The scarier option is that this ain't subservience, he's doing this because he likes enough of what's happening that he wants it to continue.
This could all be the world's shittiest up jumped RTO, creating world misery to make everyone desperate for any jobs at all. Let a couple hundred million people starve and suffer, destroy prosperity, bring everything down a couple notches, and watch how the world wraps itself around this new axis of power.
Maybe he too salutes what's happening, believes in the chainsaw.
For comparison, even Rupert Murdoch refused to kill the WSJ expose on Theranos when asked to do so by Elizabeth Holmes. He did this, despite being a major investor.
It's not a character thing, really. Grotesque subservience is a firm requirement to be successful in authoritarian environments. He wants to remain successful and will play the game by the rules presented. Lots of people operate that way, probably more than those that don't.
That this has not been historically true in the United States is the notable outlier.
Meh, so does violence and conquest and coups. Certainly there's a feedback cycle between them, but the path to autocracy has many forks. Again it's the rule of law that's the exception, not autocracy.
To be clear: it's not a notable character thing. Yes, yes, some people are uncorruptible paragons who'd never bend to the will of an autocrat, not matter the personal cost. Most of us aren't. Bezos isn't. The notable people are the paragons, not the bland rule-followers.
Bilderberg is an actual doors-closed conference of many of the world's most powerful people, you know. It's in plain daylight too, comparatively speaking.
How is supporting freedoms and free markets "subservience?"
Freedom is literally the opposite of subservience.
If a journalist, who is being paid to write, has to withhold from expressing oppressive ideas in order to protect the freedoms of their readers, who are paying them to write, then that's a fair tradeoff.
Any furthering of 'altruistic' causes which requires the oppression of other people's freedoms is not worth it IMO.
Nothing wrong with that. Every other job requires that paid workers meet the requirements of their boss whom themselves must meet the requirements of their customers. Jeff Bezos is responding to his customers' requirements, so should the journalists who work for him.
Journalists who work for these big media platforms can basically bypass the need to compete for attention on the global marketplace of ideas. This has allowed them to spread bad ideas and the scale of the platform means that the repercussions have had a delayed effect which Jeff Bezos is now trying to rectify.
Customers are leaving in droves and he doesn't have to respond to customers because he is a billionaire oligarch. He can keep wapo around as a propaganda outlet. See also: twitter.
Journalists have more integrity in one pinky than all the oligarchs combined.
Well they got half of the voters voting against their interest for a guy who by that point had history of incredible moral and legal shortcomings.
Of course that emboldens greedy billionaires, the little good they did was just a fig leaf. Now they realized that they got the permission to even leave that out.
Ironically "free speech" was kind a talking point on the right for decades, only to crumble the instance they are in power. But to people who know their history it was clear before that "free speech" when used by the far right does only include their choice of what they see as free speech. And if I pointed that out a year ago on this very website, people would have told me I was wrong — hope you're not a government researcher in electrical engineering trying to use the word "bias" then.
The Washington Post has always been a shitty right-wing rag with no separation between editorial and news. The only thing Bezos changed was turning the headlines linkbaity.
The only reason it has a current reputation as a left-of-center paper is 1) because the people talking about it didn't read it at all before it became the Trump News, like every other paper, and 2) because the Democrats completely embraced every single Reaganite policy.
The WaPo being about "free markets" and "civil liberties" (from Bezos' statement) is only a surprise because of the second part. I also do not trust them on the second part, at all; I just think the branding of free speech as "so-called free speech" by a bunch of people calling themselves journalists was starting to make people who actually believe in the profession physically ill.
edit: It's also important to point out that Ruth Marcus is not a person who quit the WaPo because of a neutral-sounding editorial edict from the owner. She's a person who didn't quit until months later.
Lefty here. I didnt consider the WaPo left of center. I considered them moderate right.
What’s really interesting about this is that the Overton window has shifted so far to the right with this presidency that even moderate right is now experiencing a chilling effect of its discourse.
Hopefully the market self corrects on this and washington posts loses subscribers. Forcing an opinion section to have only opinions you want is just the opposite of its purpose.
What is the end goal there? This is not a situation where the free market has much influence. I don't particularly like the Washington Post. But I doubt that the owner cares much about subscription revenue, nor does he seem interested in selling. And if the whole organization were to wither away due to lack of readers and qualified writers would that be better than the current situation?
I'm not happy about someone losing their job this way, but then again, who reads the Washington Post for the opinion columns? You can get opinions anywhere, and they're often better researched on Substack.
From a purely selfish standpoint as a subscriber, if they axed the entire opinion section and beefed up news coverage, that would be a win.
I stopped subscribing to the NYTimes, when 8 out of 10 "news items" promoted to me through the app were from the opinion columns. Super annoying. I know they rank and promote stuff that's popular, but we don't really need editorials/opinions in the news. It's why all those Fox/MSNBC viewers are confused by their favorite pundits, and mistaking what they say for "news" and "facts".
The other annoying thing now, even publications like NYTimes does is A/B ing inflammatory headlines to get the clicks, even though when you read the article, the facts presented are often different or opposite than the headline enticement.
> if they axed the entire opinion section and beefed up news coverage, that would be a win.
They're kind of doing the opposite though. They're stripping the text-based news coverage and replacing it with short form videos and podcasts.
I agree with you about opinion sections because somewhat worthless today though. The WSJ actually has great news coverage, even though the opinion columns are absolute garbage.
I feel like it's been a long time since newspapers relied on subscribers, or even traditional advertisers. By now they're all loss leaders for the lobbying industry.
The Post has already lost a lot of the subscribers who would leave over something like this, in successive waves after: Bezos spiked the Harris endorsement, the paper blocked a political cartoon depicting Bezos and others bowing down to Trump, and the announcement of this new "two pillars" editorial policy that the blocked editorial here would have commented on. All amid a stream of resignations.
I don't know that the market can all that meaningfully discipline Bezos, even if a response had the kind of direction and magnitude that would. Though he clearly has sought profitability for the paper, running it at a loss is a drop in the bucket financially for him.
The market cant self correct here because the market is broken. Bezos is using his profits from one industry to prop up his unprofitable business in another industry, which also helps from any real competition starting up as they don't have access to Amazon profits
This behavior and its consequences are why people call for monopolies to be broken up
> the paper blocked a political cartoon depicting Bezos and others bowing down to Trump
So are we saying that Bezos is so plugged into the day-to-day operations of WaPo that he can yank the things he doesn't like, or is there some sycophant put in place that pings Bezos when they think it is something Bezos wouldn't like? I can't imagine that Bezos gives a damn enough to be checking in every day before release deadlines while cruising the globe on his super yacht.
Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon’s retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple’s Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally – wisely – left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn’t let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they’re all still there, and Larry is not.
Isn't it even worse if he only checks in after seeing something make it to print that he doesn't like? Then there's a chilling effect where everyone is guessing what might get them fired, and so they add an extra safety margin to their syncophancy and go beyond the minimum needed.
Bezos is exactly involved like this. Just go look at all the headlines at the end of February that was the precursor started all this. He cared enough to censor the opinion columns.
Sorry but I don't think you understand the newspaper business. Bezos bought the entire Washington Post for $250m. Amazon has a market cap of $2T of which Bezos owns ~9%. The capitalist incentives are very clear, the market dictates that Bezos should do practically anything to WashPo to help Amazon. Let's say that WashPo drop to 0 value, that would be a real shame! And I'm sure Jeff would sigh really quite loudly while sailing his megayatch over to Blue Origin where they're working on that $3.4B contract for Nasa that Trump could cancel any minute. That megayatch? It cost him 2 Washington Posts to build.
I don't know what you think market forces are going to do here?
> That megayatch? It cost him 2 Washington Posts to build.
Nice. I wonder... A Copilot prompt of "[...] Instead of using units of dollars, please use units of "Amazons", where 1 Amazon equals 2 Trillion dollars." gave a plausible result. And country populations in NYC's. The speed of sound is 19 Zebras (at max gallop). Great Oxygenation Event occurred at 8 gal and Cambrian Explosion at 18.5 gal (galactic year). Oscars viewing cost 100 lifetimes, superbowl 650. c is 1800 Gff (gigafurlongs per fortnight). Rewriting problems and text using alternate units. So... how to use this in education?
Editorial freedom like this was actually quite commonplace at US newspapers. Op-Eds criticising the paper's owner signals viewpoint independence to readers, which boosts sales. In fact, it's usually easier to criticize the owners themselves than policies the owners care about.
Over 100 people upvoted this but nobody has any thoughts? I will share one. It is a negative side effect of capitalism that monetary power controls information flow.
I upvoted this post and would not have commented if not for yours, so maybe my reason for (almost) abstaining is similar as other people who upvoted. What follows might be a ramble and is just my anecdotal experience on HN:
I've been an HN user for years, and I've found it somewhat hard to comment on anything related to economics or non-technical / pop-cultural topics. Many HN users are experts in their technical fields, and they seem to think this automatically translates to expertise in political science, sociology, psychology, and all the other fields of endeavor where we can't just point to source code to justify our positions. I mostly find that HN commenters are a thoughtful bunch. But, there's a small, noisy group of armchair experts waiting to swoop in and correct your grammar or disagree on some technicality over social issues like this.
Since HN is tech-focused, even posting something not directly related to technology can get your post flagged and taken down as irrelevant. So in a way, discussing these things is disincentivized by the site's purpose. I get that WaPo is an online platform and therefore in-scope, but it's "scarier" to comment on because it's more social than technical.
In part, the act of being a thoughtful commenter also means steering well clear of any flame wars (that aren't related to NixOS, Rust, or LLMs). I.e., it's like jazz in that it's about the notes you don't play— it's the comments you don't make that foster a good online experience.
This is also a US-specific article, and lots of American people are overwhelmed by the onslaught of post-election political news; so, this might be a cultural thing in that people are not commening as much because they're dealing with a big inbox of emotions to sort through.
I still take active interest in political posts like this and personally think Bezos is a modern-day robber baron in the new Gilded Age. But, I'll seldom say so, opting instead to upvote so others can see the post and then move on silently.
Clearly some people benefit from controlling information flow, and some people are impacted negatively. Bezos may make another $1B by controlling WaPo opinion pages, while I, as a reader, may lose $1 or rights or whatever from the same action. How do you balance the two?
I think you just hit on the the biggest threat to journalism right now -- how to you quantify the value of the reporting to the reader.
Financial news outlets have long been successful at this -- Bloomberg, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, etc. They are able to build strong businesses with a relatively small audience often because that audience is willing to pay large sums of money for access. (Bloomberg Terminals reportedly cost up to $25k/yr! https://www.bluegamma.io/post/bloomberg-terminal-pricing#:~:...
Still -- how much value do you get from the Washington Post? How much value do you get from knowing about the inner workings of your government? Federal, state, municipal, any of them? Does being a better citizen have a financial incentive? Can you put a price on knowing about the situation in Ukraine, or Gaza, or even the dangerous intersection downtown?
And without that, how do you justify payment for journalism, which itself is expensive? Or is the answer that the payment comes from people who want to push a narrative, or control the conversation? Is there a monetary value to preventing that?
It used to be ads; before the Internet there was limited advertising space that reached lots of people, so papers could fund themselves with their wide distribution even in the face of competition from TV. Of course, the Internet blew that wide open.
A couple of places have tried diversifying content towards what readers will pay for; NYT has done probably the best job with the branching out towards cooking, Wirecutter, etc. that people do want to pay for. Buzzfeed attempted to do the same for clickbait to fund real journalism but that fizzled out.
I'm asking how do you quantify the underlying value. As a consumer of news, how am I richer now than I was before reading? And is it possible to put a number on it?
If you consume listicles and you like them that's value enough. (Buzzfeed)
If you enjoy crosswords, new recipes, or product reviews, that also has some value people are willing to pay for. (NYT)
Historically, journalism has mostly been finding out about what cross-subsidy works, whether that's real estate, sports, scandalous gossip, etc. that people will actually pay for. There isn't a whole lot of people paying for just the main stories for the news.
Thats kind of my point. The people who have figured out that value, i.e. Bloomberg, WSJ, Politico Pro, etc -- charge for the value. The ones that haven't are the ones figuring out other monetization strategies.
This is not a journalist. This is someone that writes their opinion on a column.
I’m sick and tired of "journalists" (probably should call them "professional opinion givers") using the journals to spew their personal opinions instead of reporting the news.
I know I was born too late to experience the golden age of journalism where journals would actually stick to give you the news, but it’s just tiresome to see the journalist's personal opinions and ideologies now in full display on every article.
I don’t care about what they feel about the theme, I just want the facts. And judging by how journals are faring, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one feeling this.
Even if you don't like the idea of the opinion section in newspapers, the Washington Post seems like they're going for the worst of all possible worlds here by keeping the section but pushing it towards only reflecting Jeff Bezos' personal opinions.
But I also don't see a problem with the idea of having the opinion section in the first place. Not every topic worth covering can be boiled down to just the facts and there is a long history and a lot of value to be found in consuming well formed opinions on a particular topic from a variety of voices in addition to just the facts. As long as media outlets clearly separate the two, those who want just the news can steer clear of the opinion section entirely.
Yeah but it's also preference. Some people like to read the facts and then come to their own conclusions. I think it can be interesting to read an opinion / column so now and then, to see someone's perspective. But I think it's important to also think about the stuff that's happening yourself, and not just take the opinions and views of someone else.
Yes that's the point of editorial journalism, to give you another perspective. You're the one acting as if you've been forced to accept their opinion verbatim which you haven't, and deciding it's not journalism, which it demonstrably is.
I wasn't the one who posted the original comment you replied to.
And yeah, reading other people's opinion can help you give perspectives and come to your own personal views. But I also think that certain newspapers seem to weave in little opinions in between the facts, and sometimes it's hard to separate them. And I empathise with the annoyance of that.
"Depending on the form of journalism, 'journalist' may also describe various categories of people by the roles they play in the process. These include reporters, correspondents, citizen journalists, editors, editorial writers, columnists, and photojournalists."
Well, she resigned in protest of the entire newspaper becoming an opinion piece.
But the idea that news is without bias/opinion is a bit controversial. They have limited space, what they choose to report on and not, promote, etc. are all forms of opinion that reflects ideology.
Maybe it is us in our era who are too naive and gullible, asking for something that isn't possible, instead of learning to think for ourselves and be critical.
> But the idea that news is without bias/opinion is a bit controversial.
It's not controversial, it's an idea only held by morons who didn't finish high school. To be clear, everyone in this country with a GED or higher has taken classes on media literacy and bias and understands that unbiased news isn't a thing and never has been.
It was really good during Cronkite and pretty much died with "Fake but accurate," from Dan Rather, who was ironically Cronkite's successor. Back then, they tried really hard, but today, they just don't have the integrity to do that anymore. I'm not sure if it's due to personnel/editor issues (i.e. journalistic activism), or the nature of the declining business model dictates they have to pander to their audiences.
Regardless of your political stance, the owner of a newspaper dictating that they will be "writing every day in support and defense” of “personal liberties and free markets." means they are no longer journalism and are simply propaganda.
