521–530 of 1001 posts
To play Devils Advocate for a moment: Why do we need, or even want, a newspaper to endorse a President? How does it not undermine a paper's journalistic ethics to be neutral and fair?
What's even the point of being a billionaire if you're still scared of Trump?
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The idea that editorial team has some kind of expertise, unavailable to general population, that allows them ecxlusive ability to properly understand current events, seems to have no factual support at all. They are professionals in giving their opinions, it doesn't make their opinions be better that anybody else's. Experience suggests they are usually worse.
> The idea that editorial team has some kind of expertise, unavailable to general population That doesn't make sense to me - they literally spend all day every day absorbing, summarising and writing about context as their full time job. They are trained formally at assessing, evaluating and questioning facts. You can criticise the end result, but I can't see how it's reasonable to say they aren't far better positione…
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While you may not take this as proof it affected this exact decision, it's hard to ignore it as a possible reason. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/10/amazon-wants-to-depose-presi...
Bezos wants to help elect someone who (his lawyers allege) killed a gov contract favourable to his own business? Or did I misread your comment.
Who knows.
Newspapers publish opinions for the same reason that they publish comic strips: people want to read them. Readers seek them out. Newspapers are a business and have to give their customers what they want. The problematic aspect here is that the current business owner, Jeff Bezos, has a conflict of interest. Bezos is making a bad business decision for The Washington Post, sacrificing it and losing readers for the sake…
I just hope this will finally put to bed any ridiculous mentions of "liberal media bias", or that the tech sector has some liberal bias.
Reminds me of a certain time in history.
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Endorsements are published by the editorial section which is specifically separated from the rest of the newspaper so to not undermine the neutrality of the journalism in the other sections. Opinion and analysis has always been part of news publications, and plays an accepted role in adding layers of interpretation onto the raw "facts" that is crucial in making those facts interpretable by readers who aren't expert i…
The idea that editorial team has some kind of expertise, unavailable to general population, that allows them ecxlusive ability to properly understand current events, seems to have no factual support at all. They are professionals in giving their opinions, it doesn't make their opinions be better that anybody else's. Experience suggests they are usually worse.
I think the endorsement was just bad journalism or bad writing and Bezos just did not want to risk it. If such an endorsement would come out in such a divided climate, then i would want it to be excellent. Maybe it was just partisan. Who knows.
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.
Why would they want to appear neutral? All news reporting, no matter what, is inherently biased in some way. There isn’t some “ideal” where that isn’t the case. There can’t be some magical font of unbiased information because just selecting what stories to put on the front page introduces bias. News can’t be unbiased and being unbiased was never a goal. News is meant to inform, which includes facts as well as analysi…
Getting some notion of what USA politics are like on HN, I can understand why you'd have this viewpoint, but I don't think it's true
The news I am used to, I couldn't tell you what political color it has. The selection they make seems based on the perceived severity, which certainly means there is a selection process that must be introducing some sort of bias, but as near as I can tell, this bias is towards a shared humanity and not a party
Perhaps I am just naïve, so I opened the local Wikipedia and it has no mention of them being accused of having a bias, political coloring or selection, notable omissions, or any such thing
I disagree strongly with the party for hate and egocentricity having come out as the biggest one in the most recent election, and to a lesser extent with the rich people be rich party from the previous ~decade, so it's not like all noses are pointed in the same direction where I'm from; but I couldn't tell you how this organization (the default thing if you turn on your TV at prime time) feels about any particular party beyond that I expect they would condemn hate and violence in general -- shared humanity, basically.