[tpmoney]

Do Editorial and Opinion sections of news papers do "conflict of interest" disclosures as a matter of course? It seems like it should be assumed that an Opinion article is expressly a biased article, written by someone with an interest in the topic at hand. If the NY Times wrote an editorial on schools or on medicaid, I wouldn't really expect to see a line disclosing the number of editorial staff members with children in the school systems or with family members receiving medicaid.

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.

[overfeed]

> 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[...]

[tpmoney]

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. Likewise it tells us nothing about whether the "matter of routine" changed since before Bezos took ownership.

Similarly it says nothing about the wider industry. Oh sure, they tell us: > Newspapers typically manage the perception with transparency. And they tell us that viewing it as a conflict of interest is "conventional", but again no information about how the WPs frequency (either before or after Bezos took ownership) compares to the industry as a whole, nor whether that frequency has actually changed.

Again some numbers would be instructive here. The article says "at least 3 times in the last 2 weeks" this has occurred (and apparently been subsequently corrected). But how many times was it necessary in the last 2 weeks? If the WP published 4 articles in the last 2 weeks that would have normally had one of these disclosures, missing 3 out of 4 is a different thing than if the WP published 200 such articles in the last 2 weeks.

I know it's always been a lot to ask our news reporters to actually do some fact gathering, but it hardly seems unreasonable to ask for any sort of comparative information when asserting there is a change people should be concerned about.

[overfeed]

> 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"

[tpmoney]

The issue is that the followup contradicts the idea that there has been a change of any note. If I tell you in one breath:

"Bernie Sanders has reduced is fighting for civil rights in worrying ways"

And in a second breath tell you that:

"Bernie Sanders has resolutely fought for civil rights in the past and even now does so as a matter of routine"

You would probably find those statements at odds with one another. You quite reasonably might want me to quantify what is different currently from recent and also prior past behavior. You might also reasonably want me to quantify his behavior in "fighting for civil rights" against his contemporaries, both past and current. What I would not expect is for you to take and hold those two statements at face value, finding that a satisfactory report on the state of things.

It's certainly possible that there is no contradiction. It might be true that he was resolute in the past, and routinely did do to date, but in the past month has missed 50 votes on civil rights legislation. But even then you'd probably want to know how many votes he misses as a regular course. You might want to know how many votes he did enter during that same time period. You might want to know whether or not he was sick or otherwise absent for health reasons.

And that's my issue at the moment. The article says "3 times in the last 2 weeks an event happened". It also tells you that the WP "resolutely" (but again notably not "always") does not allow the specific event to happen. It also tells you that the WP "routinely" (but again not "always" and without any relative comparison to "resolutely") does not allow the specific event to happen even to this very day. So why are we supposed to be worried that it happened 3 times in this last 2 weeks? By their own words, it must have happened at other times in the past, or they would have used words like "always" and "unfailingly" to describe both past and current behavior. So what makes these particular 3 times worrying? Have they never failed to do so 3 times in 2 weeks ever in their history? What about 2 times? They don't say, we have no numbers and without numbers or any sort of relative comparison we have no way to gauge whether the current behavior is or is not worrisome.

[overfeed]

> Bernie Sanders has resolutely fought for civil rights in the past and even now does so as a matter of routine"

I see where the disconnect is. Please read the sibling thread about the differences between Opinion (responsible for editorials, and subject of the NPR article) and news department (does reporting on actual news journalism). Opinion & News have different org charts under the WaPo banner. In my prior comment, A = disclosures in journalism, B = disclosures in editorials. They are not the same thing in a way that can be applied to a singular Bernie.

> They don't say, we have no numbers and without numbers or any sort of relative comparison we have no way to gauge whether the current behavior is or is not worrisome.

The number of op-eds are a small part on this article about the vibe-shift at the Washington Post: NPR provided additional context with the words of people who used to work there, mentioned thr waves of resignations and subscriber cancellations, noted WaPo declined to comment on this story. Make of that what you may.

[tpmoney]

> In my prior comment, A = disclosures in journalism, B = disclosures in editorials. They are not the same thing in a way that can be applied to a singular Bernie.

I can see that reading but even with that, comparative numbers are still useful. If we continue to assume that the words in this story were carefully chosen to be what they are (which I think we both are doing that, so I don't think I'm making an out of bounds assumption here), why the "3 times in the past 2 weeks" phrasing? Why not "has stopped" (or even "appears to have stopped" if you want to hedge)? Back to my original question of "is 3 times in the past 2 weeks" 100% of the time? Is it 50%? 1%?

If 3 times is 100% of the number of times it should have happened, how many times did it happen in the 2 weeks prior to that? Or the month prior? Is 3 "conflicted" op-eds in 2 weeks high? normal? low?

Have they missed disclosures in the past? Multiple in a short window? How frequently? How many?

The current incidents were apparently corrected without any specific call out (a practice becoming far too common in the news I agree), how does that compare to previous times when they have corrected a disclosure?

We have no facts to go on. We have information, as you put it:

> about the vibe-shift at the Washington Post ... words of people who used to work there ... [mention of] the waves of resignations and subscriber cancellations, noted WaPo declined to comment on this story.

So we have implications that this means something, and maybe it does, but again we have implications. What I "make of it" is that the Post continues to be in a state of disarray, as it has been for some time now. And that's about all I make of it. And I specifically decline to make anything about "declining to comment" on a story. Second only to the police, you should shut your mouth and say nothing to the press. Everything you say can and will be used against you.