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Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
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Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
#332[dead]
Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fo…
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.
Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's common practice across the anglosphere (US, Canada, UK, Australia, NZ). I'm not sure about elsewhere.
Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
#335To 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?
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.
Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
#336[flagged]
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 tha…
> 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.
Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
#337Newspapers publish opinions for the same reason that they publish comic strips: people want to read them. Readers seek them out. Newspapers are a business and have to give their customers what they want. The problematic aspect here is that the current business owner, Jeff Bezos, has a conflict of interest. Bezos is making a bad business decision for The Washington Post, sacrificing it and losing readers for the sake…
You seem to be implying that he made a decision based on other business interests, against those of the Post, but there is no support for that in the article. Do you have a source which describes this motive? It seems like not endorsing candidates might be good for the Washington Post's business, by improving its perceived impartiality. In addition to this, the WaPo seems to have spent much of its history not endorsi…
> there is no support for that in the article.
Untrue. At the top, "KEY POINTS: 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."
Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
#338What's even the point of being a billionaire if you're still scared of Trump?
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.
Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
#339Newspapers publish opinions for the same reason that they publish comic strips: people want to read them. Readers seek them out. Newspapers are a business and have to give their customers what they want. The problematic aspect here is that the current business owner, Jeff Bezos, has a conflict of interest. Bezos is making a bad business decision for The Washington Post, sacrificing it and losing readers for the sake…
You seem to be implying that he made a decision based on other business interests, against those of the Post, but there is no support for that in the article. Do you have a source which describes this motive? It seems like not endorsing candidates might be good for the Washington Post's business, by improving its perceived impartiality. In addition to this, the WaPo seems to have spent much of its history not endorsi…
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Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
#340Good because newspapers should not be endorsing candidates.
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.
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