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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

#111

Post by cjaybo »

davisr wrote: post #52
ecshafer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their headlines include lines about marching against fascists and calling people toadies. This would indicate their bias is rather left.

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

Everyone thinks they have “a bias towards reality”. I have yet to see this actually be true!

Everyone has biases, whether conscious or unconscious, and trying to claim otherwise is a massive red flag on its own IMO.

Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

#112

Post by cogman10 »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #58
cogman10 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s needed and the next president will be glad to have it, instead of doing large official gatherings in tents. This may be true, it's simply the way that it's approached that has my hackles up. This is something that should have been provisioned and approved by congress. > Separately, raising money through corporate “donations” seems like a huge loophole for corruption. The US corruption laws are laughably bad. Y…

“ The US corruption laws are laughably bad” The crazy thing is that if you are a low rank Congress staffer or other government employee, the anti corruption rules are actually quite strict. It only loosens up the higher you go.

Totally agree. For the average federal employee there are (or at least were) a huge amount of checks in place to weed out corruption. That was sort of the entire point of the inspectors general, to track down and weed out fraud and corruption.

Even for the FBI and most of the other police agencies there was a decent amount of checks in place to make sure they weren't acting out of pocket. It's ICE and the CIA that have had much less restrictions.

Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

#113

Post by terminalshort »

burkaman wrote: post #36
skybrian wrote: post #26

Earlier 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…

> later realizing that the commenter failed to mention they are a major investor in the product. You would feel mildly annoyed or misled, right?

I wouldn't really care if the claims they made were correct. An opinion is an opinion (and we are talking about the opinion rather than news section here) and I find that peoples personal emotional and ideological biases are actually a lot stronger than commercial interests in most cases. So really every single editorial should have a disclaimer "this entire article is biased as hell" at the end, but if it applies everywhere do we really need it at all?

disclaimer: this comment is biased as hell

Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

#114

Post by slg »

next_xibalba wrote: post #99
slg wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Some people are of the opinion that the world is flat, I would say it's objectively round. That is the context in which I'm using that word. I'm not using it to describe 100% consensus, because there will always be someone who disagrees with something.

News without opinion is objectively impossible because the act of reporting the news is inherently governed by an opinion on what is worthy to report. Pretending otherwise is just pulling the wool over your own eyes.

Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

#115

Post by fdschoeneman »

I agree that Bezos should have disclosed his links to the construction through Amazon, but I also think every single reporter for NPR, including and especially the one who wrote this, should disclose their personal, family, and political relationships to political parties and politicians before reporting on them.

One standard.

Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

#116

Post by coliveira »

istjohn wrote: post #97
coliveira wrote: post #92

I 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.

While the original owners are dead, this doesn't mean the foundation can do whatever "good" you imagine. These foundations are vehicles to keep doing the political bidding of these families and they still operate according to the wishes of the original donors, which are all oriented towards major industries. Or do you really believe people give millions of dollars to whatever cause with zero strings attached?

Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

#119

Post by jandrese »

senderista wrote: post #65
pessimizer wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> always extremely conservative You have a pretty idiosyncratic definition of "conservative"

In the past the articles were reasonably objective. The editorial section was always to the right of Attila the Hun.

Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

#120

Post by terminalshort »

mey wrote: post #16
skybrian wrote: post #13

My initial reaction to the White House ballroom was “the next president should tear it down and put it back the way it was, just on principle.” I was surprised by that editorial and thought it made a good (or at least arguable) point that it’s needed and the next president will be glad to have it, instead of doing large official gatherings in tents. I’m more neutral on it now. I don’t really know what facilities the…

Is the Whitehouse fit for purpose in the modern age? Probably not. Is it a symbol of the country? Yes. Messing with that symbol on what seems to be a whim funded by corporate interests rather than doing something public and methodical is disgusting. Especially with a government shutdown. We aren't even getting bread and circuses, just Nero at this point.

> Is it a symbol of the country? Yes

The actual White House, yes. Some out building of the compound, no. If you showed me a picture of it a month ago I would have no idea what it was. This whole thing is bribery, no doubt, but compared to all of the other Trump corruption this one is the least bad.

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