701–710 of 1001 posts
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> 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."
If the capital gains / wealth tax plan goes ahead it would cost Jeff much of his fortune. $10 billion over ten years is peanuts.
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?
The issue here is that Trump is a threat to our democratic system of government. It’s not the time to be changing policies and refusing to endorse. It’s a time for taking a stand.
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Which party is ending capitalism? I'm curious, because there's one party saying explicitly that they intend to end the democratic process, one party explicitly stating the goal is the end of the rule of law, and one party saying they want to deploy the military against the supporters of the other political party. You could make the argument that those positions are fundamentally opposed to capitalism as well, but tha…
> Regardless, only one party is threatening either of your alternatives, your straw man nonsense about ending capitalism not withstanding. Nobody is threatening either of those things. The idea that democracy is under any sort of threat is a pure lie told to you by those who benefit from keeping you scared.
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Isn’t this like Russia’s oligarchy? I’m not enamored with Democrats, but Trump doesn’t share Constitutional values and I’m very much for independent journalism. This is bad.
If this is true, it’s beyond bad. It may be the beginning of the end of the free world.
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.
A newspaper that succumbs to fear of reprisal fails completely in its principal duty and becomes little more than a propaganda rag.
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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…
>by improving its perceived impartiality Can WaPo really be perceived as "impartial" if we know they already were going to endorse Harris?
- The rule of law and the republic as a process are superior to anything else.
- One of the candidates does not subscribe to these sufficiently.
In that case, and given the political duopoly, they could still claim to be impartial towards candidates. Their only allegiance/partiality would lie with the rule of law and the republic as a process.
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Could you please stop posting flamewar comments and using HN for political battle? Your account has been doing both. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
In a recent comment, you write that "single purpose accounts are not allowed on HN". This one is fourteen years ongoing, and I know that you have been alerted to it numerous times: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rayiner
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…
NYT is particularly guilty of that behavior.
How one contextualizes a story and presents the attention grabbing headline puts a massive thumb on the scale of how the topic is perceived.
Because of what the article mentions or doesn’t mention, provides context for or no context for, the exact same core story centerpiece is biased and leading. Any impression the author wants to convey is easy to bring out in the “neutral” writing. This is simply a fact of writing.
And yet some reporters and news orgs, like the NYT, profess they are neutral observers as if from the planet zorg recording a miraculous unbiased story.
No, that is impossible and everyone knows it. Claiming to be neutral is gas lighting.
The Venn diagram of those who'd be influenced by a WaPo endorsement and committed Kamala Harris voters is a perfect intersection. For 50 years, WaPo has endorsed the democratic candidate [1] for president. No mystery here. It's a pointless endorsement. [1] https://noahveltman.com/endorsements/
Endorsements express the values of the paper and gives people more information about the candidates and what is at stake.
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I would extend that to all businesses. For the sake of the business & their customers it's usually best to keep politics out of it.
As long as the Post has an editorial page, with people employed to share their opinions, what are they supposed to do? Opinion and reporting are separate- famously the WSJ reporting is quite strong and their opinion section is ... often wrong- but as long as an opinion section exists that's kinda their job, to share their opinion. If you want to get rid of opinion that might be a reasonable thing (with cable news and…