Jeff Bezos Escapes Scrutiny from His Own Paper–and Its Rivals | Hacker News Reader

Jeff Bezos Escapes Scrutiny from His Own Paper–and Its Rivals

fair.org

151 pointsblackbagboys92 comments

Okay, what the hell. I googled "washington post amazon" and immediately found TWO news articles from the last 3 days, both critical of Amazon.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/birkenstock-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/is-amazon-getting-to...

Am I missing something, or is TFA just straightforwardly wrong, to an embarrassing degree?

Here is an HN comment from jawns on one of the WP articles that tries to explain this:

"This reverse submarine -- a critique of Amazon published by Jeff Bezos' paper -- tries to give what appears to be a biased news source a patina of unbiased objectivity by running what appears to be a piece that's critical of the thing it's thought to be biased toward."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14877216#14878179

Whether this is true or not actually does not matter as long as the conflict of interest is there.

So, if the WaPo doesn't criticize Bezos, it's because they're owned by him, but if they do, it's because of a 'reverse submarine'?

Quite the box they're in there.

Let me throw occam's razor out there -- unless Bezos and/or Amazon PR people leaned on the WaPo to write this story, then it's exactly what it looks like, a random writer with a critical thought piece about Amazon.

It bugs me that without evidence sedevach and the commentator he linked to just present something speculative as a certainty. HN comments just jump right into full throttle conspiracy theories and receive hundreds of upvotes. It's not like at the edges of the discussion and downvoted. These uncritical comments are frequently floating at the top of what people are reading.

If you've got evidence of Washington Post writers trampling their journalistic credentials and planting favorable stories for Bezos you should share that along with your accusations otherwise you should maybe hedge your claims a bit. Eh? Maybe go look up the authors for these pieces on twitter, they're often there, and just go ahead and accuse them right there where they can see it. Such a shameful thing to do in my opinion, and so far fetched.

Well, there's an argument to be made that captains of industry shouldn't own newspapers, full stop. That argument can be made without evidence, and there's some credence to it.

The problem with that argument is that newspapers basically aren't profitable anymore, so we have to choose between "news" outlets that skimp on all journalism costs and simply parrot stories from other sources, real news outlets owned by those captains of industry who are willing to run them at a loss for what amounts to vanity purposes, and bankrupt/soon-to-be-bankrupt new outlets with little-to-no future.

When someone comes up with a profitable model that can support real, independent journalism, perhaps we can start making that argument. Personally, if I compare quality journalism with a blind spot for Bezos, neo-nazi/alt-right crackpot "news" sites and small-town Romanians making up fake news to go viral on Facebook, I'm inclined to think that what little bias WaPo has isn't really that big of a problem.

It's simpler than even that. Regardless of whether the agency or the journalist is "unbiased", or even if Bezos didn't interfere at all, the fact that there's a conflict of interest heavily devalues the story. I mean by definition Bezos is leaning on WaPo, as WaPo is under his direct control.

I think the very fact that Bezos owns the Post means that any article published about Amazon (positive or negative) deserves an extra dose of scrutiny/skepticism. The bottom line is that there's a conflict of interest there, and none of us knows Bezos well enough to know if he's above this sort of pressure or not. It's highly unlikely that we'd ever find evidence of any wrongdoing, or evidence of lack of wrongdoing, no matter what -- if anything -- is going on.

I don't think we should assume the worst and discount anything WaPo says (or doesn't say) about Amazon, but I think it's important to keep in mind that Bezos owns the paper, and just continue to think critically about things.

Why would Bezos care either way? Seems like he has more to win by not being seen as a tyrant and letting his paper publish whatever he wants about him. It's not like a critical article about Amazon is going to sink or have any effect on that Titanic.

Actually Occam's razor would say that WaPo will naturally have a bias towards Bezos. That is the simplest/purest answer.

The simplest view is that Bezos owns WaPo and therefore he will have undue influence over WaPo.

I don't ever envision WaPo going on a anti-Bezo rant like they do with Trump/et al.

Also, occam's razor says Bezos bought WaPo for his own benefit. Nothing wrong with it. But people are so eager to tech gurus the benefit of the doubt or project some "saintly" traits to them.

Entirely off topic but your comment made me realize some people read acronyms as the letters and others will read the full wording. So I'd say "a HN comment".

Ok back to the subject.

"Substance is illusory, only appearance is substantial."

It took me a while to put to words what I find objectionable about your view -- it's intellectual laziness masquerading as critical opinion.

Rather than grappling with a tough problem, it advocates abandoning the problem completely into some sort of post truth fluff, then dresses that up to pose as wisdom.

There's no critical analysis of how bias manifests or the tradeoffs of that bias versus other biases that might be introduced by other sets of circumstances -- there's no meat to that line of thinking.

It's intellectual high-fructose corn syrup.

Tangential to the topic at hand:

The substance itself, if you look closely, is only yet another layer of appearance, slightly closer to the Truth - God.

I feel like bias is the lazy man's argument: "As a progressive group, FAIR believes that structural reform is ultimately needed to break up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent public broadcasting and promote strong non-profit sources of information."

So FAIR is a biased news source, and we should disregard any criticism they present about any media companies. See how easy this is? Didn't even have to think, which I suppose is the appeal.

You've got bigger problems if you're forming opinions about Amazon based on the relative frequency of positive vs. negative headlines in the news(a metric which is literally the article's concern). Safeguarding the integrity of input sources is only a hugely important problem if you also outsource thinking and evaluating arguments to them.

The report is discussing a survey of 190 articles, 6% of which they deemed negative and 54% deemed neutral.

I'm not sure how finding two articles contradicts any of that.

Those numbers mean nothing though unless, at a minimum, you're doing the same thing for other similar companies. For all we know, using the same methodology, one might find comparable numbers for other companies with, say, similar market cap.

Huh? What does this have to do with the original point: that finding two negative articles on google doesn't necessarily contradict anything in their analysis about the breakdown of positive/negative articles?

It could show that there is some other effect happening here. Maybe that effect is that newspapers arent generally critical enough of large cap tech companies.

But it could show that the Bezos connection between WaPo and Amazon is not the primary issue.

*edit typos

Again, what does this have to do with the comment I was replying to? Two negative articles found on google don't necessarily contradict FAIR's analysis, whatever you think of it.

Does the "newspapers not being critical enough" relate, in one way or another, to the point the commenter was making about how easy it was to find those two critical articles on Google? If anything those points would seem to pull in opposite directions.

If you would stop being so hostile, you would realize that both points were extremely relevant.

1.) If a casual search on Google can find two negative articles, it draws to question the article's methodology. If a casual searcher can find articles that didn't make it into the sample, how many more were missed? Is it possible that positive articles get shared more often and are thus easier to find? Or, if they were included (and get indexed highly) does it mean negative articles have significantly more traction, thus making it likely that 6% negative will have a greater impact than 94% positive?

2.) Without knowing what proportion of positive/negative articles exist for other companies, it's quite hard to argue that the Amazon coverage is atypically positive.

The question on the table is what (if any) conclusions can be drawn about the veracity of FAIR's report from finding two critical articles on google. I noted that a survey of 190 articles isn't necessarily shown to be wrong by the discovery of two critical articles on Google. Maybe there's a "there" there, but it's speculative, well short of the conclusion that "TFA just straightforwardly wrong to an embarrassing degree."

Berebo and elefanten both jumped in and observed that you might find similar positive/neutral/negative coverage breakdowns for other companies. Well, you certainly might. But doesn't speak one way or the other to the question of what two critical articles found on Google say about the veracity of FAIR's reporting. In light of this, are those two critical articles found on Google now better evidence? Worse? What's the connection?

Moreover, elefanten's point pulls in the opposite direction of sedachv's. sedachv suggests maybe there is more critical coverage than WaPo is getting credit for, meanwhile elefanten is suggesting that maybe there is a lack of critical coverage, not just at WaPo but across the industry.

You're saying that these observations are "relevant" in some general sense, which is true enough. But I am specifically asking what their connection is to the two critical articles found on Google. And because I'm asking this you seem to think it means that I don't understand their point and am being hostile.

The first article appears to be trying to make his competitor sound like a crazed maniac.

That doesn't strike me as something that would count as overly critical.

Now try doing the same thing for the CIA, whom Amazon was trying to court as a multimillion dollar customer for ages...

The article literally says that the Post was not less critical and scrutinizing of Amazon then other news paper, falling right in the middle.

Therefore, I have to conclude the title is clickbait. And this makes me feel less confident that FAIR has a valid point in saying Amazon appears to evade scrutiny, and more likely to believe there's nothing scrupulous to report about Amazon, except for FAIR wanting to make the headlines.

It's not just Amazon. Facebook and Google also want to avoid any criticism that suggests they should be regulated as utilities.

The #1 marketplace, #1 social network, and #1 search engine companies all lend themselves to natural monopoly, much like the oil and railroad companies at the beginning of the twentieth century.

It will be kind of amazing to watch the complaining as people who, by consensus, refuse to pay for news and discuss news on a site that helps them evade paying for news, then complain about what the news organizations they don't pay for do or don't do. Because apparently America is owed robust news organizations that act in the public interest and survive off bread and water. The parallels to open source software and maintainers will be ignored.

This was probably (wrongly) downvoted because it's hitting too close to home.

Nearly every HN post with a paywall has comments boycotting or denouncing said paywall, how else do you expect them to survive?

I expect people who want robust investigations of what half trillion dollar companies are doing to pay for news, not expect reporters to devote say 1/4 of a year to an investigation at a cost of probably $100k+ (their salary, expenses, editors, travel, etc) in exchange for a couple hundred thousand pageviews with $0.1cpm ads. Though spending $100k to make $50 is actually supported by the valley =P ... but it doesn't lead to a robust public press.

It's not that simple. The amount of money it takes to run a newspaper exceeds the amount it could easily charge readers, at least in the conventional way in which newspapers have done. This has always been the case (a good read is Hillaire Belloc's "The Free Press").

> America is owed robust news organizations

Americans would and should pay for this, collectively and without recourse, via a strong social safety net and possibly taxes. Your shelter, your food, a high quality of life for your kids, etc. should all basically be provided for, so that people can take risks and be daring journalists without being guilt-tripped into feeling like they sacrificed their offspring to their ego.

However, levying taxes to pay for things has been systematically demonized as just not an option at all, and by-and-large people have been hoodwinked into believing that more and more facets of society need to be mediated via "the free market", and if they fail that test, they are not deserving of existence.

It'll take a while until people realize that the market is just a tool, not a be-all-and-end-all.

There are countries that have taxation funded news organizations. They are hardly bastions of objective news. Like any organization, they serve whoever funds them - in this case, they serve the interests of the people that run the government.

This is an American canard, but it's not really true. Usually, public broadcasting reflects the consensus of where the middle is, with a slant towards social justice, almost unavoidable when criticizing public policy - usually stories are about something the government isn't doing, or is doing wrong, rather than shouldn't be doing.

If a public broadcaster publishes plainly biased stories, independent media can lambast them. But the shaming only has effect if the independent media is itself taken seriously; so the critique has to come from the middle ground.

What you won't get from publicly funded news is a rounded perspective on what opposing camps think. The extremes are lopped off; you won't get small government conservative ideology, and you won't get communist ideology. Being anodyne and factual is the best defense against criticism from both independent media and political sources.

If one's own position is significantly to one side of the political spectrum, naturally the middle looks like it's on the other side.

There have been numerous attempts to defund public broadcasting by those who disagreed with their slant. They didn't have the votes, because most of those in power have the same views as PBS.

>Most of those in power have the same views as PBS.

I wonder how that strange coincidence came about.

It's not surprising. PBS is centrist, and most people in power gravitate towards centrist positions in order to win elections.

I'm not so sure. Has, say, npr, not always leaned left even during R administrations?

NPR consistently plays the middle ground. They're threading a needle. Their audience is largely left-of-center college-educated middle class & upper middle. Their public funding is at the mercy of Republicans. As a result, they're very centrist and will frequently pull their punches in controversial situations.

Despite NPR's reputation, many on the left are increasingly distrustful and critical of them, while many listeners on the right seem to prefer their talk shows to be full of yelling. I'm not sure the relentlessly centrist strategy is working for them.

And in some ways, it's unnecessary. Thanks to endowments and listener contributions, NPR could drop government money without major impact. Public funding is a small part of their budget.

I was somewhat skeptical, but here's[0] a chart of NPR funding sources. I really had no idea.

Turns out corporations give them a lot of money too.

[0] http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Funding

> "According to CPB, in 2009 11.3% of the aggregate revenues of all public radio broadcasting stations were funded from federal sources, principally through CPB; in 2012 10.9% of the revenues for Public Radio came from federal sources."

It appears approximately 10% of NPR funding is from the US government. That's a decent chunk, but not enough to hold sway if it goes against the majority of their donors.

Contrast that with a services like the BBC and RT which are almost all funded by taxpayer money:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC#Finances

> "According to the BBC's 2013/14 Annual Report, its total income was £5 billion (£5.066 billion),[2] which can be broken down as follows:

* £3.726 billion in licence fees collected from householders; * £1.023 billion from the BBC's commercial businesses; * £244.6 million from government grants, of which £238.5 million is from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for the BBC World Service; * £72.1 million from other income, such as rental collections and royalties from overseas broadcasts of programming. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)#Budget

"When it was established in 2005, ANO TV-Novosti invested $30 million in start-up costs to establish RT,[14] with a budget of $30 million for its first year of operation. Half of the network's budget came from the Russian government; the other half came from pro-Kremlin commercial banks at the government's request."

"About 80 percent of RT's costs are incurred outside Russia, paying partner networks around $260 million for the distribution of its channels in 2014."

"In 2015, RT was expected to receive 19 billion rubles ($307 million) from the Russian government in 2016."

Oh yes

I think you're misreading the parent comment. They're not advocating for tax funded news organizations, but instead for a stronger social safety net. They're theorizing that this would enable people to pursue journalism without fear of losing their livelihoods because of struggles in that market sector.

I'm not saying that I agree with this position. I think that without capital, the news industry would shrink and struggle even with a strong social safety net to support its journalists. Personal blogs cannot fully replace well funded news organizations.

I don't know why you're downvoted. This is a correct reading of my post.

I'm more concerned with the family of a daring journalist being safe regardless of their investigations, than with the actual remuneration of the journalist.

CBC was pretty critical of the Conservatives while they ruled

Granted it's a debated topic: http://cbcexposed.blogspot.ca/2017/07/is-cbc-news-biased.htm...

Shouldn't "critical of the government" be the standard, though?

> CBC was pretty critical of the Conservatives while they ruled

That relationship was pretty combative from both sides, though, no?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cbc-budget-cut-by-115m-over-...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/cbc-funding-h...

That's the point. It undermines the idea that publicly funded news organisation follow the government line.

That's not true in Australia. Our national broadcaster is considered by the (conservative) government to be too left wing, yet it is too popular to defund.

Or they are funded via models which insulate them from the government of the day, allowing for them to report in a much less biased matter (they don't fear for their jobs).

> Or they are funded via models which insulate them from the government of the day

Can't happen. Somebody is deciding to hand them money. That somebody's views are going to be catered too. Maybe not exactly, but close enough to keep the money flowing.

The term natural monopoly keeps cropping up, seemingly with a definition other than the one I'm familiar with.

What does the natural adjective mean, the way you use it here?

A natural monopoly is where a company operates in an industry in which either network effects or vertical integration make a big difference for the competitiveness of the company, so it's naturally incentivised within the market for one player to gradually become dominant. I don't buy that Google is a natural monopoly for search, but it makes sense for Amazon and Facebook, since network effects are huge. That's how I interpret it.

Assuming that's true for Facebook, how could they be so threatened by Instagram? Snapchat? And how could Facebook even make a dent in MySpace, who fit the natural monopoly definition above just as well?

If social networking were a natural monopoly, could a startup really stand a chance?

I feel the fast pace of innovation and customer behavior shifts makes these products very different from oil and railroads.

Facebook isn't really threatened by either of those companies. They own Instagram. They also own WhatsApp, which is overtaking Snapchat in users[1].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/3/15537000/whatsapp-stories-...

They were threatened enough to buy them at large valuations is gp's point.

The fact that they were easily able to buy them up and still have piles of cash is exactly the sort of thing that a natural monopolist is able to do.

But anyone can buy a company in its infancy, and neuter it before it becomes a threat. This is possible even if the market is not one that would naturally give rise to monopoly, but rather one where monopoly is ensured by governmental acts or anti-competitive behavior by the most dominant company.

I prefer the more standard definition where a market that naturally tends to monopoly is one where a multi-company state is less efficient than a single company state.

In social networking, despite the power of network effects, having multiple companies is still efficient simply because people want to compartmentalize their networks of friends and interests. People want to use WhatsApp to talk to group A, and Skype to group B.

There's a tendency to assume that since phones were a monopoly, and mail is a monopoly, then all communication and social interaction aides must be naturally monopolies too, but that's not the case. Phones and mail were monopolies due to physical efficiency, not due to the desires of consumers.

Are they all that threatening if they can simply buy them?

>> I don't buy that Google is a

>> natural monopoly for search

Google has most of the search users, creating better data for improving its product (ad targeting and search), so it gets all of the ad budget for search. Data+ad revenue suffocates the competition of users and revenue creating a natural monopoly.

How do you distinguish between a "natural monopoly" and just a "monopoly"?

One clear-cut example of an "unnatural monopoly" would be the state outlawing all but one company in an industry.

A natural monopoly in an area arises from the dynamics of the business itself, other monopolies require external forces to prop them up.

The term has a specific meaning in economics: a natural monopoly occurs when the most efficient number of firms in a market is one.

This can occur through a number of dynamics, generally attributed to economies of scale, though network effects also come into play.

I'm exploring the idea that monopolies (natural or otherwise) are almost always strongly tied to network phenomena (not just in a physical sense), and are largely synonymous with the concept of economic rent.

There are a number of elements which accompany monopoly status, only some of which are strictly economic. Many of the others involve overt political or other power.

I personally don't see a good rationale for needing to recognize any of them as utilities.

There are alternatives to Amazon, Facebook and Google - good ones at that - while it /could/ be argued that a search engine is an essential product, I would argue the opposite - and even more so for social networking and online shopping - if I saw conclusive proof that any go them were using their market power to force competitors out of the market, I might be more agreeable to the concept.

They've all used their market power to quash competitors.

Your language is debatable, on a case by case basis.

But even assuming it true, even that is not the standard by which anti-trust is judged. It's judged based on consumer welfare. That's where the debate should lie.

And no doubt it is a debate still. And the debate alone could shape actions and outcomes.

There's no doubt that the consumer welfare standard has been the AT standard for recent memory, but more folks are starting to question if that is the right standard. That's part of the discussion around some of this.

http://allthingsd.com/20131010/how-jeff-bezos-crushed-diaper...

...to take one case.

what are the alternatives?

eBay, Snap/Twitter, Bing.

Twitter is different from facebook.Snap is not and will never be a facebook alternative(vice versa).Because social network is not just client software but relationships.You can easily replace facebook/whatsapp with snapchat or whatever you like,but how do you persuade your friends and relatives to do that?If none of your friends use the alternatives,you have to reuse facebook.

There is in fact a highly functional, proven alternative to what you're proposing.

It's the Intel approach. The US Government allowed Intel to keep its monopoly, while simultaneously restraining it enough that Intel wasn't able to truly lock out various competitors from rising up over time.

ARM, Samsung, nVidia, AMD, Taiwan Semi, etc.

It's also what ended up happening with Microsoft & Windows. Had the US Government not been involved at all, Microsoft could have trivially barred all competing search engines (bye Google) from their desktop platform, and all other browsers (bye Netscape, Chrome, Firefox), and all competing media software (bye iTunes), and so on.

Intel didn't have to be regulated as a fake natural monopoly that it in fact obviously wasn't (nor are Facebook or Google), in order to keep the lanes open to competition.

NB: it was oil transport and most especially refining which seemed to capture true monopoly rents, most especially where oilfield control was not unitised.

In the case of unitised oilfield control (that is: a single company or other entity controlled all extraction from a single resource), other monopoly powers might exist, most especially if the field exhibited lower-than-average costs (as in Saudi Arabia).

Aamzon isn't the #1 marketplace. They're the 9th largest retailer in a still very competitive space. Social media isn't important enough to regulate. Google Search is the only thing that could conceivably need regulation and really no one is demanding it right now.

and so Bezos buys the post while the control FB and Google have on advertising (and increasingly the internet in general) just makes Journalism ever more reliant on them.

Is this a statement about WShington Post or the other papers or all the papers together?

Out of curiosity, is there anything critical to be written about Bezos specifically?

I don't understand the title and its implications. Why is it relevant that Bezos owns the Washington Post, if the Post is no more guilty of bias than any other paper?

> no more guilty of bias than any other paper

When 99% of the press beats up on a presidential candidate, and he still wins, people may smell a rat.

2016 was a fun year.

The rat that smells here is one making ridiculous and patently absurd declarative statements about extremely recent history.

I am not sure the poster from parent is all that wrong. The mainstream media (CNN , MSNBC, WaPo, NYT, HuffPo) straight up shilled for HRC during the election. CNN even provided HRC with questions for the debates.

Figuring out whether or not Bezos is doing behind-the-scenes censorship of his own media outlet ultimately depends on the internal organizational structure of WaPo and Amazon.

If the most senior leader of WaPo - the person in charge of greenlighting or pulling articles that get published - may be fired/terminated/reassigned by Bezos, or someone who Bezos oversees, then there is a conflict of interest that can't be ignored, and will always be inherent within the organizations until this is remedied.

Now, just because there's a conflict of interest does not mean that shady reporting is occurring. But, we cannot definitively say that WaPo is unbiased towards Amazon, unless there is something about the internal controls that would separate Bezos from the ultimate decision-making.

Assuming we take the article at face value.. how does coverage compare to any other major company?

I used to listen to FAIRs radio show. They clued me in to the sides of journalism i never knew existed.

Nowadays though, wapo and other are just not as relevant.

For example, HN has taught me via comments to expect counterfeit electronics on Amazon..

FAIR is still a net positive IMO

I also wish that WashPost would disclose that its owner has contracts with the CIA, whenever it writes a story on the CIA (especially a positive one). Readers should know that there may be a pro-CIA bias in the story and a conflict of interest when publishing the story.

WaPo shouldn't cover Bezos or Amazon at all.

I have been enjoying the investigative journalism of WaPost; I am disappointed to learn that it is so closely affiliated to Amazon, an economic powerhouse (e.g. commanding about 50% of online sales, and their AWS).

There is a need for non-corporate owned media. There do exist independent media voices, but they often have ideological leanings.

There is plenty of non-corporate output being made these days; it's just a matter of getting it to the masses.

At one point, the internet offered a glimmer of hope that we could enjoy modern discourse outside of corporate influence, but our open publication platform has been effectively re-centralizing under the control of a small handful of MegaCorps like Google, Twitter, and Facebook, who, to varying degrees, all engage in censorship of social, political, and creative speech.

I guarantee there are unknown content producers toiling away providing writings, commentary, and reporting far exceeding that available from the major media companies, but that we don't see it because BigMediaCo is paying a major attention broker like Google or Facebook to promote their offerings instead.

Nothing stopping you. I pay for journalism from Michael Yon, The Guardian, Rebel Media, and others.

I've heard from someone who I think would know, that the editorial influence of owners on their newspapers' journalism has waned.

Is it a matter of principle, or are you concerned with any tangible editorial slant?

Nope, I personally subscribe (pay) for "perspective" journalism. It just would be nice to have a more neutral source sometimes.

FAIR is a noted hard right wing organization.

You're thinking of the other FAIR: Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Hmm, wiki says the opposite, that the organization leans left[0]. The organization itself calls itself "progressive"[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_and_Accuracy_in_Repor...

[1] http://fair.org/about/

Care to explain your point a bit? Is it that FAIR is right wing, therefore its argument is flawed? Can you provide some backing to the claim that it is rightwing?

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