For me, seeing a person or business consciously claim neutrality this year is reprehensible and impossibly out of touch. Whether Bezos likes it or not the business he is in comes with the assumption of an endorsement, and silence is an implicit endorsement. I’d never hold an individual to that standard but power comes with responsibility and this choice is putting his privilege on full display.
Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
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Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
#692[flagged]
If you flag, please don't also comment that you did. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
#693> CNBC has requested comment from Amazon. 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 Spa…
He's afraid of Vance. Trump is an egoist but Vance has an ideological dislike of amazon.
Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
#694More interesting to me is that this is the third tech billionaire to take a decidedly different stance than he did previously. Musk is quite active, but even Zuckerberg took a much more neutral stance for 2024. Honestly I'm more surprised that Bezos even bothered. Does he really think the endorsement of The Washington Post editorial board is so significant that it's worth intervening? That seems implausible.
I would say Zuck went as far right as reasonably possible, and his timing was good. Kind of cowardly, but also impressive foresight on his part.
That's absurd. His political donations are very blue.
Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
#695[flagged]
don’t ask german companies what they were doing during 1933-1945
They were under the thumb of the regime. They produced whatever the government told them to produce. They had a predetermined profit margin that the government dictated to them. German capitalists certainly fared relatively well, but their influence and prestige was greatly reduced compared to the past. Nonetheless they took that deal because the alternative was literally communism.
Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
#696Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
#697Newspapers 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…
> Newspapers are a business and have to give their customers what they want. Isn't that supposed to be news and not worthless institutional opinions on the presidential office? > It's unlikely that an independent owner with no conflict of interest would make the same decision. An unconflicted owner wouldn't endorse either candidate. In general, hopefully, but in this election, particularly.
that's my stance as well
WaPo needed someone to make a difficult decision, conflict of interest or not, to just rip the bandaid off of their imprisonment of endorsing candidates
that's over now. the end. the market is going to forget this was ever a thing.
Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
#698Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would it put it to bed? It’s worth people knowing that the media leans over 90% left from all the stats that exist.
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and the profession is also populated by people that went to specific universities, in specific cities and have a specific voting record
that's the standard people are using and can be corroborated
Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
#699I find it strange that people are so upset about the absence of an opinion piece from this newspaper. What is the reason? Either you want to be told what to think, or you want everyone else to be told what to think. I think it is the latter. Would there be any outrage here if Fox news decided not to endorse a candidate? I highly doubt it. Some people may like being challenged on what they believe, which is good, but…
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Re: Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
#700Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Publishing an editorial endorsing a candidate is extremely common, both for US papers generally and for this paper specifically. The reasons for that are various but they have nothing to do with what we're discussing here. 2. Moreover, that whole question is irrelevant when the editors aren't even making the decision. If Bezos is willing to override them, then effectively he is the paper's editorial board - so the…
(1) might be both common and also wrong. (1) being why I dislike most of these media outlets. (2) the editorial board may be wrong and suffering groupthink, and ultimately slowly killing the paper.
The fact that editorial endorsements are extremely common is relevant because it means that no typical reader would mistake them for being the position of the paper's parent corporation, like GGP suggested. Whether endorsements are right or wrong in the abstract isn't relevant, and I didn't say anything about it.