Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by person3 2107 days ago
Except that The Washington Post operates independently, and has strong editorial standards, something that a lot of "news" sites on the Internet today don't even pretend to have. The Post continues to publish articles about surveillance, as well as articles critical of Amazon.

For example, here's reporting on an interview with Martin Baron, the paper’s executive editor:

Mr. Bezos holds conference calls with The Post’s leadership every other week to discuss the paper’s business strategy but has no involvement in its news coverage, Mr. Baron said. During his occasional appearances at The Post’s building, Mr. Bezos sometimes stops by a news meeting “just to thank everybody,” Mr. Baron said.

“I can’t say more emphatically he’s never suggested a story to anybody here, he’s never critiqued a story, he’s never suppressed a story,” the editor said.

“Frankly, in a newsroom of 800 journalists, if that had occurred, I guarantee you, you would have heard about it,” he added. “Newsrooms tend not to like those kinds of interventions, particularly a newsroom that’s as proud as The Washington Post.

“If he had been involved in our news coverage, you can be sure that you would have heard about it by now,” Mr. Baron added. “It hasn’t happened. Period.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/business/media/to-trump-i...

(edited for formatting)

5 comments

That's not how editorial pressure works. Chomsky detailed it quite well, but in a few words:

The advertisers react to "wrong" coverage by withdrawing support, the chief editor is very attuned so he assigns the right people to the right jobs before trouble starts, and the journalists so assigned naturally work quite sincerely. No actual orders to publish or withdraw articles need to happen.

Unfalsifiable conspiracies are my favorite kind!

There's got to be a natural law that, for any given situation, one can compose a scheme whereby no proof of anything would actually exist, but evil would still be done.

I believe the term you're looking for is "plausible deniability".
That's not unfalsifiable. A verifiable leak will suffice. Perhaps what you meant is "what has not been falsified yet"
> The advertisers react to "wrong" coverage by withdrawing support

Easily attributable to business decisions / climate.

> the chief editor is very attuned so he assigns the right people to the right jobs before trouble starts

Staff assignment as a smoking gun? That's going to be a stretch.

> and the journalists so assigned naturally work quite sincerely

Indeed, just people doing their jobs.

Who, pray tell, is going to leak what?

I invite you to consider Hannah Arendt's words on institutional pressures driving unethical patterns of behavior. These she referred to as "the rule of Nobody" and also "the banality of evil".

In this frame, "business decisions / climate" are exactly the driving forces which perpetuate such structures and outcomes.

Business decisions and climate are also the driving forces behind literally everything a company does.

The banality of evil doesn't forgive laziness in the construction of hypotheses, unless you're Fox News.

To spell it out, what leak / disclosure would constitute proof of GP's belief? A memo from the WaPo editorial staff which says "Pursuant to Mr. Bezo's comments on X, please assign Y to story Z, so that reporting will be more favorable"?

And barring a plausible method of provability / falsifiability, we're in "just asking the question" rumor territory with regards to the original assertions of malice. Which, personally, seems below the level of discourse I expect from HN.

They eliminated their Ombudsman position in 2013. Not to pick on them, as most publications, NYT included have as well. I'll read occasionally, but definitely don't trust any of these any more without checking sources.

Just being the owner taints their coverage even with no direct influence (again, we can't just pick on Wapo here either). "So Joe, want to spend our time on researching this piece critical of Amazon or one the other hundred stories?"

> Except that The Washington Post operates independently, and has strong editorial standards, something that a lot of "news" sites on the Internet today don't even pretend to have.

Right, your news company is the only one that doesn't smell. Maybe you should adopt the motto "fair and balanced" to reflect how editorially independent and objective you are.

> Martin Baron, the paper’s executive editor:

The newspaper's editor says that he is objective? Zuckerburg also says facebook is all about user privacy. So it must be true.

C'mon man. I have firsthand knowledge of an editor asking a contributor to remove mentioning Amazon in a story because it cast the company in a negative light.
If a random guy online uses an account created a couple of days ago to say he has knowledge of something without providing any proof or substance then everyone should just blindly trust him and take his word for it.

Right?

Well... You may have firsthand knowledge or claim to have firsthand knowledge, but the rest of us don't.

When you saw that happening, did you just let it slide? Where did it happen? Was the story originally about Amazon or was it just an off-topic side remark that didn't really fit in?

Not everyone is willing to martyr themselves for a cause. Just because no such information has leaked yet does not mean it has not happened or that there will not be such leaks in the future.

Why should I stop sawing this branch I am sitting on, I havent fallen yet ?

> Why should I stop sawing this branch I am sitting on, I havent fallen yet ?

Your argument is that we can't prove the absence of a conspiracy.

Hence, a better analogy would be

"why should i stop sawing this branch? just because gravity has never left me suspended in thin air doesn't mean it can't or won't happen in the future"

Look at it this way: the next time Amazon is in the news for some scandal, WaPo won't be covering it.