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

These billionaires don't have a solid feedback loop back to reality

FAIR has its own biases, and these can be quite strong (have a glance at the studies on their website and judge for yourself).

IMO, the Columbia Journalism Review (https://www.cjr.org) is a better source for media criticism.

Or NPR…

https://www.npr.org/donations/support

And now that Zuck has nuked Facebook AI Research org, they get their acronymic exclusivity back.

I second that. When I was a news junkie, I would love reading their (occasional) posts.

Glad they're still around.

The same week that WaPo announced their new editorial policy, I added a uBlock Origin rule to delete the opinion sidebar. It's basically ads run by Jeff Bezos now. There's no reason to expose oneself to it.

Their news reporting is, for now, still decent (and retains its familiar slant).

wsj newsroom is probably the best national reporting entity, but sure

WSJ is not owned by Jeff Bezos, but by another billionaire Rupert Murdoch.

By all means skip the Wall Street Journal's braying editorials, but don't ignore the reporting. For example, the Theranos scandal was blown open by the WSJ's John Carreyrou. They've done good reporting on Tesla, Epstein, Amazon, and others.

An individual editorial? No. At the meta level when an outlet only allows a specific direction of bias, that doesn't feel like a good idea to accept.

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.

There is a reason they publish opeds right next to hard news. Its not by accident.

Because the editorial authors are employees of the news organization, they must disclose the conflict of interest between their employer and its owner or parent organization and the matter they are reporting on.

Let's say an editorial piece says "AWS is the best cloud service" but fails to disclose that its owner also owns AWS, that would be a breach of journalistic ethics. Similar case here.

I just can’t believe people even read editorials. I’m the news outlets I read, they are clearly marked and it makes an easy and instant “skip”.

People are upset over the wrong bias lol

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.

That's because even if he realizes the conflict of interest having a massive media outlet at your disposal is just too powerful a temptation to ignore for these fat cats.

There was an ulterior motive and the impact was deliberate.

Further down the article:

> O'Neal was brought in by Bezos this summer after the corporate titan tore up his paper's opinion section.

> Bezos said he wanted a tight focus on two priorities: personal liberties and free markets. The top opinion page editor resigned. A raft of prominent columnists and contributors resigned or departed as well. Some were let go.

The Post is a plaything to him that has a disproportionate impact on the rest of the world. We’ve created systems that allow a few individuals to control resources beyond the wildest dreams of the monarchs of days past. Whether it is about power, control, self-aggrandizement, or simply a special interest to him, there is no accountability at the end of the day, and we are all excellent at justifying and rationalizing our decisions to ourselves. I don’t think there has to be an ulterior motive per se, it’s simply human nature.

Don't ask what you can do for your property; ask what your property can do for you.

It’s part of the centi billionaire class power grab playbook. each one of them for the most part has some major media interests. if you can control and dictate the narrative, for a while no one can protest you, and maybe they won’t notice for a while that their futures are being robbed to enrich a handful of extremely vain white men. by the time they do, it’s likely too late.

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.

This is called “managing the narrative”

It’s a classic hallmark technique of advanced psychopaths wherein you agree with reality but don’t change it because as long as you acknowledge it, most people assume you’ll “do your best.”

So all you have to do is acknowledge it, and as long as there’s nobody who can force you to do anything then there’s no obvious way to address it without escalation - that escalation being the reason then for claiming you’re attacked and then you have carte blanche to “simply defend yourself”

Do that long enough and people get tired and move on and you just cemented your place further

What does this have to do with the article?

Donations from multiple foundations, most of which were created by people long dead, are hardly comparable to ownership by a wealthy, living business magnate.

The issue is that donors don't have a _controlling interest_ in the organization.

Having said that, I would expect NPR to disclose, if editorializing a piece on Ms Kroc, the donation that Ms Kroc made to NPR (and they likely do that already).

Estate bequeathals and foundation grants are a far cry from direct ownership and editorial control by a single oligarch.

Citizens United had nothing to do with journalism, and these newspapers, traditionally privately owned by extremely wealthy dynasties, have always been propaganda outlets. I'd argue that what made an outlet "mainstream" is the depth of its contacts with US intelligence agencies, and its willingness to put out false stories on their behalf, without any vetting, in return for getting scoops that are strategically leaked to them ahead of anyone else.

Ida Tarbell was the first useless makework liberal, a model for the current generation of movement Democrats who consider themselves fighters for the underdog through the method of threatening to generate paperwork. The breakup of Standard Oil made the owners of Standard Oil wealthier and more powerful than they were before (they owned the resulting companies.) All of that effort went to naught. The breakup of Standard Oil was to the defeat of oligarchs as Obamacare was to the defeat of an extortionate US health care system: a useless distraction executed by people who were still somehow unbelievably proud of themselves.

Ida Tarbell is a model for exactly what to avoid. The expenditure of massive effort on crusades of dubious benefit as a proxy for going after oligarchs, relieving the built-up energy of the public to actually go after oligarchs.

Like how the built up energy after the housing bubble scam was spent on passing an unconstitutional Heritage Foundation healthcare plan whose uselessness was masked by simultaneously passing an expansion to Medicaid and a massive subsidy for it. Nobody was punished for the housing bubble, for robosigning, for synthetic CDOs, for auction-rate municipal bonds; nobody went to jail; when people ask why, they're told that nobody committed a crime; when you show them the crimes, they say "what are you going to do, punish everyone?" Forget all that, now the important thing for the good liberal to do is to defend Romneycare.

All the oligarchs have to do is run the clock down, and the middle-class people who noticed something unavoidable for a moment will totally forget that it happened. They'll even somehow forget that the Washington Post has always been a conservative paper, or maybe it's that they'll forget that they themselves used to be conservatives (because their beliefs haven't changed at all.)

The article does not say this was a one-off:

> On at least three occasions in the past two weeks

Bezos announced a relaunch of the Opinion section earlier in the year, I don't think it's unreasonable to wonder if there has been a policy change. Three times in two weeks is a lot.

> potentially a mistaken omission that was fixed within 24 hours

potentially, yes. Responsible news organizations post correction notices when they make an omission like this, but WaPo did not (despite having a history of doing so, again, a notable change in practice)

Even now, the newspaper's reporters do so as a matter of routine.

Reporting and editorial are separate units in newspapers; the point being made is that, while reporting continues to properly disclose potential ownership conflicts of interest, editorial and op-ed, following Bezos taking direct control of them, are not doing so.

Of course, the Post is Bezos' toy, and there's no law that says he can't use editorial as a megaphone for his personal interests without disclosing them (or, in fact, even use the reporting side for the same purpose!), but you can't do that and still claim that the paper has any of the Grahams' pedigree left in it, and this is very much a change from Bezos' earlier ownership, in which he largely stayed hands-off on editorial decisions.

There are two additional recent ones mentioned in the article:

> On Oct. 15, the Post heralded the military's push for a new generation of smaller nuclear reactors. "No 'microreactor' currently operates in the United States, but it's a worthy gamble that could provide benefits far beyond its military applications," the Post wrote in its editorial.

> A year ago, Amazon bought a stake in X-energy to develop small nuclear reactors to power its data centers. And through his own private investment fund, Bezos has a stake in a Canadian venture seeking nuclear fusion technology.

and

> Three days after the nuclear power editorial, the Post weighed in on the need for local authorities in Washington, D.C., to speed the approval of the use of self-driving cars in the nation's capital. The editorial was headlined: "Why D.C. is stalling on self-driving cars: Safety is a phony excuse for slamming the brakes on autonomous vehicles."

> Fewer than three weeks before, the Amazon-owned autonomous car company Zoox had announced D.C. was to be its next market.

Edit to respond to your edit: these are the opinion pages, not reporting.

It doesn't appear that you read the article at all. It states the first disclosure was added later, and without comment. And there are two other mentions of conflict of interest. Nothing you wrote is true other than that you aren't a subscriber to the Post.

Respectfully, you either skimmed this article to support your point or didn't pay proper attention. I see no ambiguity in this article - none - whatsoever. This is about Bezos's changes to the WaPo opinion pages (including their opinion editorial board), a shift to topics that matter to Bezos, and a clear loss of discipline or intent in conflict of interest disclosures when discussing such topics.

> 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.

> So at minimum the article disagrees with itself, but it seems the outrage bait is working hook line and sinker.

No, because they aren't doing so for Amazon and Blue. That's the entire point. Find an Amazon article with a disclosure on it.

It says the news section is more diligent and that the opinion pages/editorial are the ones omitting disclosures repeatedly.

And it wasn't fixed entirely - usually fixes to an article are declared in the article, and they didn't do that when they inserted the disclosure after the fact.

The ballroom discussion isn't even part of the topic here, the point is that an article with clear conflict of interest didn't note the conflict of interest, and didn't do a correction until a 3rd party basically forced them to. And it isn't a one-off, it's now a pattern.

This shows that the organization is getting rotten from the inside, otherwise stuff like this is flagged up front, if the journalists and editors there have any journalistic integrity left in them.

Trump doesn't have the right to tear down the White House. It doesn't belong to him. It needs to go through a design approval process.

By law, any money spent by the executive needs to come from Congressional appropriation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act

> The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal employees from ... accepting voluntary services for the United States, or employing personal services not authorized by law, except in cases of emergency involving the safety of human life or the protection of property. 31 U.S.C. § 1342.

Trump said the project "won't interfere with the current building. … It will be near it but not touching it. It pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of. It’s my favorite place. I love it." Then, he sent in bulldozers to bring the whole thing to the ground.

Trump is also requesting the government, of which he is the head, to cut him a check for nearly a quarter of a billion dollars.

Trump has engaged in illegal impoundment and rescission of funds and programs appropriated and authorized by Congress.

Republicans in Congress and serving on the Supreme Court are failing to check Trump's lawlessness.

Trump has stated that he would like to serve an unconstitutional third term as president. If this comes to pass, it would mark the end of the American democratic experiment.

Is the Whitehouse fit for purpose in the modern age? Probably not. Is it a symbol of the country? Yes. Messing with that symbol on what seems to be a whim funded by corporate interests rather than doing something public and methodical is disgusting. Especially with a government shutdown.

We aren't even getting bread and circuses, just Nero at this point.

The issue is not whether or not the White House needs a new room, it's that the private funding model is an incredibly obvious avenue for bribery. Every single "donor" has immediate business with the federal government, and they've seen how easily Trump will sell pardons or diplomatic favors or merger approvals to anyone who pays him enough. There is no other plausible explanation for the list of funders. If this were an important and practical addition to the building, then the government could pay for it without any corruption necessary.

An honest editorial might say something like "this addition is a good idea, but why are these specific people (including my employer) paying for it"?

> it’s needed and the next president will be glad to have it, instead of doing large official gatherings in tents.

This may be true, it's simply the way that it's approached that has my hackles up. This is something that should have been provisioned and approved by congress.

> Separately, raising money through corporate “donations” seems like a huge loophole for corruption.

The US corruption laws are laughably bad. You don't even need this sort of loophole other than to avoid reporting on who's doing the donations.

There's basically nothing that really prevents someone from giving a Justice, Senator, congress person, or the president a yacht, airplane, home, or a "loan" that gets forgiven. The only real limits is that's supposed to be reported (and that foreign governments can't do the same). Yes yes, the bribery law states that you can't pay someone to perform an official act. However, if you simply give them a gift that doesn't count. Even when that person is actively working on official acts that directly impact you.