Do we really hold editorials to the same standard as the rest of the news? These are opinion pieces, you should expect bias, no?
People are upset over the wrong bias lol
Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
71–80 of 305 posts
Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article does not say this was a one-off: > On at least three occasions in the past two weeks Bezos announced a relaunch of the Opinion section earlier in the year, I don't think it's unreasonable to wonder if there has been a policy change. Three times in two weeks is a lot. > potentially a mistaken omission that was fixed within 24 hours potentially , yes. Responsible news organizations post correction notices w…
Do Editorial and Opinion sections of news papers do "conflict of interest" disclosures as a matter of course? It seems like it should be assumed that an Opinion article is expressly a biased article, written by someone with an interest in the topic at hand. If the NY Times wrote an editorial on schools or on medicaid, I wouldn't really expect to see a line disclosing the number of editorial staff members with childre…
> And this is an honest question, I don't know what the WP standard for their Editorial and Opinion pages were prior to Bezos' ownership, nor what the broader industry standard was before say 2016.
Fortunately, the NPR journalists do know, as the article states:
>> The Post has resolutely revealed such entanglements to readers of news coverage or commentary in the past[...]
Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their headlines include lines about marching against fascists and calling people toadies. This would indicate their bias is rather left.
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>So it gives the appearance of “opinionated news is good, so long as the opinions are correct.”
All news is opinionated news and some opinions are objectively better than others. For example, the simple act of choosing which story to cover is an opinionated choice and if a news outlet decided to cover a random high school teacher the same way they cover the POTUS, that would be an objectively incorrect editorial opinion.
Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you believe their reporting differs from reality? They're writing about rising authoritarianism and those who submit to it, which is a fact of the world happening today. They use the term "toady" in its literal definition. FAIR has anti-bias and counter-spin, aka "a bias towards reality." https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/toady (noun) : one who flatters in the hope of gaining favors : sycophant
I've never seen Manhattan Institute, Hudson Institute, or Cato Institute using the term Toady even if technically correct. It is a term almost exclusively used by the left, typically more anti-authoritarian. Maybe you have some libertarian types using it as well.
It would be used by the right too, if they weren’t toadies.
Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
FAIR has its own biases, and these can be quite strong (have a glance at the studies on their website and judge for yourself). IMO, the Columbia Journalism Review ( https://www.cjr.org ) is a better source for media criticism.
Also, Poynter. https://www.poynter.org/
"Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view this site properly."
it always makes me sad when i see this. you are not reaching your target audience. fyi this seems to be a cloudflare thing. i see it everywhere. The World Wide Web seems to be going down a dark path. perhaps i do need to update my browser, but why should that matter for just reading a news site. it's like someone wants you to not have access unless you buy a new macbook(or maybe a chromebook). maybe i should just install Chrome already? i just feel like this Big Tech has crossed the line with their customers a long time ago at this point.
btw, fair.org looks interesting. i never heard of them before. Thanks!
Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you believe their reporting differs from reality? They're writing about rising authoritarianism and those who submit to it, which is a fact of the world happening today. They use the term "toady" in its literal definition. FAIR has anti-bias and counter-spin, aka "a bias towards reality." https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/toady (noun) : one who flatters in the hope of gaining favors : sycophant
I've never seen Manhattan Institute, Hudson Institute, or Cato Institute using the term Toady even if technically correct. It is a term almost exclusively used by the left, typically more anti-authoritarian. Maybe you have some libertarian types using it as well.
Why would right-wing leaning think tanks be complaining about right wing authoritarianism they’re in favor of? You’d expect them to trot out this verbiage if a populist left wing politician with authoritarian vibes came to power.
Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their headlines include lines about marching against fascists and calling people toadies. This would indicate their bias is rather left.
Really we're all just interested in what your line for calling a person a fascist is, and what you would call the folks who did this? "When the Pentagon announced that reporters would only be credentialed if they pledged not to report on documents not expressly released by official press handlers, free press advocates, including FAIR (9/23/25), denounced the directive as an assault on the First Amendment. The impact…
Yeah, my line for calling someone fascist is not “restricting reporters access to the Pentagon”. It cheapens the word and all that it represents.
There is a wide gulf between writing with basic clarity and injecting opinions like “so and so is a toady”. I would love to see media outlets attempt to describe just the facts with as little opinion as possible. FAIR clearly does not meet that bar.
Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do Editorial and Opinion sections of news papers do "conflict of interest" disclosures as a matter of course? It seems like it should be assumed that an Opinion article is expressly a biased article, written by someone with an interest in the topic at hand. If the NY Times wrote an editorial on schools or on medicaid, I wouldn't really expect to see a line disclosing the number of editorial staff members with childre…
> And this is an honest question, I don't know what the WP standard for their Editorial and Opinion pages were prior to Bezos' ownership, nor what the broader industry standard was before say 2016. Fortunately, the NPR journalists do know, as the article states: >> The Post has resolutely revealed such entanglements to readers of news coverage or commentary in the past[...]
Great, and that's followed by
> Even now, the newspaper's reporters do so as a matter of routine.
So, we know they "resolutely revealed" this in the past (but that is of course not the same word as "unfailingly" or even "always"), and we know that they continue to do so even to this day "as a matter of routine". But neither of those tells us anything about the current frequency compared to the past frequency. Likewise it tells us nothing about whether the "matter of routine" changed since before Bezos took ownership.
Similarly it says nothing about the wider industry. Oh sure, they tell us: > Newspapers typically manage the perception with transparency. And they tell us that viewing it as a conflict of interest is "conventional", but again no information about how the WPs frequency (either before or after Bezos took ownership) compares to the industry as a whole, nor whether that frequency has actually changed.
Again some numbers would be instructive here. The article says "at least 3 times in the last 2 weeks" this has occurred (and apparently been subsequently corrected). But how many times was it necessary in the last 2 weeks? If the WP published 4 articles in the last 2 weeks that would have normally had one of these disclosures, missing 3 out of 4 is a different thing than if the WP published 200 such articles in the last 2 weeks.
I know it's always been a lot to ask our news reporters to actually do some fact gathering, but it hardly seems unreasonable to ask for any sort of comparative information when asserting there is a change people should be concerned about.
Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
#79Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
#80> When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post. - https://archive.is/flIDl It kind of…
> Washington Post becoming a shadow of itself The Post was always terrible, always extremely conservative, and always blatantly mixed editorial in with its news reporting (unlike most other outlets in the past.) A bunch of anti-Trump people decided it was movement liberal because it didn't like Trump (like every other Republican and Republican outlet until people started voting them out over it.) WaPo was the most ri…
I would say that the Washington Post was pretty centrist before Bezos decided to target MAGA readers.
They were planning to endorse Kamala Harris before Bezos quashed it.