141–150 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I think you’re missing the point a bit here: the fear of endorsing the “wrong” candidate, as it would lead to loss of profit by the owning company, is what led to the axing of the endorsement. Call it what you want: profit and political strongarming silenced a newspaper.
It's just political strongarming. The Washington Post is not profitable.
What's even the point of being a billionaire if you're still scared of Trump?
According to the article, Jeff Bezos is presumably afraid that Trump would continue to punish Amazon. If that is the case, this seems like an entirely futile exercise.
Not that corporate PR responses are ever particularly illuminating. I read an article regarding information conveyed per syllable. English was near the top. Languages with less information per syllable like Spanish were spoken faster. In dead last place were PR statements from Fortune 500 companies.
What's even the point of being a billionaire if you're still scared of Trump?
Just look at what happened in Saudi Arabia and the billionaires there.
It makes sense in so much as "it's a risk to our business to endorse Harris because of the risk of falling afoul of Trump's vindictive nature should he win." From a fiduciary standpoint, I agree with that assessment. From the standpoint of a citizen, I find the implication alarming. I do believe that this is the reasoning behind the decision, but it is certainly speculation on my part.
Countries with no First Amendment, where hate speech is in fact criminalized, routinely score higher on international free-speech indices than the USA because in the USA the government, especially the Republican Party, has the means and the will to intimidate the press into silence or capitulation.
Is anyone really changing their mind based on some newspaper endorsement? I’m pretty sure everyone knows who they’re gonna vote for at this point.
This is extremely similar to the sudden announcement of policies by all the major newspapers that they were not going to publish documents that they thought were stolen by foriegn intelligence services from political campaigns: it is a reasonable position to have, and if announced well before the election season started would be completely unobjectionable. Doing it when they announced it, however, is significantly ch…
And the standard to/not publish should be clearly laid out and justified in their own words.
He knows something
Billionaires are not your friends.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well I mean the most generous take would be that he's come around about Trump and has decided that the editorial board making an explicit endorsement for Harris isn't in his own (or the country's) interests. On X they're floating the theory that he knew this would cause a lot of them to resign, and wanted that for other reasons. All we can do is speculate, I guess.
No need to speculate. It’s in black and white: last time Trump wanted to spite Bezos, he canceled $10Bn in AWS contracts. This is profit driven, plain and simple. > 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. Notably, most presidential candidates aren’t so petty and vindic…
He knows something