Live data from Hacker News

Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris

cnbc.com

161–170 of 1001 posts

Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris

#161

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…

It's certainly possible, though if he truly felt pressured that way, he could do a lot more than waiting until 11 days before an election to simply withhold an endorsement.

Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris

#162
post #76

It seems like it would be less polarizing if it was the default state for news and information outlets to not endorse any candidate ever and just remain as neutral as possible.

These are opinion editors. They're expected to have opinions.

Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris

#163
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The Washington Post has endorsed a candidate every election cycle since 1976, with the exception of 1988. The New York Times has endorsed a candidate in every presidential election since its founding in 1851.

yes. its always been done and therefore is good! …?

Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris

#165
So many times HN posters have extolled how Bezos hasn't interfered with the WaPo and those of us who expressed concern about his purchase were chicken littles. It has never been true and it's plain as day now. He bought it for the same reason Musk bought Twitter. To have control over a media outlet he values.

Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris

#167

Good 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.

Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris

#169
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Washington Post has endorsed a candidate every election cycle since 1976, with the exception of 1988. The New York Times has endorsed a candidate in every presidential election since its founding in 1851.

Just because it has always been done doesn't make it good . It's surprising to me that a news organization not publishing an opinion piece is itself giant front page news

What's so bad about large institutions in the opinion shaping space endorsing?

Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris

#170
post #135

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.

The problem is the the billionaire owner of the newspaper is censoring it, not the number of votes that will change.

Is it censorship when your boss forbids you publishing your personal opinion as the official position of his company?

It's funny reading the comments here but has anyone considered that Bezos may in fact support Trump? Bezos is a billionaire and Harris seeks to target them to fix the deficit.

Its just possible Bezos supports Trump and it makes economic sense too, though its terribly unfashionable to come out and say such a thing.

Post reply on HN