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Comment by jholman | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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...

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