Employees outraged at ‘chicken-shit’ move that breaks 30-year precedent, alleging Jeff Bezos quashed Harris support
There was uproar and outrage among the Washington Post’s current and former staffers and other notable figures in the world of American media after the newspaper’s leaders on Friday chose to not endorse any candidate in the US presidential election.
The newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, announced on Friday that for the first time in over 30 years, the paper’s editorial board would not be endorsing a candidate in this year’s presidential election, nor in future presidential elections.
After the news broke, reactions came flooding in, with people criticizing the decision, which, according to some staffers and reporters, was allegedly made by the Post’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos.
Karen Attiah, a columnist for the Washington Post who writes a weekly newsletter, called the decision an “absolute stab in the back”.
So the same people who spent almost a decade sanewashing trump and leaning into his candidacy for no reason other than morbid fascination and clicks are getting spanked out in public by the monster they created.
Sucks.
I’d be willing to bet that the billionaire owners had more to do with that than you think.
They don’t spend all that money on trusted media outlets to not control the narrative.
If there’s someone here who thinks billionaires owning our news isn’t a problem then you should search the terms, USS Maine, Spanish-American War, and Yellow Journalism.
Nothing has changed.
I for one am glad they didn’t. Journalists who claim they strive to stay neutral and report the news faithfully and factually shouldn’t endorse any candidate. When they do, it lowers their credibility.
It’s the editorial board that makes endorsements. The opinions section is completely separate from the news section - the news reporters don’t contribute to the editorial decisions or endorsements.
You can tell it’s election season when a guy says fact based journalism is better than bias and gets downvoted to oblivion.
What an embarrassment of a sub
That’s how it goes on social media: you hope to have an intelligent conversation and you’d expect the mod points to express whether the person’s argument is worth discussing - even if you disagree with the person - or whether that person is a troll. But no: people use the mod points to express their disagreement.
Oh well… At least on Lemmy, points are meaningless and only hurt the feelings of those who care about them, and I really, REALLY don’t care 🙂
Why do you care about downvotes so much. They don’t matter
Because it shows the sentiments of the people I share this sub with .
That’s exactly not what he said.
Neutrality is not fact based, is the thing. forget the current candidates for a moment, since they have a lot of emotional investment: consider an issue like, say, vaccines. If you were to give equal consideration to both doctors vouching for their effectiveness, and some anti-vaxxers that think they’ll kill you, you would technically be neutral on that “argument”, but you would actually be biased in favor of the anti-vaxxers in doing so, because the reality of the situation is that they are simply wrong, and suggesting that both sides are equally valid by giving equal weight to their statements paints them in a better light than that. Now, for political candidates, things arent quite as simple as that, because they dont represent one single statement that can be physically demonstrated to be correct or wrong, but they do take actions that can be more or less helpful, or endorse ideas that can be shown to work or not work, or make statements that can be more or less objectively correct, and one can take a sum total of these things and suggest that one candidate or the other would have more or less desirable effects on the country than the other. Indeed, unless the candidates are exactly the same, one of them generally will. Which implies that treating them as if their positions are equally effective and their ideas equally valid is biased in favor of the worse candidate, whoever that might be, and thus, if you wish to reduce that effect, a journalistic organization should endorse the one their research leads them to conclude is preferable.
[Maggie Jordan ]: How can you be biased towards fairness?
[MacKenzie McHale ]: There aren’t two sides to every story. Some stories have five sides some only have one.
[Tess Westin ]: I still don’t underst…
[Will McAvoy ]: Bias towards fairness means that if the entire congressional Republican caucus were to walk in to the House and propose a resolution stating that the Earth was flat, the Times would lead with “Democrats and Republicans Can’t Agree on Shape of Earth.”
On the other hand, journalists are among the most informed and aware professionals out there, and these endorsements are part of their editorials, not part of their factual articles. By making an endorsement, the editorials board is sharing a perspective, and perhaps that should be a lens through which to understand their reporting. That’s up to the individual reader - on that note however, I’m concerned about how blurry readers have become on news articles vs. opinions. Fox News has been the vanguard on that, and the rest of the internet was quick to follow.
Nevertheless, I think sharing an editorial perspective as a new organization is better than Supreme Court Justices pretending to be unbiased during their Senate confirmation hearings.
What about if the FBI spikes the 4500 claims of sexual assault to smooth that process??
The goal of journalism isn’t neutrality, it’s truth. If that commitment leads to the endorsement of one candidate over another, then that speaks to the weakness of the spurned candidate, not the journalist.
You’ll note the word “neutral” doesnt actually show up in their code of ethics. Rupert Murdoch and Fox News are the reason we’re wedded to the notion that journalists must remain neutral, and it’s high time for that notion to be relegated to the trash bin of history as another facially stupid concept.
Newsroom and Editorial Board are different things. Maybe don’t opine when you don’t have a clue what’s being discussed.
Perhaps you clearly-superior enlightened individual have reading comprehension problems. I didn’t say newspapers shouldn’t have an opinion: I said they shouldn’t endorse candidates. Endorsing a candidate means entering the political fray and journalist should be better than that.
I wonder if we’ll ever find out how many subscriptions they lost because of it.
Canceled mine immediately.
Same! Now I have NYT only although they spam like crazy. Reuters is going sub now so I’ll prob pick them up since I’ve been enjoying their stuff for years now.
I still have my NYT sub, I’ll be switching to games only next year though. The EIC there is a real piece of shit.
Said it in another post, but my main reason for keeping NYT is for their war and science reporting. There’s only a handful of decent outfits to get quality reporting on global conflict: Bellingcat, NYT, and War Nerd, among others. NYT probably has the best funding so they have a pretty far reach. I can’t think of another outfit that is actively reporting on Sudan, Bangladesh, Côte d’Ivoire, Central America, and a whole host of other areas.
Yeah the NYT, despite its flaws, isn’t beholden to a single person.
Cousin works for Reuters. Fuck them. “Centrist” or “”unbiased”” means fucking dogshit, at least to me, these days.
There’s unbiased as in, “if two groups disagree, we won’t do anything to favour either side”.
And then there unbiased as in, “we will report the facts as best as we can tell them, regardless of which sides, if any, those facts favour”.
Reuters, as I understand it, is more the latter than the former. But too many major media organizations are the former.
Whichever one of those definitions of “unbiased” you subscribe to, the other will seem biased, unless both sides are doing the same thing (eg both lying or both being honest and accurate).
Yeah but most times I just want the news and not the talking heads. I like Reuters on in the morning with a cup of coffee.
Sigh…Billionaires buying America media and using it for their own ends is American as Apple pie. Hearst, Pulitzer, Luce, Murdock, now Bezos. I think the thing to say about this issue is Bezos is basically a Coward and not worth the time to think about.
Clearly unethical. They should have loudly proclaimed their support for Claudia de la Cruz.
I’m curious of who down the line capitulated to Bezos.
He could say “don’t endorse!” but someone there also has to say “ok boss!”
They could still run the endorsement. Someone may get fired for it, but Bezos isn’t down in the newsroom hitting the big STOP THE PRESSES button that shuts the whole operation down.
Read about the Milgram experiment, its depressing but this is how humans are
well, apparently the toady they brought over from Murdochistan.
Would this have been a bigger story if they did endorse?
No
Now how will I know who to vote for?
Hehe. True. But also not the point.
The funny thing is, if they did endorse Harris, probably nobody would notice or care. But the fact that they were stopped from endorsing Harris is now a huge story.
Jeff Bezos, meet Barbara Streisand.
