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Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

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Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

#81

Post by platevoltage »

metabagel wrote: post #57
notahacker wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, when it comes to surviving the modern media landscape the Guardian seems to be good at online, but has the distinct advantage of the UK having no other remotely left leaning broadsheets or even middle market tabloids. Since Lebvedev destroyed the Independent, it's basically the Guardian or the Mirror which is a trashy rag, and the nominal centrist papers are owned by Murdoch and the Daily Mail General Tr…

Anecdotally, The Guardian has a lot of U.S. readers. I regularly read and donate to The Guardian. Their U.S. and California coverage is very good and seems to be continually improving. Axios has an article about The Guardian's success in the U.S., but I don't have access behind the paywall. https://www.axios.com/2025/05/06/the-guardian-us-expansion Better resource: https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2025/09/11/Guardian_Annua…

I'm one of them. I don't love that I have to overseas to find reliable news on my own country.

Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

#82

Post by ratelimitsteve »

embedding-shape wrote: post #2

> When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post. - https://archive.is/flIDl It kind of…

the temptation is to take him at his word for what he wants and then ask why he doesn't do the obvious thing to get it. try something different: assume he wants what he gets and then ask yourself why he might want that. it's shocking how often that tends to make things very clear.

Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

#83

Post by overfeed »

tpmoney wrote: post #78
overfeed wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And this is an honest question, I don't know what the WP standard for their Editorial and Opinion pages were prior to Bezos' ownership, nor what the broader industry standard was before say 2016. Fortunately, the NPR journalists do know, as the article states: >> The Post has resolutely revealed such entanglements to readers of news coverage or commentary in the past[...]

Great, and that's followed by > Even now, the newspaper's reporters do so as a matter of routine. So, we know they "resolutely revealed" this in the past (but that is of course not the same word as "unfailingly" or even "always"), and we know that they continue to do so even to this day "as a matter of routine". But neither of those tells us anything about the current frequency compared to the past frequency. Likewis…

> Great, and that's followed by > Even now, the newspaper's reporters do so as a matter of routine.

What's the issue with the follow up?

The headline says "WaPo no longer does B". I quoted the bit that says "in the past, WaPo used to resolutely do A and B" to answer your question about whether we should expect B at all, and your riposte is "the NPR article continues to say WaPo still does A". The NPR article is about WaPo stopping B, and now you have a historical baseline for B.

I'm not interested in the pivot to arguing about whether news articles ought to share raw data; the way it works now is via editors, editorial standards and fact-checkers that determine if the facts support the wording. Ultimately, news outfits like NPR and the Washington Post live and die by their reputations.

edit: more thoughts on quantification

"Resolutely" is a stout word, IMO, which to me is a word one might be talked down to using when they mean "always" but do not have the time to prove before the publishing deadline, or need to add linguistic error-bars. If it were an option in a survey, I'd place it higher than "almost always" and just below "always"

Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

#84

Post by metabagel »

pestat0m wrote: post #75
metabagel wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, Poynter. https://www.poynter.org/

"Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view this site properly." it always makes me sad when i see this. you are not reaching your target audience. fyi this seems to be a cloudflare thing. i see it everywhere. The World Wide Web seems to be going down a dark path. perhaps i do need to update my browser, but why should that matter for just reading a news site. it's like someone wants you to not have acce…

Works for me on Firefox / MacOS

Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

#85

Post by platevoltage »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #32
embedding-shape wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like trying to run a newspaper the same way you run a for-profit online marketplace isn't the greatest of ideas. Who could've known...

Coming Soon: WaPo Marketplace. Search for a story and get 10000 results from writers in China like LIOPOSFO and XIGISNN that look almost like the genuine article!

LIOPOSFO actually got banned from the platform unfortunately. They did get a new writer named LIOPOSFI who is very similar though.

Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

#86

Post by GCA10 »

afavour wrote: post #11
embedding-shape wrote: post #2

> When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post. - https://archive.is/flIDl It kind of…

Yeah, this was always the tell. If he truly cared about journalism and wanted to use his money to support it he could very easily place WaPo in some sort of trust he has no power over. And yet, despite publicly admitting the conflict of interest, he hasn’t. Only one reason why you do that and it's because you intend to make the most of your control.

It's worth reading former WashPost editor Marty Baron's memoirs for a little more insight about Bezos's priorities. Back when Bezos was married to MacKenzie Scott, she was a surprisingly strong voice about how to do things. (The slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness" got approved after her blessing.) Lately, my sense is that his new wife, Lauren Sanchez, has more of an interest in the Post than Bezos does.

So he's basically the absentee owner of a property that's more interesting to the women in his life than to him. Current management at the paper is probably eager to make sure that the paper doesn't embarrass (or "complexify") his bigger business priorities. Their desire to mollify may be excessive. I've seen such things happen inside large organizations.

Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

#87

Post by platevoltage »

senderista wrote: post #65
pessimizer wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Washington Post becoming a shadow of itself The Post was always terrible, always extremely conservative, and always blatantly mixed editorial in with its news reporting (unlike most other outlets in the past.) A bunch of anti-Trump people decided it was movement liberal because it didn't like Trump (like every other Republican and Republican outlet until people started voting them out over it.) WaPo was the most ri…

> always extremely conservative You have a pretty idiosyncratic definition of "conservative"

the definition of conservative has changed drastically over the last couple decades.

Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

#88

Post by embedding-shape »

clircle wrote: post #68

Do we really hold editorials to the same standard as the rest of the news? These are opinion pieces, you should expect bias, no?

Regardless if it's in the opinions sections, if the author/publisher has clear biases, especially financial ones, they're disclosed somewhere in/next to the piece.

Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

#89

Post by platevoltage »

metabagel wrote: post #80
pessimizer wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Washington Post becoming a shadow of itself The Post was always terrible, always extremely conservative, and always blatantly mixed editorial in with its news reporting (unlike most other outlets in the past.) A bunch of anti-Trump people decided it was movement liberal because it didn't like Trump (like every other Republican and Republican outlet until people started voting them out over it.) WaPo was the most ri…

I would say that the Washington Post was pretty centrist before Bezos decided to target MAGA readers. They were planning to endorse Kamala Harris before Bezos quashed it.

Amazing that they have any paid subscribers after this happened.

Re: Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

#90

Post by metabagel »

placardloop wrote: post #7

The title makes it seem like this is a major or systemic issue, but the article content essentially says this was a one-off, potentially a mistaken omission that was fixed within 24 hours. The article itself even states that the Post routinely discloses its ties to Bezos in its reporting and this was an anomaly. I used to read the Post (I’m not a subscriber anymore) but I do distinctly remember seeing such a disclosu…

> The Post has resolutely revealed such entanglements to readers of news coverage or commentary in the past … since 2013, those of Bezos, who founded Amazon and Blue Origin. Even now, the newspaper's reporters do so as a matter of routine.

What this is saying:

- Previously, WaPo disclosed conflicts of interest.

- They still disclose in their news articles (as opposed to in their editorials).

> So at minimum the article disagrees with itself

No.

> Edit 2: To try and be a little clearer here: the article is trying to (but in my opinion doing a really poor job of) make a distinction between the disclosures that the non-editorial WaPo authors do, and the disclosures that the editorial authors do, with the assertion that the editorial authors are worse at it.

Everyone else seems to understand but you. By the way, "non-editorial WaPo authors" are called reporters or journalists.

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