny factor, especially in this election.
I know at least one person who votes based off a publication. As for changing minds, I have no idea if this person even considered who to vote for until the publication releases their endorsements.
> I’m pretty sure everyone knows who they’re gonna vote for at this point.
I already did (yay early voting), but I was pretty close to just flipping a coin. Not for red vs blue, but for the lesser evil vs one of the more amusing third parties.
That’s what an undecided voter is, and that demographic is the one effectively deciding the next president, so yes these endorsements are consequential.
I think there are some number of people who are trying to decide what's "true" or "real" and while I don't think they'd have even noticed a WaPo editorial, I do think they might hear that Bezos prevented an endorsement and see it as indicative that the endorsement of Harris was somehow dishonest and tally it as a stone on Trump's side of the "reality scale."
If I didn't have context about the situation, I'd say it makes sense. However I think that in this flawed two-party situation, there is unfairness on both sides, resulting in some sort of balance, and it's bad that one of the richest people on earth could upset the balance in this way, especially at the last moment.
Yeah, I think you’re missing the point a bit here: the fear of endorsing the “wrong” candidate, as it would lead to loss of profit by the owning company, is what led to the axing of the endorsement. Call it what you want: profit and political strongarming silenced a newspaper.
You could have created a top-level comment instead of replying to mine. I don't see how your reply is about my take on it and isn't just your completely different take on the issue.
Why is everyone in this thread pushing the idea that Bezos is scared of Trump? It seems more plausible to me he is scared of the DoJ breaking up Amazon under Harris.
what happens behind closed doors is entirely different than what makes the papers. i am positive bezos has spoken to trump, and i am positive trump assured bezos of something that harris did not
A rational person would know that many past promises or reassurances offered by Donald Trump have proved to be empty, worthless and even costly to their recipients, as documented by countless legal actions.
If Bezos believes what Trump has told him behind closed doors, then his companies are in the control of a sucker, not just a coward.
legal action does not show reality, people can sue for nearly no reason at all, and people have large political and PR reasons to sue Trump for posturing reasons. we have very little idea what trump's track record is for making deals because the vast majority of it isn't public. to base your entire opinion of him based on tabloids and biased corporate news and pretend that literally nothing ever happens that isn't public is not going to give you a realistic picture. i am sure there are also dozens of high profile examples of deals that were public and went just fine.
obligatory trump is terrible is racist etc. not defending trump, just highlighting questionable logic
I think people are finally coming around to paying attention to “Putin’s a really great guy” and “imprisoning the enemy within” and realizing Trump’s not joking around about that.
Yes, and it seems to me equally likely that he likes Trump but is too cowardly to say so. I don't know why others are so certain he's scared of Trump, unless there's a piece of information I'm missing.
Because soon it’s very possible Trump will rally the military behind him and start imprisoning billionaires who dared to cross him. He’ll be the only “billionaire” with real muscle to imprison his enemies for life or even summary execution.
Trump may be handed unprecedented [0] power, is quite openly and plainly motivated by retribution, has repeatedly threatened to use the power of the military and the state against his political enemies, and at least once has used his own media platform to call for the termination of the US constitution.
(Those are facts. Not political claims.)
Putting aside any broader assessments of his character, I think it is rational to be afraid of the consequences of being on the wrong side of such a person.
What is depressing is the number of people in positions of influence who do not feel like modelling the virtuous position of having fear of the consequences of doing what they believe to be the right thing but doing it anyway.
[0] I realise that in principle there is a precedent for him having this power because he had it before. But what any presidential candidate in 2024 now has is the opportunity to run an executive with the clear legal opinion that they are permanently immune from prosecution for most of their actions, and an implicit handbook on how to bury criminal acts in official communications that are covered by absolute immunity. This extended power has no precedent.
About half of American voters are behind Trump. More poor/less educated coming to him compare to past cycles. Why wouldn’t a billionaire scared of him?
More interesting to me is that this is the third tech billionaire to take a decidedly different stance than he did previously. Musk is quite active, but even Zuckerberg took a much more neutral stance for 2024.
Honestly I'm more surprised that Bezos even bothered. Does he really think the endorsement of The Washington Post editorial board is so significant that it's worth intervening? That seems implausible.
We’re in. Situation wheee one of the candidates routinely criticizes us and praises our enemies, and still pulls at about 42%. Rationality is not in evidence.
The reason is pretty damned simple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid Or, as Bertolt Brecht put it, "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral." The Democrats used to understand this but now they don't and that's why they are struggling.
All elections ultiamtely come down to undecided swing voters. It's silly every-time, but you need to vastly lower your expectations for that kind of crowd. Yes, a cheesy dance number endorsing a candidate can be all that is needed to swing an entire election.
This is an issue with first past the post, but that's a much larger thing to tackle.
This is such a weird take. People can't conceptualize a world of many discrete important actions and reduce it to one event. It's a failure of imagination.
"Delaware Chancellory Court" of course being a political appointee in the home state of the powerful politician whom they had an adversarial relationship with, in this situation... but you know how these things work
It's telling when people resort to ad hominem. The government is in the process of confiscating tens of billions of dollars from him - if thats not a real consequence I don't know what is. Wether or not that ruling only happened because of his political position is a different matter, it's not like the judge mentioned it was because of his political posts on social media - like other officials have [1].
The government isn't confiscating anything.. they merely ruled that the independent board of directors who authorized the richest pay deal in the history of pay deals wasn't truly independent as is necessary to properly represent the shareholders they legally must represent. Every dollar stays with the company.
Tesla had $50 whatever billion worth of stock before his deal, they had it after the deal when Delaware ruled in the shareholders’ favor and they granted it to him again following the subsequent shareholder vote. It’s a real ‘flexible’ use of the word confiscate when the confiscating party never had a dollar of the confiscated funds…
I’m sure Elon is annoyed he has to follow basic corporate governance, but that’s kind of the point of governance.
So it wouldn't be confiscation or a punishment if the courts said you owed me a few years of your salary - because theoretically I could decide to give it back to you in the future?
If you want to wire me a few years of your compensation I will gladly accept.
Presumably you have to draw a line somewhere, though? There is not liking someone's political views and there is not liking someone's attempts to undermine the whole country by (possibly purposefully) selling it to Russia etc.
Could you please stop posting flamewar comments and using HN for political battle? Your account has been doing both. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
In a recent comment, you write that "single purpose accounts are not allowed on HN". This one is fourteen years ongoing, and I know that you have been alerted to it numerous times: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rayiner
Helpfully, the relevant quote I was thinking of is directly on the books website:
> Do not obey in advance.
> Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
(The quote on the website goes on with several pages of examples.)
Well I mean the most generous take would be that he's come around about Trump and has decided that the editorial board making an explicit endorsement for Harris isn't in his own (or the country's) interests.
On X they're floating the theory that he knew this would cause a lot of them to resign, and wanted that for other reasons. All we can do is speculate, I guess.
No need to speculate. It’s in black and white: last time Trump wanted to spite Bezos, he canceled $10Bn in AWS contracts. This is profit driven, plain and simple.
> In a 2019 lawsuit, Amazon claimed it lost a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract to Microsoft because Trump used “improper pressure ... to harm his perceived political enemy” Bezos.
Notably, most presidential candidates aren’t so petty and vindictive as to cancel contracts with political opponents for spite, but we’re talking about Trump here. It would be best if you woke up to this reality.
It's certainly possible, though if he truly felt pressured that way, he could do a lot more than waiting until 11 days before an election to simply withhold an endorsement.
You know all the stuff Musk has been doing with Twitter since buying it? That.
Or, just to throw out a few ideas: insist on more conservative people on their editorial board. Insist on endorsing Trump (rather than simply not endorsing). Insist that more pro-Trump stories be covered, and fewer pro-Harris ones.
Or, if all of that is too far, just sell the paper and get out of the way.
Any of these makes more sense than simply waiting until the last minute to enforce the withholding of an endorsement if the genuine goal is to avoid being targeted in the event Trump wins.
I think this is a last-minute hedge: a lot of people did not expect the Republicans to shield Trump from prosecution as effectively as they did (including the SCOTUS majority being willing to invent an unprecedented reversal of U.S. legal precedent) and weren’t expecting him to actually win again.
Now there’s a roughly even chance that he’ll do so and that’s causing some hard calculations: if Harris wins, they won’t face retribution because Democratic administrations don’t do that. If Trump wins, Bezos and Soon-Shiong can go to him saying that they got rid of the liberals at their companies in a very public display of support.
Trump is an authoritarian at heart: he doesn’t care if you like him, he cares if you support his power. Vance used to be a harsh critic but got the VP position by publicly recanting and displaying obeisance. It really looks like they’re thinking along the same lines: either it won’t matter or he’ll be satisfied with their acceptance of his power since he really wants to attack other people who aren’t fellow rich men.
Bezos cares because his businesses have billions of dollars in revenue from the federal government. Trump has already claimed to personally review those contracts and was reported as trying to kill the $10B JEDI contract:
By all accounts, he’s prepared to be more authoritarian and less bound by the law if re-elected and he’s already threatening journalists with rape and talking about yanking broadcast licenses for channels which don’t kowtow to him.
Presidents get far too much praise or criticism for the state of the economy. In reality, their effect on it is fairly limited, especially over such a short span like 4 years.
of course it is. endorsements by major entities such as major newspapers… endorsements by celebrities and all these other points form the constellation of how a candidate is perceived. a huge chunk of people will not just vote blindly for whoever seems to be more broadly supported but actually deeply like whoever is put in front of them. and they will also believe it if a bunch of newspapers release the same story at the same time… even if there is no evidence offered to support the main assertion. or even if its obviously false. creation of the appearance of a consensus is an extremely powerful tool
It's almost as if coming out in favor of taxing unrealized capital gains right before the election wasn't the stroke of political brilliance that Harris thought it was.
"Hmm, I'm facing a close election. Hey, wait, I know! I'll make enemies of people who buy ink by the trainload and bandwidth by the petabyte-second."
I really wish somebody could have talked her out of that idea, or at least convinced her to wait another couple of months before putting it on the table. It was an incredible faux pas, maybe a history-changing one, whose consequences were trivially foreseeable.
Actively making the Democrats chance of winning less likely for your own personal interests is shortsighted.
Jeff still needs customers, he needs a sane society where his businesses can operate from ?
Sorry but the leader of the Republican Party is completely unhinged. Bezos might get away with a tax break or avoid some other legal scrutiny or even Trumps gestapo hit squad,but wow, you’re giving up a lot for a little.
Actions like this completely undermine one of the main reasons people believe Trump should be president. Which is that he is too rich to be bought. Well, look at the rich people being bought by their own greed and shortsightedness now.
Do you vote according to what others tell you to? Or do you believe most other people do so blindly? Dem voters will stay home because they didn't read a papers opinion? Or you believe that others can't tell the stance of a newspaper regarding a candidate from their reporting on them?
It makes sense in so much as "it's a risk to our business to endorse Harris because of the risk of falling afoul of Trump's vindictive nature should he win."
From a fiduciary standpoint, I agree with that assessment. From the standpoint of a citizen, I find the implication alarming.
I do believe that this is the reasoning behind the decision, but it is certainly speculation on my part.
This is why we need to repeal and replace the First Amendment with an amendment that guarantees freedom of expression within the bounds of civilized discourse (e.g., open Nazism=crime) and severely punishes government officials who use their power to stifle such expression. The First Amendment, as written, protects speech that oughtn't be protected, and fails to protect speech that ought to be protected, hence the current situation with the Washington Post being cowed into withdrawing their endorsement by the threat of a vindictive Trump.
Countries with no First Amendment, where hate speech is in fact criminalized, routinely score higher on international free-speech indices than the USA because in the USA the government, especially the Republican Party, has the means and the will to intimidate the press into silence or capitulation.
We need to do no such thing. All speech, even speech which is vile, must be equally protected under the law or else the protections are meaningless. In your preferred policy regime, it's entirely too easy for the people in charge of government to declare "this is outside the bounds of civilized discourse" about perfectly legitimate speech which they don't like. History has shown us, time and time and time again, that this will happen once you give people the power to censor. It may take 5 years or 100, but it is inevitable. I'm not willing to open that door, and if the price is that I have to deal with some jerks who are Nazis, I call that a bargain.
I generally align with your viewpoint here. I do think what we need are better ways to regulate the way free speech flows in a constantly online world. That's hand wavy and non-specific, I know, but one example might be some regulation around algorithmic outcomes re: echo chambers. Though, I did recently come across a paper that strongly suggested such regulation was futile. In any case, for the betterment of society, we need some creative solution to combat the fact that technology has given us the means for propaganda to spread effortlessly and without consequence for those behind the grift.
If you own a paper money isn't the point. Just like in a hospital or a law firm or even a bank. You do the right thing because society trusts you and making money comes from that. Do the wrong thing, and your business will vanish.
The problem extends beyond WaPo, though. He is connected with other companies that rely on government contracts or are otherwise subject to current and/or future government regulation, e.g., Amazon, Blue Origin, etc. WaPo may be the one he's willing to risk in this instance?
You are forgetting that the ftc is looking at amazon under biden, one would hope that harris will keep kahn in the post (because she's kicking asses that have been needed to be kicked for 30+ years).
I think he's in a bad place. If he endorses trump he's endorsing a potential fascist dictator. If he endorses harris he's contributing to amazon's anti-trust peril.
A billionaire personally intervening in the endorsement of a major newspaper on the basis of profit motive seems like the sort of thing that would contribute to anti-trust peril.
It seems like it would be less polarizing if it was the default state for news and information outlets to not endorse any candidate ever and just remain as neutral as possible.
I do remember the 1990s where it was typically local newspapers doing explicit endorsements and it was almost always limited to local candidates and issues.
The Washington Post has endorsed a candidate every election cycle since 1976, with the exception of 1988. The New York Times has endorsed a candidate in every presidential election since its founding in 1851.
Nothing, I suppose. I honestly didn't realize it's so contentious. I guess it just seemed kind of weird for "the news" to have an opinion at all. Why do people want an organization to tell them who they think should be president?
maybe biased opinions should be entirely separate from journalistic enterprises if those journalists want a single shred of credibility. people are mad at trump supporters and anti covid and anti vax stuff, and while i agree that's all stupid, i don't blame them at all for falling for it because main stream corporate journalism has destroyed any and all trust with absolutely everyone. maybe if we weren't constantly being lied to and sold something, more people would believe them when they say important things like "trump is taking away reproductive rights" and "covid exists and people are dying"
That's a fair point. But in this case it wasn't a principled stand against the idea of opinion journalism[1]. It was an act to kill an in-progress editorial piece days before publication, for quite clearly partisan reasons (though most people believe Bezos did it out of fear and not affinity, he'd presumably prefer Trump loses, but doesn't want to be in the line of fire if he doesn't).
[1] Which, let's be honest, is pervasive and popular. You aren't simultaneously arguing to kick Hannity off the air, right?
Pretending there exists “unbiased” journalism is silly. All journalism is biased to some degree. The worthwhile categorization is to what degree the bias exists.
Journalistic credibility comes from presenting facts. Which facts you present, which pieces you publish are in themselves opinions, biases.
That's why I see aiming for unbiased reporting to miss the point of journalism. We want opinions, but not random uneducated opinions, we want well argumented, relevant and proof backed opinions.
"Candidate X is a liar" is valid journalism if there's the facts to back the claim and the analysis to make it a thought provoking piece that brought something to the readers. We have whole Pullitzer winning books going into minute details about how some public figures are crooks.
To note, not reporting, not expressing opinions is also a bias so I don't see a middle ground. For instance if a major national journalism would not publish the news of a candidate getting arrested, that in itself is a biased decision. If they'd publish a dry piece just quoting the official police declaration, that would also be tremendous bias and everyone would see it as a refusal to comment on it.
Why would they want to appear neutral? All news reporting, no matter what, is inherently biased in some way. There isn’t some “ideal” where that isn’t the case. There can’t be some magical font of unbiased information because just selecting what stories to put on the front page introduces bias.
News can’t be unbiased and being unbiased was never a goal. News is meant to inform, which includes facts as well as analysis. That seemingly the average American doesn’t understand that is a failure of the education system.
You’re suggesting there’s no difference between journalism that attempts objectivity and outright political advocacy which is clearly false. Perfect neutrality doesn’t exist, we can even get into a discussion of what knowledge is, that doesn’t mean news outlets don’t have an obligation to try. They did in decades past which is evident from a review of older journalism.
That just isn't true. It is possible to be unbiased in journalism, and it was a major goal of journalists at various times in history. Obviously not all journalists at all times have striven towards this goal, but some have. Stop making excuses for blatant partisanship, instead hold them to a higher standard.
By no means. Word choice on its own __is__ a bias. Even if you reported straight facts, the word choice used presents a bias or not. Is it a military action or a terrorist attack? Is it a protest? An occupation? Are they Freedom Fighters?
Choosing __to__ or __not to__ use an organization's given name or a description of them, is having a bias.
Choosing to report on something at all is a presentation of bias.
There is bias in everything and to imagine there isn't is to be even more susceptible to it.
> Why would they want to appear neutral? [...] There isn’t some “ideal”
Getting some notion of what USA politics are like on HN, I can understand why you'd have this viewpoint, but I don't think it's true
The news I am used to, I couldn't tell you what political color it has. The selection they make seems based on the perceived severity, which certainly means there is a selection process that must be introducing some sort of bias, but as near as I can tell, this bias is towards a shared humanity and not a party
Perhaps I am just naïve, so I opened the local Wikipedia and it has no mention of them being accused of having a bias, political coloring or selection, notable omissions, or any such thing
I disagree strongly with the party for hate and egocentricity having come out as the biggest one in the most recent election, and to a lesser extent with the rich people be rich party from the previous ~decade, so it's not like all noses are pointed in the same direction where I'm from; but I couldn't tell you how this organization (the default thing if you turn on your TV at prime time) feels about any particular party beyond that I expect they would condemn hate and violence in general -- shared humanity, basically.
> Why would they want to appear neutral? All news reporting, no matter what, is inherently biased in some way. There isn’t some “ideal” where that isn’t the case. There can’t be some magical font of unbiased information because just selecting what stories to put on the front page introduces bias.
Sure, but just because you can't be perfectly unbiased doesn't mean the only alternative is to become a mouthpiece for a political party.
That pretentious “above the fray” belief some news orgs and reporters have is awful and harmful.
NYT is particularly guilty of that behavior.
How one contextualizes a story and presents the attention grabbing headline puts a massive thumb on the scale of how the topic is perceived.
Because of what the article mentions or doesn’t mention, provides context for or no context for, the exact same core story centerpiece is biased and leading. Any impression the author wants to convey is easy to bring out in the “neutral” writing. This is simply a fact of writing.
And yet some reporters and news orgs, like the NYT, profess they are neutral observers as if from the planet zorg recording a miraculous unbiased story.
No, that is impossible and everyone knows it. Claiming to be neutral is gas lighting.
100%. People upset about this are just upset cause they didn't endorse their candidate. Trust in media/journalism is at an all time low. This is simply a smart move to not alienate 50% of the population. If individual editors/writers/journalists want to endorse someone, take it to your blog or website or twitter.
I would read "neutral" here to mean "factual" rather than endorsing trump as part of being neutral or something. If one party proposes e.g. impossible things or financially stupid things or whatever it may be (general examples from politics anywhere), that can and should be reported on and would not break neutrality
But it is not. They regularly make endorsements and call outs. They recently called for Biden to step down from the ticket, just months ago. It seems like we should not examine situations based on idealistic, non-existent scenarios but the world we actually live in.
News outlets by definition can not be neutral. Just look at the insane amount of stuff that the global news agencies like Reuters or AFP push out every minute, and on top of that comes all the state, county and local news.
The very act of filtering what to report to the audience is political in itself. Say, floods or other natural disasters caused or (like wildfires) made worse by climate change. Most of them tend to be ignored outside of the nation they happen, but not reporting on it also means that people don't grasp just how bad climate change already is, and thus the people may not vote for parties or individuals campaigning on climate change.
You learn this by science, and scientific reporting. Not by reporting events usually selected by severity of harm to humans and clickbait factor to enrich the media companies.
I feel like you missed the point, which is that reporting or not reporting, or how you report something can all be examples of bias. The conclusions you draw. The quotes you use or don’t use. The ordering in which you report things.
The job of the journalist is to try to present a version of the story which is as close to the truth as possible, and without leaving out any relevant information. But, also the story is in context of the values which most of us hold dear, because we are human beings.
We might have thought that an unbiased news story would have to be written by a robot, but as we know now, LLMs are biased too.
Consider the editorial board to be the equivalent of Fox's Opinion shows. They opinion side if the house is nominally independent from the News-gathering operations. If you're arguing purveyors of news should not carey opinion-pieces l, you may be a few centuries too late.
Why do you think what Fox is doing is our standard? Why do we need Editorial Board’s biased opinion. Can we not have a truly unbiased journalism outlet?
It is one thing to be neutral when one candidate wants more military spending and a lower top income tax bracket and the other is in favor of higher taxes on top and more social spending.
But in this case one candidate literally tried to subvert the last election. Even ignoring all his other issues, that one is enough to say we shouldn't vote for him.
Yes but if I was a richer than God billionaire what would I care that POTUS had a grudge. What's he gonna do, audit my taxes? There is something fishy going on.
He'd care about getting government contracts. For example, during the Trump administration the Pentagon chose Microsoft over AWS for JEDI. AWS claimed there was political interference that favoured MS.
Obviously Bezos will be rich with or without these contracts, but he'd prefer to be richer.
Yes we can infer. His political leanings are fairly Democrat. His media puppet is very left leaning. He didn’t announce this policy years ago when it would have been a nothing burger, instead just a couple weeks before the election as a splashy egg on face moment.
I can smell fish. His best information is that he was backing the wrong horse and now he is scrambling to contain the damage. Because it’s also quite a slap to the Harris campaign, he must not think much of their chances or sees a very, very asymmetrical risk profile here. Snub versus scorched earth.
We are going to be in for a very interesting four years.
According to the article, Jeff Bezos is presumably afraid that Trump would continue to punish Amazon. If that is the case, this seems like an entirely futile exercise.
Not that corporate PR responses are ever particularly illuminating. I read an article regarding information conveyed per syllable. English was near the top. Languages with less information per syllable like Spanish were spoken faster. In dead last place were PR statements from Fortune 500 companies.
Imagine taking as many steroids as Jeff Bezos has taken, only to end up being afraid of an obese elderly man who cheats at golf. What was the point of all that flexing?
On a serious note, this is an example of what historian Timothy Snyder refers to as "obeying in advance", where people predict what a repressive government will want and then obey before they're in power just to be safe. This creates a positive feedback loop that leads to them seizing power.
Well, he does have a reasonable chance to be elected to presidency, so there's that.
Morality and general spinelessness aside, it's clearly the sensible thing to do. You might anger a few sensible people but that will pass. Trump is not exactly known to be forgiving. Remember when he refused emergency aid to states that weren't supportive enough of him? That's the sort of decrepit small-minded snowflake we're talking about.
1) He already has experience with the Trump admin trying to deny AWS from government contracts on the basis of Trump's personal frustration with the Washington Post.
2) It's notable that his other significant enterprise is Blue Origin, whose competitor is Elon Musk, who has by now deeply and publicly ingratiated himself with the Trump campaign.
Maybe Lina Khan is part of the story, but it's silly to act like there aren't more straightforwards reasons.
That doesn’t make sense to me. Lina Khan already doesn’t like Amazon, she cut her teeth at Yale calling them out for antitrust. How is not endorsing Kamala Harris going to smooth that over? And it’s WaPo, which is entirely separate from Amazon as far as antitrust is concerned.
Even within the internal logic of the equivalency between Donald Trump and Lena Khan it doesn’t make sense. It’s pretty clear he is afraid of Trump.
To be clear, the camps never went away, and we’ve been mass deporting for decades now. Support of ICE is a bipartisan effort. Iirc the only change Biden made was to end the policy of family separations. The rhetoric is massively different, but the actual policy is not.
I really wouldn’t hold my breath for a president that doesn’t fearmonger about immigration in the forseeable future.
One candidate has proposed a day of violence and given indications they consider “anyone who disagrees with me” as an “enemy within”. I don’t think they have talked about televised tribunals, and they also have a … tenuous … relationship with the truth or following through on promises (even when baselines against normal “politician lie rate”)
Do you not think that people communicate their intention in a scripted situation?
I, personally, script meetings because I don’t communicate effectively when put on the spot. To me, “unscripted” interviews feel like gotcha journalism - why not let someone take their time to describe their thought process?
POTUS is not in a tactical fighter jet dogfight where low latency is massively important. What matters is thinking things through, to consider second order effects.
Instinctual reactions are great for sports but I have no idea why they’d be important for politics, outside of optics. Type II systems, not type I.
Your comment broke several of the site guidelines, by (1) posting in the flamewar style, including nationalistic flamebait, (2) being snarky, (3) doing political battle, and (4) commenting about getting downvoted. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules? We'd appreciate it because we're trying to avoid hell here.
This is a story that is going to lead to political passions. Don't want such stories? Just kill them. What kind of useful conversation do you think it will raise that will not ignite passions?
"More specifically, Trump has pledged to toss reporters in jail and strip major television networks of their broadcast licenses as retribution for coverage he didn't like."
But hey, I'm doing political battle? You guys really are in denial.
So many times HN posters have extolled how Bezos hasn't interfered with the WaPo and those of us who expressed concern about his purchase were chicken littles. It has never been true and it's plain as day now. He bought it for the same reason Musk bought Twitter. To have control over a media outlet he values.
Well, it might have been true until now. Certainly there's no previous good evidence for Bezos-directed coverage or editing at the Post.
But regardless: you were right. I was one of the folks who viewed him as a basically benign entity who, sure, had opinions of his own, but clearly would never put his fingers on the editorial scale. And I was wrong, and he isn't.
They're not really saying Bezo or Musk are acting illogically. He's lamenting everyone who has set with their heads buried in the sand and pretended they aren't doing the things they're doing.
Not really, there was no proof, just speculation with no evidence. In this case there is plenty of evidence that Bezos put his finger on the scale. See the editor resigning and likely there will be others to follow. He said he was hands off when he bought it, but here we are.
Because you believe in something more than personal gain. The US and other countries were built by elites who believed in more; it's the current generation that are failing.
Or at least forming your own vision of what you want the world to be like based on your own values, and seeing the world move that way as "personal gain."
I think people nowadays choose some generic and pointlessly bland vision of personal success instead of having their own vision based on their own values out of narcissism. The more generic, the more people will agree that you are successful.
> The newspaper also published an article by two staff reporters saying that editorial page staffers had drafted an endorsement of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over GOP nominee Donald Trump in the election.
This is a bizarre way to use his control as a owner. If you own a newspaper or tabloid, we know from Trump how you use it effectively: you practice 'catch and kill', or you kill your own inconvenient stories, or you sic your reporters on the enemy disproportionately (while still scrupulously reporting only true things), or you selectively amplify stories from elsewhere.
You don't... kill editorial board endorsements (while still publishing an article on it!). Is there a single person in a swing state who, despite being bombarded by advertising for years, is now going to vote for Trump but would have voted for Harris once they saw the Washington Post endorsed Harris instead? "Ah, well, if WaPo says so, I guess I was wrong about her! I wasn't expecting them to endorse the Democratic candidate!"
I can only read this as Bezos trying to kiss up to Trump, who is narcissistic enough to actually take personally a foregone editorial board endorsement of his opponent.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 467 ms ] threadSad to see an important newspaper die in this way. I hope the people that do good work there are able to find new employment.
Don't listen to what they say, Look at what they do.
Breaking Points back in July, while discussing the Trump-Biden debate <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV8ULfwTneE> (which I highly recommend watching; it's the single best sum-up), pointed out two things for those who claim (to believe) the above:
* If TrumpNaziKKK being reelected means "no more elections ever", shouldn't Democrats have originally chosen someone other than a living corpse as his opponent?
* While discussing how the many plans among Democrats like Newsom, Whitmer, etc. (and their successors) for 2028 were disrupted/forced up by the potential to replace Biden (before Kamala's abrupt coronation), they again pointed out the paradox of on the one hand claiming that Trump will abolish elections, and on the other hand having plans for running to replacing Trump in 2028.
Read this June New York Times interview of Whitmer. <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/22/magazine/gretchen-whitmer...> Strange, how she doesn't say (despite being very specific about things like the plot against her) that "if Trump wins, there won't be elections in 2028 and all non-MAGAtards will be executed by Trumptroopers". You'd think that would be something of sufficient urgency to repeat at every public opportunity. Almost as if actual Democratic leaders don't really believe the rhetoric they have so successfully foisted upon their supporters, including 75% of Redditors.
Another example: Post-Trump/Biden debate, Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) explicitly denying that Trump's reelection will threaten American democracy <https://www.bangordailynews.com/2024/07/02/opinion/opinion-c...>.
Yet another example: After discussing Golden's op-ed, Ezra Klein citing other Democrats who privately admit to him <https://x.com/Timodc/status/1811136469911711877> that a) they don't believe Trump is an "existential threat to democracy", and don't know why others say that, and b) that's why they aren't speaking out about Biden stepping down, because they believe the damage to their own careers from doing so is a greater threat than Trump winning
Yet another example, perhaps the most prominent of all: Biden telling George Stephanopoulos that if he loses to Trump then, well, "I'll feel, as long as I gave it my all and I did as goodest as I know I can do, that's what this is about". If he was the only person who can save the country from Orange Hitler, would that really be the extent of Biden's reaction? Really?!?
They clearly are a party divided by old timers, radicals and the rest. Biden has a retinue of close advisers who loose power when he looses office (either by mental ability or loosing) They have the influence to damage anyone taking a swipe at the "king". Obvious disloyalty is toxic in politics. (even more so in trump circles. even though hes not very loyal to you)
Trying to pry a leader out of their seat, when there are no clear charismatic upstarts is fucking hard, even more so when your party is in paralysis because they are loosing in the polls.
THe democrats bungled it. and you have Harris.
Youre citing sources saying that the democrats will plan x,y & z, and they are keeping it a secret.
They can't keep a secret. Look how much warning we had about Biden being yeeted. _months_ of low lying noises and grumbles.
Where as you look at trump and he says: "I'm going to deport milions"
and
> “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
There isn't really an equivalent from the democrats, because they are disorganised and frankly useless.
Trump has a chance to do this because he's surrounded by pricks who'll let that happen.
I used to fear for what this would mean for Europe (me), but I think it will be incompetence top to bottom. He had a decent crew last time around, but by the end it was Giuliani, MyPillow and the big dick toilets guy.
This is about billionaires wanting to avoid taxes.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-apple-ceo-cook-c...
Now, if Americans are stupid enough to make Trump president again - well, that's a different scenario because Trump would be president. Then Tim Cook has incentive to try to convince Trump to not thoroughly wreck and destroy the US economy. Tim Cook can wait until after the election to see if he has to cross that bridge.
> So no, there's no reason to believe this happened.
Why hasn't he (or any of the other Big tech CEOs who Trump has claimed conversations with) denied it? They just have to put out a statement saying "the conversation never happened". Their silence is deafening.
Not if you want something from the narcissist. Instead you chuff the narcissist up. It's gross, but we've seen them all do it reactively after he was elected in 2016, so why not be proactive this time? None of them (Big tech) are going to lose customers over it, so there's no risk.
> Only an idiot believes Trump's incessant lies and neither I, nor presumably Tim Cook, gives a rat's ass what idiots think of us.
Whatever his cognitive abilities, if elected president, he will have nearly absolute power over foreign trade policy. He could try to use it to exert leverage over the EU to weaken their antitrust enforcement.
If you think Big Tech can't be replaced, then you haven't been paying attention. Google is facing irrelevancy in the age of AI. Netflix subscriptions have been tanking as the world's largest content creators have moved into the streaming space. Facebook's growth is anemic and people are actively trying to use their service less.
Apple's customers trend liberal and Apple already has the challenge of convincing them they need a better camera than the one they bought two years ago, when the one they bought two years ago works just fine and does everything they need. That's why iPhone sales are down - significantly. Same with Mac sales. Good enough is good enough. Facing those challenges, do you really want to go and piss off your customers over something like politics?
Amazon is about the only one that's looking like it has a bright future. That's why Bezos wisely chose not to endorse Harris last week - why would he want to piss off half his customers over politics? Especially heading into the holiday season where he's expecting major sales? Look what politics did to Bud Light.
So no, Big Tech is not safe. They're big because they're smart, and by being smart they know there's no need to kiss Trump's ass before he's president and there's a business need requiring them to do so.
I never said that. They are not safe. Specifically they are not safe from anti-trust enforcement and the threat that the corporate tax rate will rise to what it was before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, and those are strong motivators for them to get ahead of the political ball.
Big tech is probably also talking to the Harris campaign before the election, to try to negotiate the de-fanging of the FTC and preserving their tax cuts to the extent they can if she wins. Some of Harris wealthy tech donors specifically want Lina Khan removed.
They are smart (and cynical) by covering all their bases. Trump talks about it because he feels (not incorrectly) that name-dropping those conversations helps him.
There is little long-term risk of these corporations losing business over this stuff. Consumers have demonstrated for a long time that they don't care much about the unethical behavior of corporations, especially if changing their consuming behavior affects their lifestyle in any way.
Between now and the election or holiday season, what are Apple, Google and Amazon's customers going to do to boycott? Delay an iPhone purchase? Stop advertising on Google (conceding attention space to competitors)? Shop instead at ... Walmart?
As far as what customers may be willing to do, do you think Bud Light drinkers stopped drinking beer? I'm not confident we can rely on past customer behavior to predict future customer behavior in today's political climate. That's the very essence of chaos.
I agree that most of his statements are lies, but his claim that big corporation CEOs called him is far more plausible than his lie about Haitians eating cats and dogs.
Again, why haven't the CEOs debunked his claims? If anyone else with a similar megaphone to Trump made such false claims, they would immediately release a statement to the contrary. Their lack of rebuttal of his supposedly false claim is incredible telling of how much they hope to gain from him if elected.
> As far as what customers may be willing to do, do you think Bud Light drinkers stopped drinking beer?
Please explain what is the serious non Bigtech option for your next smartphone, or the serious retail alternative to Amazon or Walmart (without trading off convenience - which most consumers will not do).
In contrast, there are a ton of cheap beer alternatives to Bud Light, like Coors, Pabst, etc.
What we seen to disagree about and are arguing about are the subtleties of the posturing and timing rather than the intent.
Not one hundred percent of them. And many tech execs are liberal. I'm talking about the larger demographic trends.
https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/ftc...
Everything is backwards.
> An endorsement of Harris had been drafted by Post editorial page staffers but had yet to be published, according to two sources briefed on the sequence of events who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The decision not to publish was made by The Post’s owner — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — according to the same sources.
Seems it’s just Bezos
I can't answer why we would want newspapers to endorse presidents- except that historically, newspapers played a big role in shaping public opinion (now mostly replaced by social media).
Where did you get this? Every news source has some bias, journalists, editors and owners of the media house are not some ideal beings. The good ones are honest about their bias.
As to endorsing a candidate, it's absolutely for the paper to decide. Endorsing a candidate might alienate some readers, not endorsing others.
But that's not what happened here. The editors did their normal endorsement process, but the owner of the paper stepped in and personally overrode their process for this one particular endorsement. That's a way different story from deciding to stop doing endorsements.
The proper framing is “the owners stepped in to change the policy, to mirror the same policies they had before the 80s”.
Whether that’s right or wrong to do is a separate question. But framing this as though it has been editors going rogue or something is just not what’s happening at all.
Of which I didn't do. Granted, 40 years is a long time. But given that the company has had the policy of not endorsing for over two-thirds of its existence, I believe the "undo" framing is accurate.
Better question: Why now? What changed for them? Was it declining revenue/readers, an overhaul of ethics or process? I can't wait to read the tell all some day about these decisions.
At the national level, I don't think it really makes a difference if a newspaper endorses a candidate for President. Those who read and value the opinions of that newspaper are more inclined to vote for the endorsed candidate anyways.
It's not two media organizations. Both wrote endorsements of Harris.
Two self-interested billionaires decided that they and their personal fortunes would be better off if those endorsements were not published.
The message this sends to the Democratic party is: suck up to the rich guys if you want power. It's bad for society.
You don’t think this is a recent lesson? Pretty sure every politician already realized this. Since literally forever. Hell, I worked for a company whose wealthy owner had a steady stream of politicians flowing in and out of our offices promising the world for a handout, support, and help. Seemed like every week there was a tour or two for somebody. I have met literally 3 governors, several senators, US reps, state reps, county commissioners, multiple presidential candidates, sheriffs, mayors, wannabes for all and scores of political support staff who excitedly walked in my office while trying to schmooze the old man.
How is it worse than a small cadre of elitist mono-culture editors using the reputation of WaPo for their chosen candidate?
Bezos didn't force WaPo to endorse another candidate, I think it's actually good they don't endorse anyone at all.
Incomplete list. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Democratic_newspape...
He owns the paper, they just work there.
I worked at a major daily newspaper 30 years ago and I personally know of two cases in my short tenure there where news stories were killed because they didn’t want to piss off important advertisers. I am also aware of a story involving a family member of one of the executives that was let’s say “barely” reported. Other local media organizations interestingly had much more detail than we carried.
News has always been and will always be first—a business.
There's definitely some very hard and frank questions we need to ask if free information decides to focus on profits over communication.
Plus in this day and age there is literally no restriction on the flow of public accessible information at least in the US. Even when it was tried recently (twitter, FB, YouTube) during the pandemic the public backlash to that attempts at information control was so great that it might literally sway this election.
like most of the 21st century: Nothing new, just getting more efficient and less subtle with it. 20th century corruption would have had this announced way back in 2023 to make the timing not so obvious at the bare minimium instead of having editorial waste its time on a story that was pulled last minute.
>the public backlash to that attempts at information control was so great that it might literally sway this election.
but nothing much changed. I don't know if public outcry vs output was always this poor, but that certainly seems to have changed over the decades. Too many people uncomfortable enough to complain but not enough to get up and get out.
Two of the three platforms (and the former CEO of one) have publicly admitted what was done at their companies was a mistake and the third has quietly reversed much of the topic controls around pandemic and vaccination content.
I’d say that is something.
Whenever people say stuff like this it reminds me why I'm wary whenever people mention things being business friendly or pro-market because it has a lot to do with protecting certain people who already have a good position over merely following market forces.
Edit: lots of changes to try and clarify my point
That may be less of a problem than government goon-squads raiding the Washington Post but I still think it's a problem.
I can also distinguish between the value of the press and the value of a social media platform. Banning an account on Twitter doesn't carry the same social weight as banning journalists. To me, while both are legal and within the bounds of free speech, one is distinctly worse for society than the other.
The issue at hand here is what happens to objective news reporting when a rampant vindictive psychopath enters the office of the President.
I guess if they entirely stopped publishing self authored editorials it might be "neutral" to not publish a particular one. But that isn't what is happening.
If a purported journalist wants to influence or otherwise lead his audience somewhere, he is many things (commentator, advocate, activist, influencer, etc.) but he is not a journalist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advocacy_journalism
The entire point of journalism is holding powerful people/groups accountable. This is why countries like China hate journalists. Big companies like “journalists” who don’t ask tough questions. But the job of journalism isn’t just to reprint a press release with slightly different phrasing.
"Engineers make implements of war" or so.
What is an engine? Citing Merriam Webster[1]:
>3a: something used to effect a purpose
So yes, an engineer can make implements of war among many other implements. The people who actually wage war are called other things.
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/engine
It has been a long tradition for the OPINION EDITORS of newspapers to endorse one or more positions of various political races, especially the presidential race.
What Bezos did is say, no, you cannot and will never again slap the Washington Post's name onto your personal endorsement. I think that's fair, he owns the brand, and I think it's also good for journalism overall because it's not a journalist's job to push opinions.
Endorsements are written and attributed to the Editorial Board, not the entire outlet.
Examples:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/10/18/opinion/kamala-harris...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/opinion/editorials/kamala...
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/editorials/a/endorsement-pr...
Objective Reporting: Journalism aims to report events truthfully, objectively, and fairly, without bias. This involves verifying facts, seeking multiple perspectives, and presenting information clearly.
Activist-journalism is an oxymoron. There are very few journalists anymore.
Are there a clear bright line tests for things like "objective" and "bias" and "fair"?
Accuracy, verification, impartiality, yes, but seeking the truth upsets people, and the usual attack on that is to claim bias, prejudice, activism and “fake news” on the part of the journalist/organization
The correct posture, therefore, of the free press when a charismatic authoritarian is on the cusp of power is opposition. So-called “neutrality” is not just foolish, it betrays their entire reason for being!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorsements_in_the_2024_Unite...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_endorsements_in_2019_A...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/federal-electi...
There is an entire Wikipedia page devoted only to endorsements in the 2024 United Kingdom general election:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorsements_in_the_2024_Uni...
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/06/28/french-...
It was done under the name of the Director of Le Monde, rather than as an unsigned editorial as is common in English language newspapers, but it sure looks similar to my American eyes.
More so than that question, I think it's more obvious to ask "if you're going to have that argument, is the year Trump, the nation destroying clown, is running, the year to suddenly make a change after something like > 3 decades? Especially when it seems like your owner might be making the change because he wants to curry favor for contracts?"
It's a pretty pathetic look, but I don't particularly expect any civic virtue from Bezos, so not shocked.
No doubt this will be portrayed as Bezos reigning in "Democrat" conspiracies and used to normalize Trump by the denizens of that delusional universe.
I'm 100% on board with impartial reporting, with the caveats that a) endorsements are of the Opinion section, and b) the fact of the matter is that only the higher-minded news orgs would attempt impartiality -- so it's really just ceding the argument.
And LATimes and WaPo endorsements almost certainly won't have an effect on this election.
But, this reeks of cowardice. If you wanted to return to the journalistic standard of impartiality, that's a great thing to do when the pressure is low. Feb 2021 would have been perfect.
Less than two weeks before the most contentious election in modern history? And specifically when one candidate has threatened news organizations and their owners with retribution (legal, commercial, extralegal) for stories they don't like?
That's capitulation, not impartiality. If you believe in the mission of journalism, the honorable option would be to anti-endorse any candidate who threatens that mission.
If you don't believe in that mission, then what are you doing operating a newspaper?
Bezos is a coward.
I can read a biased story, with values very different to my own, and still draw conclusions that are still meaningful. Mind you, I would expect omissions and couching that is flawed, but understanding the thinking of those I oppose is valuable and allows me to see their blind spots (or my own for that matter).
But a news organization or journalist being clear about their values and politics also disposes of the harmful notion that they've actually achieved some sort of objective reading or that they're being complete and well rounded. There's a deceptiveness in that pretense which some readers (watchers) may actually take for truth and not think more critically about what they're consuming than that.
Given that editorial boards at newspapers like WaPo traditionally do, I find it notable when the billionaire owner steps in to stop them from publishing the endorsement, due to fear of retaliation from one of the candidates.
To me, that’s worth knowing about.
Of course with endorsements you can technically bring up the is/aught dichotomy. The facts may be what they are but that doesn’t necessitate any particular action. While this is technically true, I never see anyone complaining about the ethics of testing products and endorsing good ones. Wirecutter is basically doing the same thing with headphones and running shoes. Yet I only ever see pushback on political endorsements.
In short, umpires are neutral and fair but the fact that some teams win a lot more than others doesn’t mean they’re not doing their job.
It’s not that politicians share a common set of facts and just have differences of opinion about how to best accomplish the same goal. They are telling vastly different stories. In some sense, the more compelling story wins.
So I see a pretty direct connection between facts and political preference.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-very-fine-people/
If I Google "Russian Pee Tape", Business Insider is the 3rd result with claims that the tape most likely exists. 1st being Mashable and 2nd being Buzzfeed.
https://www.businessinsider.com/christopher-steele-trump-pee...
As for the "Russian Pee Tape", I'll give you that one -- fake news sure exists. (I think if it was real, it would have leaked by now -- no pun intended.)
Opinion and analysis has always been part of news publications, and plays an accepted role in adding layers of interpretation onto the raw "facts" that is crucial in making those facts interpretable by readers who aren't expert in the subject matter.
There is no neutral publication. Of there is an editorial board there is by definition no neutrality.
That's pretty charitable. In my experience most opinion and "analysis" is typically heavily biased and in service of some agenda.
He says things like "I wish I had general's like Hitler's" or his political opponents are the "enemy within" and he would harness the military against them if he gets in power, and that migrants are criminals.
I really don't know how you can equate something as uncontroversial as "1+1=2" with such controversial and divisive statements.
And this doesn't have anything to do with "the left" a ton of conservative Republicans have admitted that Trump is objectively terrible.
https://www.wpr.org/news/conservative-commentator-charlie-sy...
Essentially they offer a framework of reasoning around the facts presented that the reader can use to make their own evaluation. Like if someone reports that 122,211 electric vehicles were sold last year. Is that a lot? Is that not a lot? You would need to start comparing to previous years, what external factors might be influencing sales. There is intrinsically no way to do that without introducing selective bias about what is considered or not. But the reader at least gets that context to enhance their own understanding.
That doesn't make sense to me - they literally spend all day every day absorbing, summarising and writing about context as their full time job. They are trained formally at assessing, evaluating and questioning facts. You can criticise the end result, but I can't see how it's reasonable to say they aren't far better positioned to have an informed opinion than the average reader who gets up in the morning with no training and tries to understand a slew of facts dumped on them without context.
Something the people they are writing to and ostensibly on behalf of do not get to enjoy. Perhaps people with grounded perspectives would be more worthwhile. Guest opinions are logical, an actual editorial opinion department? That's just an early retirement plan for writers who don't have what it takes to produce news anymore.
I have no idea what "absorbing" means and how it's different from any random dude spending his day sitting on a couch glued to CNN/MSNBC screen. But the fact that they are professional writers doesn't give them any special quality in the insightfulness of their writings - you can be a professional writer and a complete doofus, to which we have an ample number of examples.
> They are trained formally at assessing, evaluating and questioning facts.
No they are not. Maybe they used to, somewhere in ancient times, but there's no slightest trace of any of it in most of the content produced by major press outlets. If they can do it - which I very much doubt - they certainly aren't bothering to.
> You can criticise the end result
By their fruits you will know them. The end result is the only criteria worth considering.
> I can't see how it's reasonable to say they aren't far better positioned to have an informed opinion
Some of them - with access to sources unavailable to regular people - may be better position to form an informed opinion, if they wanted to. But as soon as that information has been published, they do not have that better position anymore. And in addition to that, what is frequently happening is that they do not just publish the information available to them - instead they distort it and modify it to fit their pre-conceived opinion, and publish that, in hope that the public doesn't know any better (it usually does). If there is any truth to separation of news and opinion sections that we were told so much about it, then by that mere fact the opinion writers don't have any special informational insights - only the news people, working with confidential sources, might.
> the average reader who gets up in the morning with no training
What is that mythical "training"? I see no evidence of any relevant "training" in anything I read in the press. Most of them know how to handle basic grammar and write somewhat coherent text, but any person with basic education can. Beyond that, I don't see any special "training" there. And certainly there is an ample number of people who undergo much more rigorous training about how to handle facts, e.g. when studying hard sciences. Most press opinion writers do not undergo anything like that.
> tries to understand a slew of facts dumped on them without context.
What is that mythical "context" not available to regular people and where does it come from? Is there some secret "context sources" that are only opening if you work for WaPo? What is stored in those "context" treasuries?
I think their existence is a complete fiction. There's just a bunch of people who are getting paid for publishing their opinions because they have a degree saying "journalism" on it or just because they applied to the job and got hired, but they don't have any special insight or "context". I mean, some of them might be just good at thinking and making conclusions (they usually don't survive in the press long) but that would be just random luck. Given the selection pressure, I'd expect lower chance to find such people among professional press than just in a random selection of people with the same class and education level.
That’s why WaPo has consistently endorsed the same party—even when that party’s policies have changed dramatically over time. WaPo would endorse Harris regardless of her policies.
A candidate's social policies may be more important to some people than their fiscal policies. So an analysis of their social policies would be more useful to those readers than an analysis of their fiscal policies.
You can make an expert analysis of a candidate's previous stances and track record on those subjects. Politicians will routinely lie about their previous stances, so that seems like a useful analysis to me.
On abortion, there's now a national patchwork of policy. You could write a damned book analyzing their implementation and consequences.
An article listing analysis like this, with appropriate quotations and explanations would be great. Does WaPo publish stuff like that, consistently, over the length of the campaign? Or would it rather do another "17 reasons why Trump is exactly like Hitler" level analysis?
Because they work for the newspaper and that's part of their job?
> How does it not undermine a paper's journalistic ethics to be neutral and fair?
If they had tried to disguise opinions as journalism by introducing intentional bias and distortion into a story, then that would be a problem. But newspapers have published opinions for ages.
Assuming neutrality isn't something that we should expect newspapers to value, then I think transparency is an good alternative. A presidential endorsement can be a good thing in that the newspaper staff are being openly transparent about their political bias.
Why do you think that readers don’t understand that?
It hasn't felt like this to me for many years, for pretty much any outlet.
Interestingly on another note, opinion writers are often actually less qualified than you’d expect, because the business model of a newspaper doesn’t really work for accumulating expertise vs. a specialized magazine/Substack / etc. The only way to have consistent opinion pieces is to have a generalist, not a specialist.
You can make the case that they might be disingenuous or manipulative in sharing what they claim to be their opinions, or that their opinions reflect cultural indoctrination rather than professional assessment, etc -- and so you don't have to take their endorsements seriously.
But it's not a crazy idea that they have something valuable to share for all the time they spend very close to news and politics, and it's not bad to know what their big picture view of topics and people are as they write and select stories for the rest of the paper as it helps you contextualize them in their subjectivity.
Like you said, that can be valuable, especially in politics, when one hopes they aid your messaging. But it’s not a moral or even practical imperative to keep up with journalism.
Imagine learning about sports through ESPN commentary and never actually watching a game.
A similar professional blindspot occurred when many engineers thought twitter would collapse when Elon fired all those people. Because they see twitter as a piece of software, not a brand and organization.
But why is there a cohort so unsure of their decisions they need support from others? Is this how we want people making decisions for the country?
One political faction/side knows a publication is favored by one of the two parties. It can use that fact to feed it false information, or truthful, and watch to see how it gets reported, and the reaction of that electorate.
It’s not biased to call a spade a spade.
I say supposedly because I find it hard to believe the WaPo endorsement would actually sway anyone.
What's the alternative, do comprehensive research on the record of 20 candidates? I don't have time for that. Read the blurbs they write about themselves in the voter's guide? Why should I trust that, they can write anything there.
A lot of folks are exhorting him to resist in order to protect the norm, but it his true that _his_ choice is caused by first amendment violations, not causing them.
If Bezos chose to constrain his own speech due to some perceived threat to his companies from a possible Trump administration, that's still a private decision (and an exercise of his first amendment right to non-expresssion).
To be a first amendment violation, the government has to constrain speech (via force or threat).
Opinion and reporting are separate- famously the WSJ reporting is quite strong and their opinion section is ... often wrong- but as long as an opinion section exists that's kinda their job, to share their opinion. If you want to get rid of opinion that might be a reasonable thing (with cable news and the internet no one has a shortage of opinion these days!) but doing it in such a ham-fisted way so close to the election is not a sign of a carefully thought-out business decision, it's a sign of cowardice.
In theory your idea would be good, except when I look at the market I don't see anyone actually succeeding at that, which suggests to me that it's not actually a very large market of consumers.
The issue here is that Trump is a threat to our democratic system of government. It’s not the time to be changing policies and refusing to endorse. It’s a time for taking a stand.
It is blatantly obvious that this decision was done solely for Bezos business interests. Ignoring this and leaning into a theoretical debate to defend the decision is insulting.
and silence, apparently.
https://apnews.com/article/poll-joe-biden-kamala-harris-dona...
Yes I agree that Joe Biden had the legal authority to step down and appoint Kamala Harris as his successor to run for President. No, I don't think doing that is democratic. What would have followed the democratic process would have been recognize what everyone else knew way in advance and stepping down early enough for potential nominees to run to be the candidate.
Criticizing the Democrats for being anti-democratic here would carry a lot more weight if the Republican nominee wasn't responsible for J6 and the fake electors plot.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/13-former-tru...
I gave up. Pax Americana had a good run. The parallels to Germany 1933 and Russia 2003 are simply too loud to ignore at this point.
The problem is the lie that either of these candidates is anything like a dictator, not people supporting them. Neither Trump nor Harris is my pick for president, but whoever wins it will still be business as usual in America for four years. The only thing which actually threatens is is fearmongering tearing apart our bonds as countrymen and undermining belief in our system of government.
Obviously this topic is a third rail here, but I think it's important to say that he upended the political environment and we are in uncharted waters now.
But just because we're tired doesn't mean we don't have to face things.
None of that is healthy. None of that is part of normal democracy.
In previous years, presidential candidates talked about policies, rather than divining meaning from a demented old guy (you may also point to biden on that one, he is still able to answer a question though.)
What more do you need?!
(yes i know Jeff doesn't work there, but y'know...)
You’re able to see this for yourself when you travel to other countries and talk to people you meet about the politics in their country in person. Suddenly, magically, you’re able to see both or all sides and actually listen instead of selectively listen.
On the other hand, one would say people closer to the issue are the more informed ones and that’s usually correct. A counter point is people closer to the issue are being targeted by more advertising and usually we associate targeted advertising with causing a populace to become more misinformed rather than more informed. The primary media bias every year is calling elections closer than they actually are. Because if the media outlets and the pollsters they hired said any given election wasn’t close, people would check the news less and the media’s primary customers, the advertisers, would be sad about their ads reaching less eyeballs.
What is your opinion about foreign views and foreign bets on foreign elections?
My best guess is that this "betting action" has nothing to do with people trying to make money by betting on who they think will win - given the scale of divergence from polling results, and the speed at which that happened, this seems more like election interference - people spending money trying to influence the outcome.
I'd have to guess that in this election it's American citizens who see it more realistically. From afar it might seem obvious that Trump will lose (spouting Nazi rhetoric, killing Roe vs Wade, etc), and he'll obviously lose the popular vote, but you need to be very finely attuned to what's going on in the swing states - especially at ground level - to understand who's going to be more successful getting out the vote, etc. If expert US pollsters like Nate Silver can't get it right, then someone the other side of the world if unlikely to either. Anyways, as said, I don't think this money really is betting action - I expect it's just election interference.
On top of that, the growth of the blue firewall in PA is losing steam too early...
I do hope I'm wrong, but purely looking at the numbers, I don't think I am.
I don't really trust my opinion, and I have a pretty limited perspective on what people in other areas think, but between 2020 and now, there is much increased support for Harris compared to Biden, and much more muted support for Trump 2024 compared to Trump 2020.
With the polling mildly in favor of Harris in key states (but within the margin of error), I wonder how you've drawn your conclusion.
If I'm wrong, please let me know, as I'd really like to be proven wrong here.
Polls don't really trend though, they tend to settle. Of course significant news can cause people to reevaluate things, but it's probably the case in this election that most people have already made a pretty conclusive decision.
There are other people who are weary from these elections having gone on for so long now and were long ready for it to all be over months ago.
The whole reason for elections and democracy is for the administration and party in power to have a peaceful decent from power. Because without them, in history the only prior means were to overtake the administration by physical force and peaceful descents from power were rare and uncommon.
That had the negative ramifications of the power being concentrated by people with the strongest weapons, not the people with the best leadership, governance, and the most care towards it’s own populace, citizens, and constituency.
If I’ve answers this in any non-neutral or biased way, please let me know as I’m NPA —- the 3rd largest political affiliation.
Because absent those comments you don't get capitalism, because absent those things you don't have a free market
Would you rather I use a word like "Cronyism" to specify private ownership of capital without free-market competition?
A) Ending democracy
vs
B) Ending cronyism
Regardless of how effective you may think they would be at that goal, would you pick (A) over (B)?
Look at musk jumping around on stage and handing out money for votes.
It’s really disturbing.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/10/25/trump-v...
* I’m aware not all Christian religions are governed by the pope. But I hope you still get the symbolism I’m making.
That's not the DNC platform, that's the reality of US elections. First past the post in a race against a proto-fascist.
Almost all established companies eventually support rules that enshrine themselves as monopolies in exchange to much tougher regulation.
Tariffs force governments to pick and choose industries to receive state protection. As do subsidies.
Even creating tons of paperwork for startups helps a lot.
Plenty of democracies function this way. Italy and Belgium come to mind.
You could make the argument that those positions are fundamentally opposed to capitalism as well, but that's not as explicit.
Regardless, only one party is threatening either of your alternatives, your straw man nonsense about ending capitalism not withstanding.
Nobody is threatening either of those things. The idea that democracy is under any sort of threat is a pure lie told to you by those who benefit from keeping you scared.
At least Taylor Swift was able to make her recommendation, so I know I'm all set.
The newsroom basically did all they could to say it without saying it.
But that's a societal issue that's only given lip service at most.
That's why this is news, it's not about a paper changing a policy, it's about one billionaire blatantly burying criticism of a fellow billionaire because they are having a personal fight (or they were having a fight and this is how they've resolved it).
Doing it after the board had already written up a document endorsing a candidate (demonstrating clearly that it was not a policy of anyone but the owner, who decided to be an utter coward at the last minute) sends a clear message that even one of the richest men in the world is scared of possible backlash against him.
And the standard to/not publish should be clearly laid out and justified in their own words.
Probably not a single voter cares.
It's funny reading the comments here but has anyone considered that Bezos may in fact support Trump? Bezos is a billionaire and Harris seeks to target them to fix the deficit.
Its just possible Bezos supports Trump and it makes economic sense too, though its terribly unfashionable to come out and say such a thing.
The fact that he had the editorial board he had (1), which wrote up an endorsement of Harris several weeks ago for his approval, and then he suddenly decided it was better not to endorse at all? That fits cowardice much more closely than it does pure economic interest.
This isn't government censorship, obviously, but do remember that the only point of the Editorial Board is to write opinion pieces and have them published in the paper. That is their entire job! They aren't reporters, they don't go out and ferret out news. They have opinions, and they write them out and get published in the paper. And they wrote out an endorsement of Harris, and suddenly it was announced (to the board only slightly before it was announced to the rest of the world, according to published reports) that they weren't going to endorse for President any more. That's a fact pattern that leads one strongly to Jeff Bezos' personal cowardice as the most parsimonious explanation.
1: At least before the resignations come in, I expect the board to be very different in a few weeks.
But it wasn’t censored for no reason, and it’s entirely reasonable to question the motives that led to this specific act of censorship.
It’s a big deal that a major historic news organization’s editorial board is overruled by the owner, whether or not you agree with the decision.
At some level of approximation it doesn't even matter who the candidate is at all. An established trend in the USA is that the public is divided pretty much 50/50 between 2 colors, and hardly sways no matter what happens. Which makes it all pretty laughable way to make the choice (seeing votes as weights, and God makes a choice using these weights to make a decision) on an important question. If we assume the elections in the USA are "fair", it's pretty much flipping a coin every time. (But then, most people are already settled on the idea that it isn't an important choice, hence the "giant douche and turd sandwich" joke is so relatable.)
So while it largely doesn't matter indeed, at some low enough level any small detail might matter. I don't imagine who is that guy who was going to vote Kamala based on WP endorsement, but, well, maybe there is one. Really, I have no idea.
For the few that are still on the fence, then more straight shooting reporting, from any source, can only help.
To me this is a total cop out, and very irresponsible, for the Washington Post to not want to "take sides" and express an opinion. I guess they would've let Hitler win election too, rather than want to "take sides" and say anything bad about him. It's like not wanting to express an opinion on whether a grizzly bear or a hamster would be a better pet for a 5 year old, because you're afraid of upsetting the grizzly bear.
It’s not that I particularly like Trump as an individual (quite the opposite), but Harris is just very unappealing to me from a policy standpoint.
I do think that the Hitler comparison undermines any point you are trying to make so maybe tone it down a bit.
You may have noticed that basically everyone in Trumps first term cabinet has come out and called him things ranging from "moron" to "fascist" to a "danger to the country". This is not normal. It's extremely abnormal. It's a warning to the country.
Just trying to gather details.
Edit: I'm gonna have to spin up alternate accounts again for the first time in a decade if I get told one more time to "slow down" my posts.
This election is not a normal election, sadly far from it. It's not business-as-usual about policies, personalities and partly loyalties.
This election is, sadly, about paying heed to the warnings that have been given to you by the cabinet members, incl. military generals, that worked most closely with Trump in his first term, and the senior Republicans who are voting Democrat.
When multiple generals, who have worked directly with/for Trump, tell you that he is a fascist and "danger to the country", then it would be wise to pay attention.
If you care about the future of America, and want to safeguard democracy, then, sadly, you need to step up and vote to keep Trump out of office.
Clearly Bezos thinks they are[1], otherwise he wouldn't have gone through the trouble of killing it 11 days before an election.
People in this thread are badly conflating the idea of "Newspaper Opinion Journalism is Bad" with "It's OK for an owner to arbitrarily influence newspaper coverage in real time". You can agree with the former and still agree the later is a horrifying precedent.
[1] Or, "Bezos thinks that Trump thinks they are" might be closer to the truth.
This is the key.
And no, not everyone knows how they're going to vote, as crazy as that seems, but I agree that newspaper endorsements are a tiny factor, especially in this election.
But it exposes the fiction that Bezos allows editorial freedom at the WaPo.
I already did (yay early voting), but I was pretty close to just flipping a coin. Not for red vs blue, but for the lesser evil vs one of the more amusing third parties.
If I didn't have context about the situation, I'd say it makes sense. However I think that in this flawed two-party situation, there is unfairness on both sides, resulting in some sort of balance, and it's bad that one of the richest people on earth could upset the balance in this way, especially at the last moment.
Article from 2020: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/28/editorial...
If Bezos believes what Trump has told him behind closed doors, then his companies are in the control of a sucker, not just a coward.
obligatory trump is terrible is racist etc. not defending trump, just highlighting questionable logic
Just look at what happened in Saudi Arabia and the billionaires there.
(Those are facts. Not political claims.)
Putting aside any broader assessments of his character, I think it is rational to be afraid of the consequences of being on the wrong side of such a person.
What is depressing is the number of people in positions of influence who do not feel like modelling the virtuous position of having fear of the consequences of doing what they believe to be the right thing but doing it anyway.
[0] I realise that in principle there is a precedent for him having this power because he had it before. But what any presidential candidate in 2024 now has is the opportunity to run an executive with the clear legal opinion that they are permanently immune from prosecution for most of their actions, and an implicit handbook on how to bury criminal acts in official communications that are covered by absolute immunity. This extended power has no precedent.
Honestly I'm more surprised that Bezos even bothered. Does he really think the endorsement of The Washington Post editorial board is so significant that it's worth intervening? That seems implausible.
- Don't know who The Washington Post editorial board would endorse
- Would change who they are voting for based on this lack of endorsement
But I could be wrong.
Then again, I always wonder what the hell actually went through peoples minds in Nazi Germany.
This is an issue with first past the post, but that's a much larger thing to tackle.
https://www.votebeat.org/michigan/2024/10/24/michigan-regist...
I’m not enamored with Democrats, but Trump doesn’t share Constitutional values and I’m very much for independent journalism.
This is bad.
It’s a distinct lack of imagination and historical knowledge that stops at one event, and refuses to ponder the long term consequences.
- Endorse Harris and Trump wins, Trump will seek revenge on Bezos and Amazon (he tried this in the first term)
- Endorse Trump and Harris wins, Harris will not act outside the bounds of a normal government official
This is capitulation to the perceived threats of a Trump presidency and is very bad.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-11/la-me-sp...
> Take or seize (someone's property) with authority.
> To use one's authority to lay claim to and separate a possession from its holder.
> to take (something) away from someone especially as punishment or to enforce the law or rules.
I’m sure Elon is annoyed he has to follow basic corporate governance, but that’s kind of the point of governance.
If you want to wire me a few years of your compensation I will gladly accept.
He has his own broadcast medium to play with and noone has banned it (apart from brazil, but all he had to do was pay some money)
California has even blocked SpaceX because they don't like the politics of Musk (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-11/la-me-sp...) so I would say is risky to expect any of the two (or its followers) not seeking revenge.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
https://timothysnyder.org/on-tyranny
Helpfully, the relevant quote I was thinking of is directly on the books website:
> Do not obey in advance.
> Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
(The quote on the website goes on with several pages of examples.)
On X they're floating the theory that he knew this would cause a lot of them to resign, and wanted that for other reasons. All we can do is speculate, I guess.
> In a 2019 lawsuit, Amazon claimed it lost a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract to Microsoft because Trump used “improper pressure ... to harm his perceived political enemy” Bezos.
Notably, most presidential candidates aren’t so petty and vindictive as to cancel contracts with political opponents for spite, but we’re talking about Trump here. It would be best if you woke up to this reality.
Or, just to throw out a few ideas: insist on more conservative people on their editorial board. Insist on endorsing Trump (rather than simply not endorsing). Insist that more pro-Trump stories be covered, and fewer pro-Harris ones.
Or, if all of that is too far, just sell the paper and get out of the way.
Any of these makes more sense than simply waiting until the last minute to enforce the withholding of an endorsement if the genuine goal is to avoid being targeted in the event Trump wins.
Now there’s a roughly even chance that he’ll do so and that’s causing some hard calculations: if Harris wins, they won’t face retribution because Democratic administrations don’t do that. If Trump wins, Bezos and Soon-Shiong can go to him saying that they got rid of the liberals at their companies in a very public display of support.
Trump is an authoritarian at heart: he doesn’t care if you like him, he cares if you support his power. Vance used to be a harsh critic but got the VP position by publicly recanting and displaying obeisance. It really looks like they’re thinking along the same lines: either it won’t matter or he’ll be satisfied with their acceptance of his power since he really wants to attack other people who aren’t fellow rich men.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/10/26/trump-mattis-screw-amazo...
By all accounts, he’s prepared to be more authoritarian and less bound by the law if re-elected and he’s already threatening journalists with rape and talking about yanking broadcast licenses for channels which don’t kowtow to him.
"Hmm, I'm facing a close election. Hey, wait, I know! I'll make enemies of people who buy ink by the trainload and bandwidth by the petabyte-second."
I really wish somebody could have talked her out of that idea, or at least convinced her to wait another couple of months before putting it on the table. It was an incredible faux pas, maybe a history-changing one, whose consequences were trivially foreseeable.
Jeff still needs customers, he needs a sane society where his businesses can operate from ?
Sorry but the leader of the Republican Party is completely unhinged. Bezos might get away with a tax break or avoid some other legal scrutiny or even Trumps gestapo hit squad,but wow, you’re giving up a lot for a little.
Actions like this completely undermine one of the main reasons people believe Trump should be president. Which is that he is too rich to be bought. Well, look at the rich people being bought by their own greed and shortsightedness now.
As someone from Eastern Europe I do not think that any oligarch really needs this.
Do you vote according to what others tell you to? Or do you believe most other people do so blindly? Dem voters will stay home because they didn't read a papers opinion? Or you believe that others can't tell the stance of a newspaper regarding a candidate from their reporting on them?
From a fiduciary standpoint, I agree with that assessment. From the standpoint of a citizen, I find the implication alarming.
I do believe that this is the reasoning behind the decision, but it is certainly speculation on my part.
Countries with no First Amendment, where hate speech is in fact criminalized, routinely score higher on international free-speech indices than the USA because in the USA the government, especially the Republican Party, has the means and the will to intimidate the press into silence or capitulation.
I think he's in a bad place. If he endorses trump he's endorsing a potential fascist dictator. If he endorses harris he's contributing to amazon's anti-trust peril.
They still had endorsements, but it just wasn’t spelled out that way.
Instead, just prominent opinions, hit pieces, etc.
It's surprising to me that a news organization not publishing an opinion piece is itself giant front page news
This was countered with "endorsements have been a thing since long before the 90s".
Previous poster didn't say anything about what's "good" or "bad". They pointed out a claim was incorrect.
Second: this is what happens in Brazil. Everybody gets angry because each news outlet defends its own conservative candidate.
[1] Which, let's be honest, is pervasive and popular. You aren't simultaneously arguing to kick Hannity off the air, right?
That's why I see aiming for unbiased reporting to miss the point of journalism. We want opinions, but not random uneducated opinions, we want well argumented, relevant and proof backed opinions.
"Candidate X is a liar" is valid journalism if there's the facts to back the claim and the analysis to make it a thought provoking piece that brought something to the readers. We have whole Pullitzer winning books going into minute details about how some public figures are crooks.
To note, not reporting, not expressing opinions is also a bias so I don't see a middle ground. For instance if a major national journalism would not publish the news of a candidate getting arrested, that in itself is a biased decision. If they'd publish a dry piece just quoting the official police declaration, that would also be tremendous bias and everyone would see it as a refusal to comment on it.
News can’t be unbiased and being unbiased was never a goal. News is meant to inform, which includes facts as well as analysis. That seemingly the average American doesn’t understand that is a failure of the education system.
literally zero semantic meaning to be found in this word salad
WaPo has been giving out endorsements since the 70s. The era you’re pining for never existed.
By no means. Word choice on its own __is__ a bias. Even if you reported straight facts, the word choice used presents a bias or not. Is it a military action or a terrorist attack? Is it a protest? An occupation? Are they Freedom Fighters?
Choosing __to__ or __not to__ use an organization's given name or a description of them, is having a bias.
Choosing to report on something at all is a presentation of bias.
There is bias in everything and to imagine there isn't is to be even more susceptible to it.
Getting some notion of what USA politics are like on HN, I can understand why you'd have this viewpoint, but I don't think it's true
The news I am used to, I couldn't tell you what political color it has. The selection they make seems based on the perceived severity, which certainly means there is a selection process that must be introducing some sort of bias, but as near as I can tell, this bias is towards a shared humanity and not a party
Perhaps I am just naïve, so I opened the local Wikipedia and it has no mention of them being accused of having a bias, political coloring or selection, notable omissions, or any such thing
I disagree strongly with the party for hate and egocentricity having come out as the biggest one in the most recent election, and to a lesser extent with the rich people be rich party from the previous ~decade, so it's not like all noses are pointed in the same direction where I'm from; but I couldn't tell you how this organization (the default thing if you turn on your TV at prime time) feels about any particular party beyond that I expect they would condemn hate and violence in general -- shared humanity, basically.
Sure, but just because you can't be perfectly unbiased doesn't mean the only alternative is to become a mouthpiece for a political party.
NYT is particularly guilty of that behavior.
How one contextualizes a story and presents the attention grabbing headline puts a massive thumb on the scale of how the topic is perceived.
Because of what the article mentions or doesn’t mention, provides context for or no context for, the exact same core story centerpiece is biased and leading. Any impression the author wants to convey is easy to bring out in the “neutral” writing. This is simply a fact of writing.
And yet some reporters and news orgs, like the NYT, profess they are neutral observers as if from the planet zorg recording a miraculous unbiased story.
No, that is impossible and everyone knows it. Claiming to be neutral is gas lighting.
The very act of filtering what to report to the audience is political in itself. Say, floods or other natural disasters caused or (like wildfires) made worse by climate change. Most of them tend to be ignored outside of the nation they happen, but not reporting on it also means that people don't grasp just how bad climate change already is, and thus the people may not vote for parties or individuals campaigning on climate change.
The job of the journalist is to try to present a version of the story which is as close to the truth as possible, and without leaving out any relevant information. But, also the story is in context of the values which most of us hold dear, because we are human beings.
We might have thought that an unbiased news story would have to be written by a robot, but as we know now, LLMs are biased too.
The Editorial Board pens endorsements. It is literally an opinion piece, in the section of the paper reserved for opinion pieces.
But in this case one candidate literally tried to subvert the last election. Even ignoring all his other issues, that one is enough to say we shouldn't vote for him.
He tried to pressure Raffensperger into finding him 11,780 votes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_ph...
He pressured Michigan election offcials not to certify Biden's victory in Michigan: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-pressured-michigan-of...
Then he rallied his supporters to go to the Capitol, where they tried to stop the Congressmen from counting the votes.
The Washington Post says it will not endorse a candidate for president
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41948631
Billionaires are not your friends.
Obviously Bezos will be rich with or without these contracts, but he'd prefer to be richer.
I can smell fish. His best information is that he was backing the wrong horse and now he is scrambling to contain the damage. Because it’s also quite a slap to the Harris campaign, he must not think much of their chances or sees a very, very asymmetrical risk profile here. Snub versus scorched earth.
We are going to be in for a very interesting four years.
Its just a hedge.
If HArris wins, she's unlikley to actually take petty revenge. If trump wins, he has past form.
According to the article, Jeff Bezos is presumably afraid that Trump would continue to punish Amazon. If that is the case, this seems like an entirely futile exercise.
Not that corporate PR responses are ever particularly illuminating. I read an article regarding information conveyed per syllable. English was near the top. Languages with less information per syllable like Spanish were spoken faster. In dead last place were PR statements from Fortune 500 companies.
Morality and general spinelessness aside, it's clearly the sensible thing to do. You might anger a few sensible people but that will pass. Trump is not exactly known to be forgiving. Remember when he refused emergency aid to states that weren't supportive enough of him? That's the sort of decrepit small-minded snowflake we're talking about.
He's a cowardly monopolist.
2) It's notable that his other significant enterprise is Blue Origin, whose competitor is Elon Musk, who has by now deeply and publicly ingratiated himself with the Trump campaign.
Maybe Lina Khan is part of the story, but it's silly to act like there aren't more straightforwards reasons.
Even within the internal logic of the equivalency between Donald Trump and Lena Khan it doesn’t make sense. It’s pretty clear he is afraid of Trump.
Usually it’s the likes of Elizabeth Warren et all that attack Amazon and similar sized companies.
I really wouldn’t hold my breath for a president that doesn’t fearmonger about immigration in the forseeable future.
I, personally, script meetings because I don’t communicate effectively when put on the spot. To me, “unscripted” interviews feel like gotcha journalism - why not let someone take their time to describe their thought process?
POTUS is not in a tactical fighter jet dogfight where low latency is massively important. What matters is thinking things through, to consider second order effects.
Instinctual reactions are great for sports but I have no idea why they’d be important for politics, outside of optics. Type II systems, not type I.
Sometimes your guidelines are stupid.
"More specifically, Trump has pledged to toss reporters in jail and strip major television networks of their broadcast licenses as retribution for coverage he didn't like."
But hey, I'm doing political battle? You guys really are in denial.
But regardless: you were right. I was one of the folks who viewed him as a basically benign entity who, sure, had opinions of his own, but clearly would never put his fingers on the editorial scale. And I was wrong, and he isn't.
I think people nowadays choose some generic and pointlessly bland vision of personal success instead of having their own vision based on their own values out of narcissism. The more generic, the more people will agree that you are successful.
This is a bizarre way to use his control as a owner. If you own a newspaper or tabloid, we know from Trump how you use it effectively: you practice 'catch and kill', or you kill your own inconvenient stories, or you sic your reporters on the enemy disproportionately (while still scrupulously reporting only true things), or you selectively amplify stories from elsewhere.
You don't... kill editorial board endorsements (while still publishing an article on it!). Is there a single person in a swing state who, despite being bombarded by advertising for years, is now going to vote for Trump but would have voted for Harris once they saw the Washington Post endorsed Harris instead? "Ah, well, if WaPo says so, I guess I was wrong about her! I wasn't expecting them to endorse the Democratic candidate!"
I can only read this as Bezos trying to kiss up to Trump, who is narcissistic enough to actually take personally a foregone editorial board endorsement of his opponent.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41951373