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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

>> And he considers Post political stance against him a directive from Bezos himself.

Which, to be fair, it very likely is. I just can't see Jeff _not_ exercising any editorial control. Post also doesn't shit on Amazon ever since he bought it, even when it's deserved.

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The Post runs the same stories seen in essentially all papers in the world. A lot of them implicate the president negatively. But how does precluding the pentagon from it's first choice on these grounds good for the country?

In a free and uncorrupt country, you don't allow leaders to intervene in national security issues because they are embarrassed by a paper's coverage. Thus few people are directly saying that amazon should loose the bid because their CEO has a paper the president doesn't like.

More common and to be consistent with the notion of a corruption free democracy, the defense for this is the claim that, despite significant pressure, this surprising turn of events would have happened anyway. This is the story being promoted more but it does require a improbably interpretation of events that only supporters could really ever internalize. Especially since Trump's own secretary of defense flatly said the goal was to screw Amazon over the Post.

There's no such thing as "corruption free" country. The US is very, very far from corruption-free, both in the government and outside it. It's less corrupt than, say, Zimbabwe, but that's not saying much. Basically one has to ask themselves a question: given that the mainstream press is wildly unprofitable (with very few exceptions), might there be a reason why its owners sinks hundreds of millions of dollars into keeping it afloat? I think you know what that reason is, Chomsky has been railing against it for several decades now. They're instruments of propaganda. They manufacture consent. They are literally no better than Pravda nowadays, although instead of being government controlled, they're controlled by five rich men. It's better than government control, but not by much.

In my reading, your post implies that everyone is exclusively motivated by short term self interest. I do not think this is true, neither for myself nor for others, and I suspect you do not either for yourself and people you know.

The problem in general with negative fatalistic views like this one is that it is non falsifiable: there is not a single positive / selfless action to which you could not ascribe base motives.

That's the problem with assuming you can read people's minds, which seems quite frequent nowadays. The key "tell" for this is saying: "so what you're saying is" followed by the opposite of what the person is really saying.

No, your reading is incorrect.

> Chomsky has been railing against it ... they're controlled by five rich men

That is a real problem, certainly in normal times. And likely decades of derailing reforms in the interest of consumers and employees is what led to the frustration that created the current catastrophe. I note even now broadcast media certainly dwells on the trade war far more than other more pressing problems.

So stories should be confirmed by looking at serious publicly owned and overseas news sources. And if a particular series of stories is in the WaPo and NPR and BBC and the Guardian and Der Spiegel and FAZ and NHK and Le Monde and El Pais then we know it is not a rich man's plot. And if privately owned media has a pro-wealth bent, maybe an autocratic kletopcray is a bit much for some of them. Especially for non-hereditary billionaires many of whom really do want to make the world better (within certain economic constraints of course)

I really doubt that, because any journalist with integrity would quit and make a stink about it, which would tank the Post's reputation. I would cancel my subscription the same day, and I imagine so would a lot of other people.

Also, I've seen plenty of negative stories about Amazon in the past months. I remember them because they always have a disclaimer about Bezos owning the post in the article. Here's one from just yesterday: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/24/amazon-.... Can you point to any specific negative story on Amazon that the Post has noticeably not covered?

"journalist with integrity"

Is there such a thing? Media landscape in the US is a sad view these days.

Do you have any specific reasons to cite for this belief? It sounds like a minority of the population find certain facts inconvenient when they conflict with their world view. This doesn't mean that the way news is being reported is changing, unless you prefer "alternate facts".

I am not from US, so I don't count for minority or majority. Specific reasons... Just watch 5 min of CNN, MSNBC, 30 seconds of Maddow or Don Lemon. Staggering amounts of venom and obsession. This is not news anymore. This is an alternative reality.

I like how you left out Fox News which is far worse. E.g The bogus Seth Rich story. There is nothing comparable. Maddow and Don are opinion.

Serious question: how do you know it's "bogus"? There's no evidence either way. For all we know the guy could have been Assange's source, which would explain the raging hard-on the current administration has for extraditing Assange.

It was bogus because they quoted an FBI source saying evidence was found on Seth Rich's laptop indicated that he sent DNC emails to Wikileaks. They retracted the story after an outcry, and IIRC FBI denied it. That didn't stop Hannity from hammering the false story for a week till Seth's parents begged him. Two and half years later there is no link whatsoever. They literally just made it up to fool their low information audience, and apparently it worked so well that I am seeing HN'ers regurgitate this bullshit with zero indication that Seth even had access to all DNC emails.

Maddow and Don are opinion. Fox is propaganda. Do not wait for an answer.

I did answer with proof. Sad to see purveyors and believers of actual fake news on this site.

Yes, you answered. Hannity has been beating dead horse for one week. Progressive media are peddling Russia collusion for years. Walls are still closing in. Tulsi is a Russian asset with no proof whatsoever! All networks are biased, but some are way more biased to the point of insanity.

There is a difference between being biased and outright making up falsehoods with fake facts like the Seth Rich story. Both are bad but the latter is much worse.

I was talking about newspaper journalism though, which seems to be as solid as ever. TV journalism, on the other hand, appears to have become more polarized, though there's still good programs out there. I'd definitely avoid opinion hosts like Maddow, Tucker Carlson, Hannity etc, since they aren't even real journalists.

Here is the latest from WaPo that changed the headline on its Al-Baghdadi obituary from "Islamic State's terrorist-in-Chief" to "austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State". Religious scholar, my ass. So much for solid journalism.

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