The ideal solution is to stop reading newspapers/sites owned by Bezos. I give the WP zero credibility for anything that is not factual. Even then they will distort the facts with opinions that are aligned to Bezos.
Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
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Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
#92I 100% agree, but need to add that npr also has financial ties to very powerful oligarchs that need to be disclosed. For example, here is what I get when researching the largest donors to npr: "NPR's largest single donor was the estate of Joan B. Kroc, who left a bequest of over $200 million in 2003. Other major donors include foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which have contributed millions to specific projects, as well as the Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation"
Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s part of the centi billionaire class power grab playbook. each one of them for the most part has some major media interests. if you can control and dictate the narrative, for a while no one can protest you, and maybe they won’t notice for a while that their futures are being robbed to enrich a handful of extremely vain white men. by the time they do, it’s likely too late.
I feel like Bezos has well more than $10M, $1B/100 (centi). Perhaps you were looking for "hecto" (SI prefix for 100)?
Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
#94Citizen's United destroyed journalism by making it for profit propaganda for the wealthy, but its always been under attack. Journalism has always been under attack from the wealthy robber barons of the time. Rockefeller famously bought out the magazine/newspaper that muckraker Ida Tarbell wrote for after she wrote a damning book about Standard Oil. However, it only hardened her and other muckrakers, who later led to…
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You might have forgotten what US healthcare was like before the ACA. The ACA was good. It successfully bent the cost curve and now you don't immediately get banned from health insurance for life if you get cancer.
> Romneycare
It's called that because the Democratic legislature forced him to pass it, not because he liked it.
Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
#95I 100% agree, but need to add that npr also has financial ties to very powerful oligarchs that need to be disclosed. For example, here is what I get when researching the largest donors to npr: "NPR's largest single donor was the estate of Joan B. Kroc, who left a bequest of over $200 million in 2003. Other major donors include foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Robert Wood…
Estate bequeathals and foundation grants are a far cry from direct ownership and editorial control by a single oligarch.
Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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You might have forgotten what US healthcare was like before the ACA. The ACA was good. It successfully bent the cost curve and now you don't immediately get banned from health insurance for life if you get cancer. > Romneycare It's called that because the Democratic legislature forced him to pass it, not because he liked it.
It was modeled fairly directly on a proposal drafted as a federal alternative to the Clinton healthcare plan by lobbyists for the insurance industry and embraced by Republican national leadership in that context (which they then stopped talking about once the Clinton plan went down in flames.)
Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
#97I 100% agree, but need to add that npr also has financial ties to very powerful oligarchs that need to be disclosed. For example, here is what I get when researching the largest donors to npr: "NPR's largest single donor was the estate of Joan B. Kroc, who left a bequest of over $200 million in 2003. Other major donors include foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Robert Wood…
Donations from multiple foundations, most of which were created by people long dead, are hardly comparable to ownership by a wealthy, living business magnate.
Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d say the UK’s Guardian newspaper is a useful example here. It’s been owned by the Scott Trust since the 1930s: https://www.theguardian.com/about/history And it has survived without continual extra investment. Possible that WaPo is just managed badly.
> And it has survived without continual extra investment. It has not. The Guardian loses millions every year. I think it made money one year in the late 90s iirc.
If I have $10m in the bank and I live off the interest I am, in a sense, losing money while being able to stay solvent for the rest of my life. I don't see a reason why a newspaper couldn't apply the same principle.
Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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 opin…
Your understanding of the word objective differs markedly from my own.
I don’t disagree with the general spirit of what you mean. But I would love to see news outlets, and so called watch dogs, pursue the unobtainable dream of objectivity and neutrality over all others. Calling people toadies and democratically elected administrations “fascists” falls far, far short of that dream.
Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such an article would just be repeating what everyone else already said. The editorial actually said something new (new to me, anyway) that added to the discussion, which seems valuable.
Imagine reading a thoughtful and substantive HN comment about the benefits of a new product, and then later realizing that the commenter failed to mention they are a major investor in the product. You would feel mildly annoyed or misled, right? Now you have to reevaluate the comment and figure out if it was primarily driven by "engineer evaluating a new tool" or "guy who wants to make money", and you'll probably want…
A standard conflict-of-interest disclaimer wouldn't be enough to answer the questions I really have:
- How much is the editorial board influenced by Bezos? Is he actually involved in writing each article?
- What are the discussions like? How do they write these articles?
Without knowing that, which would require insider journalism, not just a disclaimer, I don't really know the authors' point of view. It's basically anonymous. I assume Bezos has a hand in it somehow, if only by choosing the editorial staff. A disclaimer doesn't change that.
Opinions written by strangers are always suspect, but they can still be interesting.