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Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris

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Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris

#641

Post by mandevil »

lysace wrote: post #151
Molitor5901 wrote: post #11

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?

I don't know for sure, but I suspect that this phenomenon of news media endorsing political candidates is almost entirely unique to the US. Please prove me wrong.

I am monolingual but here is Le Monde's English edition endorsing an anti-RN (far right party) plan in the recent French Parliamentary elections:

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/06/28/french-...

It was done under the name of the Director of Le Monde, rather than as an unsigned editorial as is common in English language newspapers, but it sure looks similar to my American eyes.

Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris

#642

Post by eapressoandcats »

standardUser wrote: post #295
coding123 wrote: post #6

There is definitely a quiet support among the faang owners for Trump.

There's been so much focus on education as the new fault line in American politics. And though it is huge, and the less educated increasingly do support ultra-conservative policies, I think the even bigger fault line is across genders. And tech workers, though usually well educated, skew dramatically male and those degrees and salaries don't make them immune to the growing culture of male grievance and victimhood.

The effect size is actually pretty similar from what I’ve seen. Both are huge. Tech workers are cross pressured in that they are mostly male and mostly college educated.

Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris

#644

Post by dragonwriter »

dmix wrote: post #539
a123b456c wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the implicit argument is that he wants to avoid more canceled contracts, along with other forms of retribution like personal attacks he experienced a few years earlier.

Maybe but Bezos is not lacking money. That contract was $1B/yr contract over ten years. They make $600B+ a year. Not exactly going to tip the scales of his stock options. These billionaires usually buy money losing newspapers, or social networks, for personal reasons. If I was going to bet on it I’d very much lean on a personal motive beyond money.

> They make $600B+ a year.

Are you confusing revenue with profit? Yeah, a lot of money pumps in one end of Amazon retail and out the other, but there is very little margin: the $550+ billion in revenue on the retail side, as I understand, brings in significantly less net than the $90 billion in revenue on the cloud side.

And government contracts, where one might expect support or opposition from a potential cheif executige who has made overt promises of purges and other uses of office to punish enemies and reward friends to make a big difference, are an important part of that (not just that one $1B contract.)

Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris

#645

Post by thimabi »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #625

[flagged]

HN is not a living organism, it’s an abstract entity formed by the people who engage in the site. As it happens within any community, there’s no such thing as consistency. In fact, so diverse is this community that I’d wager that luck and chance explain much of what gains traction or gets flagged here.

Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris

#646

Post by smokedetector1 »

warner25 wrote: post #606
lostdog wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The endorsement lets them write why they support the candidate. Laying out the reasons is what could be convincing, and is what's also being blocked here.

I think the intuition of the parent comment is right, but you also make a fair point[1]. I just wonder if you genuinely believe that any prospective Trump voter could be convinced by any argument to vote for Harris at this point. I mean after all the things that have already been written and said by so many, even by Trump himself, and have failed to convince ~47% of Americans that he's unfit to be the president. Hone…

Political ads have many purposes, including convincing people to vote for their candidate, instilling a sense of urgency/motivation/purpose to actually get out and vote, and then second order goals like general PR/familiarity for the party, etc.

Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris

#647

Post by cryptonector »

nickff wrote: post #363
lapcat wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no support for that in the article. Untrue. At the top, "KEY POINTS: 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."

[flagged]

What is Trump seeking vengeance for?

Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris

#648

Post by sigy »

lostlogin wrote: post #405
sigy wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> It's hard to think that he doesn't know how lop-sided this election is, so the naive notion of "neutral" should not be applied to his behavior. I’m not American or in the US, so please keep that in mind when I ask, ‘what’s lopsided?’

I should have been more specific. I meant lopsided as in the character of the two candidates. I posit that any decent, moderately educated citizen should be able to see this clearly, but therein lies the issue.

Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris

#649

Post by eapressoandcats »

devvvvvvv wrote: post #626
eapressoandcats wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s not really any such thing as neutrality. Arguably universities can maybe step away from things (although this is complicated with departments that are inherently political), but “neutral” if you’re writing about politics always reflects some kind of value judgement. By definition one person’s neutrality is someone else’s bias.

Not endorsing a presidential candidate is neutral in this context. Easy.

But what about the rest of their coverage? Every article and its editorial promotion reflects a value judgement that basically has to be not neutral. This is unfortunately something newspapers like to pretend is not true but it absolutely is.

Your definition of neutral appears to be “shut up” and is creepily authoritarian.

Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris

#650

Post by DonHopkins »

nickff wrote: post #324
lapcat wrote: post #296

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…

You seem to be implying that he made a decision based on other business interests, against those of the Post, but there is no support for that in the article. Do you have a source which describes this motive? It seems like not endorsing candidates might be good for the Washington Post's business, by improving its perceived impartiality. In addition to this, the WaPo seems to have spent much of its history not endorsi…

Ignoring the objective fact that Trump is a fascist is not "objective", it's delusional.
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