Jeff Bezos exerts more control of Washington Post opinion
deadline.com
deadline.com
[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/jef...
Over the past few weeks, it's felt like this term has become a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)".
It's tough as someone who is a strong proponent for strong civil liberties seeing their philosophy's verbiage being co-opted as such (but the former PM/PMM in me respects game)
> At the end of the day I expect the quality of discourse to dip: being afraid of contradictory opinions is the first step in intellectual decline.
In Turkiye, Hungary, a lot of Latin America (notably Mexico, Brazil), Russia in the early 2010s, CEE EU member states (Yes Czechs and Poles, continue to be high and mighty on HN and Reddit until Babis and PiS win again the next couple months thanks to your parents in Brno or Wroclaw), Israel, South Korea, and India, this meant the rise of independent blogs and media - sort of like what Substack is trying but failing to do.
Plenty of senior journalists who felt over-muzzled would split off and form their own independent blog companies and those increasingly supplemented legacy press orgs amongst leadership, because even an illiberal democracy, you need some unbiased info.
Of course, unlike the US, plenty of journalists in those countries have bar licenses and know how to parry judicial overreach.
It also meant the opposition had balls and wasn't afraid to lie if needed as well. Politics is a brawl, not a Socratic session in a Gov94 Seminar, but these are also countries where junior party members from opposing parties beating each up with fists or a tire iron is a rite of passage.
Yup. Just more doublespeak.
Remember "free enterprise"? Sounds awesome right? Yes, please, gimme some more of that freedom.
Imagine my surprise apon learning the "free enterprise" advocates actually meant freedom from consequences.
The power to impose this new wonderland, is almost within reach. Where before it failed, greater are the possibilities for it to succeed this time around. Nothing to worry about, freedom is for those who deserve it.
But from the standpoint of an independent news organization, they suck. If you as an independent commentator are tied to a centralized platform, you are a feature to be sold, and will be muzzled or deprecated if needed.
EU [0], not US. There's a reason JD Vance was harping about "free speech" and "personal freedom" during MSC.
Hot take, but if we as Ds sacrifice Bruxelles to bring back Obama era tech donors who are overly impacted by the Digital Services Act, I'm fine with it.
[0] - https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
No wonder that about 75% Czechs are dissatisfied with current PM Fiala.
https://cvvm.soc.cas.cz/en/press-releases/political/politici...
Opposition is even worse. They do what public surveys and Babis (the leading oligarch here) tells them to do. I expect lowest voter turnout because quite a lot people don't see any point in voting. Which is ok for me. We need rethinking about current approach of giving our responsibility to unknown electorate.
There are also obvious struggles within Brussels whether the unrealistic eco-plans are going to be at least watered down or no, and the EC is still trying to push them through as much as possible.
In that environment, a "media-talented" oppositional politician who professes mild Euroskepticism is going to have an easy time winning.
https://www.dw.com/en/german-election-results-and-voter-demo...
(Yes, I know that Die Linke aren't literally Communist, and I know AfD aren't literally Nazis, but Die Linke descended from the legal successor of a Marxist-Leninist party, as AfD descended from the legal successor of a neo-Nazi party, so I think my analogy holds.)
You're definitely right about Die Linke's demographics though.
this is fine if he really means it. This is the most important thing we get from the Constitution recognizing our rights as humans. It remains to be seen if it's really just to copy what what Musk is doing at X which is amplifying far right posts along with enragement (engagement) posts, and he deamplifie everything else.
- free markets
this is worrisome. it sounds to me like they want free markets for billionaires and their arm twisting of the current Congress and Trump, and -NOT- actually giving lower and middle class an equal chance in "free markets", because it can't be free if corps are allowed to run hog wild over rights, monopolies, and colluding between each other to dominate markets.
Like any other non-Western European and North American country, politics in the CEE is very much about those networks and connections you cultivated - not really ideological - and almost everyone mid-high level in Hungarian politics today started their careers in the 1990s.
Politics in much of the CEE amongst that generation appears much more mercenary than ideological.
Anecdotally, I've heard the biggest reason my Hungarian coworkers parents voted for Fidesz was largely because of the cash benefits they would provide before elections - same as Bolsa Familia in Brazil, TOKİ in Turkiye, and Freebies in India (all illiberal democracies have a similar form of patronage politics, this is a very incomplete list)
> Over the past few weeks, it's felt like this term has become a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)".
"Personal liberty" is a euphemism for discrimination against "out groups," based on their ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, or political orientation. The Masterpiece Cake Shop debacle[0] was framed on the right as an issue of religious liberty.
"Free markets," the other "pillar" in the Bezos letter, is obviously a euphemism for opposing government regulation or oversight. In this case, I imagine it means in particular opposition to labor unions.
The solution was trivially easy: go to another cake shop that doesn't not have such an objection, but that wouldn't be heroic enough.
Instead of the obvious problem that Inequality is rising and we need to substantially raise taxes on the rich and reduce them for everyone else to close the runaway gap.
[0] - https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/th...
That's the crux. It's the same in almost all developed countries, we all have been getting more income, but most of us are not getting richer. The widening of the scissors is becoming more and more obvious, because even middle incomes suffered hard during the cost of living crisis, and continue to suffer.
The US was #1 on the Human Development Index in 1995, and is now #20, sandwiched between Slovenia and the UAE.
What your link does show is widening income inequality.
This trope is getting tiring to be honest. There are very clear issues with immigration in many countries. The issue is that for the last 20 years when these issues where brought up, the main parties just dismissed them and ostracized anyone who dare bring up the subject.
This failure to address the problem is what is fueling the rise of the far right everywhere except in 1 country, Denmark. Why? Because they actually decided to listen to their constituents and do something about it. Is it perfect no? But if you look at the result of their action, the far right in Denmark is comparatively low compared to many other European countries.
It's time for the leaders of many countries to stop pretending that problems don 't exist and acknowledged that the way the immigration issue was handled for the last 20 years is an utter abject failure.
I live in an European capital and haven't seen any of these issues that immigration is supposedly creating. AFAICT theses issues only exist in the minds of people, and thus in the media.
Regardless, let's say I'm wrong and immigration is indeed creating some issues. Are these issues really so important relative to other problems a state might have that they command the amount of attention immigration gets?
I call bullshit, it's purely a wrong skin color problem.
Then the people who care only about money and power can divide and conquer.
The problem with these solutions is that the math doesn't add up.
Either there are too few rich people in reality, and even if you can collect 200 percent from them - it won't affect the overall picture (and in the end there will be even fewer of them, and you'll have to raise taxes for everyone).
Or, if we expand the category of rich - a poverty funnel is created, where taxes on the "rich" protect the "super-rich" from competition. What difference does it make that you have to pay 90% if all the money is yours, because no one will invest in competing with you, since success will bring them 10%, and failure will take everything?
Everywhere in the world, the rich pay less. Even in countries with formally progressive tax rates, there are a huge number of subsidies and programs that in the end of the day boil down to the fact that the effective tax rate for the rich is lower (even if this means simply reducing their competition so that they get more money and pay a "progressive" tax on it).
Because the problem is not inequality, the problem is poverty. And any measures that discourage production in the end of the day increase poverty. For this reason, any construction of socialism always ends in hunger. Because what difference does it make what just and fair distribution system you came up with if your production fell ten, a hundred or a thousand times because of such a system?
While there is truth is what you say about simply redistributing money is going to directly get people the goods and services required since that is not directly production.
It does have second order effect of changing the weighting of what society produces. If people are too poor to afford food why would you bother to grow it.
Taxing should be about keeping winner take all effects in reasonable check to keep markets actually functional for a good proportion of the participants.
Below $1M NW, you are probably labor. Above $10M NW, you are probably capital. These thresholds come from asking the question "does a conservative estimation of the passive income from these assets replace a wage?" -- below $1M, no, above $10M, yes, feel free to adjust by playing with the assumptions or plugging in wacky edge cases. The point is that incentives determine so much about politics and the incentives of each individual tend to heavily favor one side or the other which tends to translate into politically relevant policy preferences that favor one side or the other.
The tax code is comically tilted in favor of capital. We should fix that. Unearned income shouldn't be taxed less than earned income, for a start. Also, if I can pay property tax on my house, mega-billionaires can pay property tax on their stock pile. But these are details, and focusing too much on details can be a distraction from the root issue: the tax code is comically tilted in favor of capital, and we should fix that.
There doesn't need to be a crisp threshold. Progressive taxation without treating labor income as more heavily taxed than generic income which in turn is more heavily taxed than capital gains would be a good start.
This is objectively false.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
> Instead of the obvious problem that Inequality is rising
I'm old enough to remember when progs all shrieked that poverty was the big scary problem. Capitalism solved that with minimal expense. You know that scary 15% in poverty figure you hear during election season? That's based on census income data, which excludes ~90% of all welfare programs, even CASH programs like refundable tax credits!
So with poverty overwhelmingly sorted, they've moved on to inequality! But even calculations of income inequality are doped up--high earners incomes are counted BEFORE taxes, and low earners BEFORE benefits. Keep that in mind whenever progs advocate for more welfare spending--even if you give it to them, they won't count it! They exclude it from the very calculations which they use as evidence of the need for ever more spending!
Top 1% Top 5% Top 10% Top 25% Top 50% Bottom 50% All Taxpayers
Number of Returns 1,535,899 7,679,495 15,358,991 38,397,477 76,794,954 76,794,954 153,589,908
Average Income Taxes Paid $653,730 $187,468 $108,251 $50,963 $27,891 $667 $14,279
Adjusted Gross Income (Millions) $3,872,395 $6,182,180 $7,745,525 $10,613,602 $13,191,209 $1,531,038 $14,722,247
1 2-5 6-10 11-25 26-50 51-100
Number of Returns 1,535,899 6,143,596 7,679,496 23,038,486 38,397,477 76,794,954
Income Taxes Paid (Millions) $1,004,063 $435,594 $222,966 $294,234 $185,068 $51,225
Adjusted Gross Income (Millions) $3,872,395 $2,309,785 $1,563,345 $2,868,077 $2,577,607 $1,531,038
Average Tax Rate 25.9% 18.9% 14.3% 10.3% 7.2% 3.3%
Average Per Capita Income $2,521,256.28 $375,966.29 $203,573.91 $124,490.69 $67,129.59 $19,936.70
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBSN40188
And
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134
And
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA
You aren't looking at the right data. This is why it's so hard to educate the public about this, even intelligent people on HN get it wrong.
It's always funny to hear about media bias with obvious very large alternatives available. It was very eery hearing about the Media's supposed Liberal biases through the 2020 and 2024 election campaigns with Fox News fully dominating viewership numbers [1]. And now here we go again with print media.
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/cable-news...
If we assume, for example sake, the country is exactly 50% left and 50% right, it makes sense that Fox, as the sole 'big' right wing news would dominate ratings.
Then you have CNN and MSNBC as left leaning outlets, so they outnumber Fox, but split viewership. According to the link above, if they merged, they'd have about the same viewership as Fox, which makes sense.
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/anticipatory-obedience-bassin-p...
Are they not in favor of Democrats? How is that left leaning?
In reality, CNN and MSNBC ideologically agree as much as FoxNews and Newsmax in that they don't. And CNN especially invented optimizing coverage for attention over viewpoint consistency (esp between 2000 and 2015).
As I see it we have one major right wing news network in America in the form of Fox; along with some smaller ones like One News Network and talk radio. We have several centrist news networks like CNN and ABC. We have several neo-liberal news sources like the New York Times.
However, we have no truly left wing mainstream news and only one major network (MSNBC) that is marginally left wing.
So it seems to me that America's media is biased towards the right whether you are counting number of outlets or number of viewers.
I expect it to stay exactly the same
It was already like this before, it's just afaik the pillars weren't publicly acknowledged
What were the previous pillars? Social justice and progressive ideology. "Diversity of opinion" matters now all of sudden?
Say it with me: "Domain-Specific Knowledge."
Was anyone genuinely under th delusion that it was any different when it was Bezos' benefit to placate the progressives?
Of course it doesn't.
> Was anyone genuinely under th delusion that it was any different
It wasn't a delusion, it was.
It's generally been the policy of editorial pages to print a diverse set of opinions pieces that contradict each other. And that aren't under control of the owner, look up the term "editorial independence".
This isn't a question of being "under a delusion", it's simply how American newspapers have traditionally operated because it was good for business.
Media owners have generally prioritized making money, not "presenting their views".
This is so elementary that anyone can see it. It's commonly mentioned in precisely the mainstream "respectable" publications like WaPo.
There's almost certainly industry jargon and marketing models for it, and technical terminology and decades of documentation about it, if I were to ask any LLM what the words and concepts are.
What have Bezos or Lewis said that indicate 'personal liberties' differ from 'civil liberties'? I don't see it in the cited article.
I haven't heard that. Where does that definition come from, and where did Bezos embrace the definition and reject civil liberties?
This move seems likely to alienate subscribers (both for potentially being against their ideology, and more importantly, for implying lack of freedom of expression that customers would demand from a newspaper). It is also likely to lose them talent. The move seems to benefit bezos personally by using the newspaper as a mouthpiece, even if the newspaper itself as a business is damaged in the process.
This suggests that the Post will effectively become just another municipal newspaper that happens to be in located the US capitol, rather than a source of national scope news. This giant shift in strategy will surely decrease the paper's market size and reputation for breaking news (as it did with Watergate and Snowden).
I suspect this also portends a big reduction in the paper's commitment to investigative journalism, something that IMO, is truly irreplaceable (especially since investigations at the NY Times have faded into a mere shadow of what the Post has long been in that endeavor. They did a rotten job at reporting Snowden's revelations, for example.)
[BTW, I was a subscriber to the Post (and a long time reader before that) but cancelled in protest when Bezos suddenly pulled the Post's endorsement of a presidential candidate in 2024. Now I guess I'll stay away forever.]
I'd say they were clearly on the left since ~2017, but had other perspectives as well.
What, are you going to report on Trump claiming that Ukraine started the war uncritically? That Haitians are eatings pets in Ohio? That vaccines cause autism? C'mon.
The Overton window shifted right in 2016, I don't think the paper's line moved much. But no more, the billionaires are here to ensure nothing will get in the way of their sweet, sweet tax cuts [1].
This is some grandiose appeal that's shared by both sides of the political coin. People generally assume that reality matches their experience and opinions.
Bezos's decision doesn't impact the news side, which reports on breaking news. The paper's editor in chief made a public statement backing that notion.
Note that they rejected an advertisement criticising Elon Musk, for example. That's not a news article, but it definitely looks biased.
Seems an odd choice to combat that loss by apparently shifting further right. You are never going to get large numbers of Fox News consumers to read WaPo. They have been told for decades how far left the Post is and that it can't be trusted.
Bezos needs a hobby I guess.
Just as with Musk and Twitter, controlling the narrative and pushing an agenda is worth far more than any balance sheets could show.
We must've read two different WaPos.
> I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no.’
> Bezos corp speak
I think you are conflating a "business yes man" with a "newspaper angle yes man". It is fine for a major newspaper to endorse certain values, and distance themselves from others! It's fine because it's a big country with a lot of newspapers!
A paper, or journalism, is much more sensitive to these issues than a typical business btw. Because as you can imagine, once readers distrust a news source it is very hard to repair that reputation.
A written variant of a FoxNews talking head telling viewers how/what to think about $topic...
I hope the US brings back fairness doctrine. Or if not, force these companies and all their parent/subsidizes to own no more than 3 Media companies.
By media I mean: Radio, TV, Cable, Streaming, Movie Production and Social Media.
What mega corporation is the Washington Post part of?
We're at the point where the personal wealth of oligarchs such as him has begun eclipsing the wealth of all but the very largest corporations. His own personal wealth would rank him somewhere around 60th on the Fortune 500.
Which, if you're going to argue against someone's position, I'd think it best to get that position directly from them, rather than building a strawman to beat down.
The predecessor law was used int the 1930s to close non English language radio stations in Chicago and FDR used it to threaten people criticizing the New Deal.
You could go on and on with examples of abuse by administrators of both parties. The fairness doctrine violated the first amendment and was garbage.
As an exercise, imagine applying it to a story about climate change. Now image Trump’s FCC gets to decide what is fair. Do you really want that?
The fairness doctrine would be just as godawful as the Debate between Kent Hovind and Bill Nye. It only serves to legitimize crazy outliers.
The problem with Fox News is not that they don't have the fairness doctrine, the problem is that your average american has so little media literacy that they can't recognize that Fox News is absolute horseshit, and that a company that has multiple times had to admit to a judge that they willfully lie to their audience should not be trusted. Republicans love to bitch about how bad CNN is as a "liberal" media source but educate liberals do not watch CNN because they once asked a physicist if MH370 could have disappeared into a black hole, and other utterly insane and clearly not journalism things. OAN and Newsmax currently exist. There is no equivalent for "liberals". A bunch of extreme right wing youtubers were found to be paid by RT, ie literal Russian State Propaganda outlet, and none of them lost their audience. There isn't a communist state funded liberal equivalent.
But apparently most americans didn't learn how to evaluate a media source, like at all, which is weird because we spent a couple classes in the library learning exactly that, along with learning how to use boolean operators to better search google for example. We were even tested on it.
But I guess all the kids who thought english class was worthless didn't pay attention, and now believe "Truth of media" === "How much it confirms my biases"
"People with more money than God own and influence media" has historically not been a recipe for social stability.
Truth be told, it does feel like free markets have become a bit of a dirty word in both political realms recently; I'm not going to complain too much about Bezos advocating for it, we could use the help.
I guess it remains to be seen just what kind of views they end up pushing, rather than what he says he wants to push :P
ALL markets are BORN of regulations. A market is what emerges when you lay some shared ground rules: here's what a pound is, here's a standard currency, here's some laws about commerce, here's a court system for mediating disputes.
So the question isn't ever really about free or not free—it's what are the rules and who sets them
99 out of 100 times the people spending money pushing the virtue of a "free market" really just want to be the ones setting the rules and steering them in their favor
Replace "free market" with "competitive market"—what most people actually want when they talk about free markets—and suddenly a lot of what Bezos is going to argue for stops making sense
I wish this was recognized more widely. I feel like the public versus private thing is kind of a red herring; the real issue is competition and cultivating it. Sometimes this means the public intervening in various ways (to support individuals in their skill development and ability to take risks, or break up monopolies, offer a competitive alternative in a public service, etc.) and sometimes it means the public stepping out (as when public regulations stifle true competition or a public service exerts too much control over pricing and services).
You just throw this out there as a statement of fact without backing it up beyond citing one hypothetical failure mode of a free market for media. Here's a dueling hypothetical: what happens if the state that is in charge of regulating the media gets taken over by someone who doesn't believe that media should hold elected officials accountable and they prevent the media from covering their actions negatively?
Now that we've evened out the "what happens if"s: On what basis do you say that regulated media produces better outcomes? Because you say so? Is there evidence in favor that you can cite?
Free market views aren't better because they have some theoretical purity; they work much better than all the other options. Anyone who approaches the world trying to get the best results will end up with strong free market views. The free market is almost a magic fountain of wealth and prosperity. The people who want to improve the world are hard ones to shut up; they keep talking. And they don't even need to be in contact with each other to figure out market principles - they're matters of observing human behaviour, not learned ideologies.
Haven't we seen for the last 10 years exactly what will happen in this situation? I mean, not through the free market, but the deep state pretty much had complete control over the narrative of 90% of the media, from Covid to border policy.
And the stronger the control, the less trust people have in these media, and at the end of the day the election results are no longer decided by who is clearly supported by 90% of the news media, but by who came to Joe Rogan's podcast.
To Bezos, a market controlled by a single large capital allocator is a free market. Unless the allocator is government of course (unless there's subsidies to apply for!).
The idea to me is strange; I shop on Amazon, but also dozens of other online websites. It's really not hard to buy from some place other than Amazon if you desire.
Many of the same effects that make it extremely hard to set up eg. competing social networks are not present for online shopping - There's plenty of shipping companies, so you can ship anywhere in the world without capital investment; You can set up an online shop and send it to anyone, you don't need to have a huge customer base to make money (relatively speaking, obviously you need customers)
The motivation for DOGE is not efficiency. It is destruction of the federal civil service and destruction of oversight for Musk's business empire.
I don't believe Bezos' motivation is honest. For God's sake, he is saying "I will silence opinions that do not align with my own; I am narrowing the intellectual capacity of this organization".
It's also loaded. He doesn't give examples of opinion pieces or a trend of speaking against free markets (so-called) or personal liberties.
It is now the personal opinion section of Jeff Bezos. Look what money can buy.
that's not the issue here though. Bezos is directly ordering the opinion editor to tow a certain line, and that is not a common practice at any reputable newspaper I am aware of (which is why the responsible editor, David Shipley immediately quit). I am German and I have friends working in the news sector. A corporate shareholder trying to dictate the topics would be considered a breach of ethics. Pretty sure that's the case at highly regarded newspapers in the US too.
That somehow a lack of regulations is fair because it allows markets to adjust to supply and demand and come to an equilibrium. And modern economists who use actor-based simulations have shown that unregulated markets are typically not "perfect markets".
But the reality is that a market with a monopolist does not do this. In fact, the closer you get to a pure monopoly, the more a price will approach one where consumers get none of the economic surplus and there is a large economic dead-weight loss.
Unsurprisingly, the tech giants who are monopolists talk a lot about "free markets" in this way. But people who work in tech should probably refrain from using this term so that we can get rid of these superstitions.
This is my single most important heuristic for filtering news. Facts in the present and the past matter. Predictions about the future have very little value.
Jon Stewart said it better. This whole show is 10/10 but linking to the most relevant timestamp: https://youtu.be/CuDcTyCq8nc?si=eiVXnJkfMxPGPv5k&t=812
That position is widely supported in the professional news media, including the Wall Street Journal.
[1]: https://newrepublic.com/post/191606/tom-homan-ocasio-cortez-...
Oddly, I'd say its basically only Trump attacking the idea in any significant way, with the strong advocacy of tariffs. It remains bizarre to me that conservatives have seemed happy to throw away generations of advocacy for free trade.
I don't expect Bezos to contradict him either.
There's more rhetoric nowadays around things like rent controls and profit caps, both of which I view as very destructive to the mechanisms of market allocation. I think it's a divisive issue though since there's no real home these days for people with those views (that is, (neo)liberal economics); the right is insane and the left have a large, very progressive segment which they have to pull back on.
Back to when? 1970s?
Döpfner: Are you upset if the Post journalists are writing critical stories about Amazon?
Bezos: No, I’m not upset at all.
Döpfner: Did or would you ever interfere?
Bezos: Never. I would be humiliated to interfere. I would be so embarrassed. I would turn bright red. It has nothing to do with … I don’t even get so far… I just don’t want to. It would feel icky; it would feel gross. It would be one of those things when I’m 80 years old I would be so unhappy with myself if I had interfered. Why would I? I want that paper to be independent. We have a fantastic editor in Marty Baron. We have a fantastic publisher in Fred Ryan. The head of our technology team, a guy named Shailesh, is fantastic. They don’t need my help in the newsroom for sure. First of all, that’s also an expert’s job. It would be like me getting on the airplane and going up to the front of the plane and saying to the pilot, “You should move aside — let me do this!”
Here's a column by John Harris, "founding editor and global editor-in-chief": "Time to Admit It: Trump Is a Great President. He's Still Trying To Be a Good One.": "The most consequential presidents divided the nation - before “reuniting it on a new level of understanding."
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/21/harris-col...
He might claim otherwise but hard to argue that the values aren’t changing when the opinion editor is resigning.
What is needed is more local news, and for the populace to prefer local. Bring back the daily town newspaper by email. We spend so much time looking down at our phones across the world that we fail to see the news happening right in front of us.
The News Corp masthead The Australian (https://www.theaustralian.com.au) is basically a propaganda rag for Rupert Murdoch.
Every day there are opinions, and every day the opinions are the same.
> There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns. You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same — his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an "Independent Press"! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
Hey hey that is a bit on the nose for HN
In fact his central complaint, that we are slaves, is the same exact lesson taught in the story of Genesis from the oral history that predates Judaism.
He is complaining that in life, we are cursed to work. You know, "the fall." A problem for every human since we became aware of the existence of the future.
This isn't some cutting insight into the downfall of American society, it's just a complaint that the world is unfair.
Well guess what? Get used to it. It's unfair in every system. This one is one of the more fair systems, though.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub...
I won't spoil it. It is well worth reading. I'll just say that I firmly believe in the protections afforded to the press by the US constitution. I also believe those who penned these protections never intended for them to be used and abused as they have been for years.
Look up the article Washington Post published on the fictional DOGE chief - Amy Gleason.
It's absolutely clear to anybody with a brain, that Musk is running DOGE and they just named a random person, because courts forced them to.
And yet, WaPo is happy presenting a profile of said Amy as if all was normal.
This is Russia / North Korea level of compliance with what the Dear Leader says... But then US recently voted along Russia and North Korea on the UN resolution regarding Ukraine so...
> Billionaire intends to turn popular newspaper into personal propaganda outlet.
It'll be very interesting to see how both employees and customers react and evolve over the next few years.
Same with leaving the shithole that is "X," but slightly less inconvenient.
Fuck you, I'm disgustingly rich! I don't care about your opinions. I am numerically, objectively killing it. I'm going to paint all of the mailboxes in town teal just because I can and it's my eldest kid's favorite color.
What part of you is still stuck in freshman year of highschool when that girl laughed at you for having a crush on her, or just for liking turtles? Just fuckin let it go man.
Personal liberty and free markets are in direct conflict with each other. Free markets require private property, which requires enforcement through violent aggression (or the threat thereof).
Free markets and private property might be justified for any number of (other) reasons, but "personal liberty" isn't one of them.
In the same way, personal liberties aren't a thing if are are unable to establish your own business
For the second part you don't need a business to be free. As a simple counterexample: I wouldn't say that human ancestors hunting and gathering in the savannah weren't free (they had literally no governmental limits) and it would take an absurd stretch to say they owned a business.
I literally just explained why the exact opposite is true. Not a proactive conversation if you’re not going to engage at all with what I said and just talk past it.
* He uses the current popular propaganda of the right-wing business elite - especially in Silicon Valley - claiming his positions "proud" and patriotic and implying inescapably that people who disagree are anti-American.
* He also uses the current businessspeak: When a top editor quits, Bezos projects uncaring disregard for any negative implication and instead he aggressively claims it was his idea and he wants it to happen, a way of making himself look invulnerable to criticism, powerful beyond restraint. (That trick should look familiar to everyone by now.)
* His claim that the news media needs a voice supporting these positions is obviously false, as they are probably the most widely supported positions supported by the most powerful people. But he brazenly makes the claim anyway with no care for its truth, only its power.
* Absent is any serious examination of the merits. The whole thing is all BS and propaganda.
And that's what we may expect to see from the Washington Post going forward: BS and propaganda. It's an aggressive embrace of those things, and a disregard for serious thought, fact, or merits. His message isn't about free markets or patriotism, but that Bezos and the Washington Post have made this their mode of communication, that he can brazenly lie and mislead and nobody can stop him - like so many others. (It also suggests that Bezos blows with the prevailing cultural winds.)
From nerds, niche, to Oligarchs.
From breaking boundaries to limiting alternatives.
From rebelling against the status-quo to become the status-quo.
The nerds now become the slave.
Look up all the shady stuff companies like Intel were doing in the 90s, from IP theft to outright bribing companies to avoid their competition (which was better). Apple and Microsoft were starting to polish how to lock in users. Google was created with the help of NSF and MDDS/CIA grants etc. It's not all rebels and outsiders.
Nerds to Oligarchs.
Things are so dire than Yann LeCun wrote a post on LinkedIN regarding grants cuts.
Chinese scientists who have lived in USA for 40+ years migrated to China to lead researchers just because The Administration decided to pick on minorities.
Of course this is not a problem specific to those in tech. It's just that we are the group that built the prison we now all find ourselves in.
Why would you blame tech workers? They're just another brainwashed mass that works for a living. If I were to suggest a wrong solution - I'd at least blame the finance sector.
Blaming doesn't solve anything because once you're done with your witch hunt - the problems remain. The systemic problem remains. We need systemic solutions and those require thinking, not reaching for a pre-made solution you've been brainwashed to reach for.
Until people recognize modern society to be a complex system that requires thinking to operate, there will be no meaningful progress. We're still operating under the system of I take people willing to dish out violence and go around bullying everyone in sight. I then take the plundered resources and tell nerds to go do their nerd shit to make me a complex society that works wonderfully.
It doesn't work. Not because nerds realize working for power hungry dummies is stupid but because we're destroying the planet and regular working people worldwide hate us and we have to work hard to barely keep the thing from falling apart. Constantly lying to everyone and yourself once you realize the fucked system you're in is exhausting, so it doesn't work. But please realize - the answer isn't to blame anyone. It's to find solutions and that takes thinking.
Sure, it's Bezos' private company, and people are free not to subscribe to WaPo. So it's not restricting free speech. But it's very telling that more oligarchs are trying to control the _flow of information and ideas_ to the masses. A key requirement of fascism.
People only notice this problem when the oligarchs that they don't agree with are doing it.
https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/hillary-clinton-warns-...
When Hillary outright said as much last year it wasn't even a blip on HN's radar.
Why? I'd say those issues are of immediate concern to many, especially insofar as they are used as euphemisms to describe the goals of the American political right.
Oops, I edited my post while you were responding. I'll let your quote represent what I originally wrote, which I think was in the same spirit. Sorry about that.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/08/02/how-jeff-bezos-got-his-p...
I hope people who disagree with these people remember that corporations and politicians are not their friends, instead of simply asking for them to wage wars against the opposing political team.
From the oligarchs' point of view, none of these users or services are going to be valuable anymore once AI automates the bulk of the economy (AI companies are strongly expecting this in the 2030s), so now's the right time to start "butchering" some pigs. In this case, shameless support for Trump in exchange for political sway for Bezos, regardless of the ramifications for the brand or customers.
In game theory terms, this the tail-end of a game of iterated prisoner's dilemma, where people start betraying each other after years of cooperation. And if AI progress accelerates, so will this.
Maybe woke went too far and that’s the old white man’s revenge?
We are probably fine on a 100 year horizon. But the next 10 years. Oh boy.
You're falling for it. In America right now, there are basically three political alignments in terms of how they orient themselves around domestic political problems:
- PseudoFascist Right (current people holding power): this is largely a collective of misinformed or uninformed people who are are feeling the severe effects of wealth inequality and have been duped into thinking the cause is their (equally destitute) neighbor rather than the talking suits who don't pay taxes.
- Less Radical Right: these people call themselves "democrats" or "centrists". They are essentially only interested in maintaining existing political power and the prevailing order. They also don't want to do anything about wealth inequality, but rather than try and blame it on people of a particular race, gender, etc. they invert the message and point to other actual disparities and problems, sometimes they make concessions and solve some of these issues, but even this is rare.
- The Remnants of the Left: These are the people who recognize wealth inequality as the underlying root of domestic problems. They actually want to address wealth inequality, but they have the least power, because America's political system has been co-opted by the wealthy through mechanisms like lobbying.
The whole "did the left go too far with woke" is a strawman being adopted by the "Less Radical Right" after their recent election loss. They hope to use this as an excuse so that, when they are up for re-election, they can still avoid solving the actual problems or addressing the actual concerns (wealth inequality) of much of the left. The core of the problem is that representatives are directly incentivized against their constituents because they get their palms greased by those "American citizens" called corporations.
From where I sit on the left, the right wing is extremely effective in making people believe the left is a parody of itself.
For instance, the left does have stronger support for LGBTQ issues than the right, but it isn't the primary issue. I'm sure "Build Back Better" investments in infrastructure involved 100x the attention and resources that LGBTQ issues did. But right media pushes stories multiple times a day about how the left is trying to turn your little Johnny into Janie. There are fewer than ten M->F trans athletes in college sports [1], but it is nearly a daily news item. The the casual news viewer (most everybody) their impression watching their news is that the only concern of Democrats is to advance a LGBTQ takeover.
Same thing with CRT. Same thing with Benghazi. Same thing with Hillary's emails. They pick an issue and hammer it, hammer it, hammer it. And it doesn't stay stuck in the right wing mediasphere. It becomes part of the "national conversation" and so mainstream media has to report on it too.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/lgbtq/5046662-ncaa-president-tr...
These people do in fact believe the things that the right says they do. And they were in fact working for many years prior to this past election to push their worldview into the wider cultural sphere. I'm not pulling this from the media, I've literally sat in rooms where people planned how to use school curricula to build acceptance for both these ideas.
There are other parts of the left that aren't that way, and you're correct that the right benefited immensely from making the left seem like it was a monolith. But that part of the left that pushed these ideas so hard so fast actually does exist and actually did fuel the fire.
I agree with GP, prior to today's ouster the implicit pillars were social justice, feminism, metoo, mental health, or LGBT. Pretty much every piece of media coming out of these institutions has been consistently cramming this worldview down people's throats since around 2017. Whatever this shit is, I'd rather just hear billionaire propaganda and see every one of these ideologes get canned
And I don't consume right wing news either, I've been reading the NYT for the past 5 years and that alone was enough to convince me things need to change
There’s just a ridiculous amount of bad actors out there and they’re all extremely motivated. There is opportunity there. This is the gold rush for them and it’s what they’re good at.
Can you say the same for the good honorable people out there? There is a handful of them, but the extremely outnumbered and who out there is even motivated like the opposition? An 80 years Bernie sanders
So let billionaires and corporations do whatever they want for profit, even if they kill people.
Bezos comes out of the oval office and mumbles: "dumb old asshole!" Zuckerberg overhears it and reports to Trump. Next meeting, Trump asks him:
- Who did you mean by "dumb old asshole", comrade Bezos?
- Biden, of course, comrade president.
- And who did YOU mean by that, comrade Zuckerberg?
This article does suggest Shipley wanted a more balanced, "both sides" approach to the opinions section, which I agree with Bezos is shortsighted and sort of shallow:
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/26/nx-s1-5309725/jeff-bezos-wash...
On the other hand, it's difficult for me to imagine David Shipley leaving over that alone if there wasn't something pointed or questionable about what Bezos was suggesting. Also, if Bezos' recent interventions are any guide, he isn't exactly pushing for greater freedom of speech, or more rigorous critique, at the Washington Post — there's a "liberty for me but not for thee" kind of sense to his actions.
If Bezos wanted to turn the Washington Post into some kind of Reason Magazine with a primary news arm attached to it, it wouldn't be the worst thing in my opinion for me personally. But I'm skeptical of his vision without more evidence: for one thing, if he wanted to come out swinging, he could have made his vision clear.
Arguably social anarchists have a different read on what personal liberty is and should be compared to, say, Ayn Rand. It might not be the best comparison, but I think the gist of it is true. Heaps of leftists value personal liberty.
It’s no less of a clear, specific ideological marker in the US today than “Blood and Soil” in 1930s Germany.
But its interesting how those trying to sell this as not ideological are just ignoring the “free markets” part.
I guess we'll see whether Bezos is willing to promote the liberty of a business to hire based on DEI criteria if that's what it prefers, or of individuals to marry people of the same sex. Or any of the other liberties that the right wing doesn't like. Given the recent closeness of Bezos to Trump, I suspect we won't see anything like that, but maybe he'll surprise me.
I wonder if the approved op-eds on personal liberty will include Trans and Abortion rights? Will it include the right to organize?
At the billionaire level, it's easy to think about the relative successes of SpaceX and Blue Origin; as they are held privately, they can hire, fire, and structure themselves without worrying about federal regulations or shareholder obligations. That is, of course, the only reliable way to get yourself into a footing that permits innovation past the status quo. These companies are, in a sense, proving that the "free market" can act on the aerospace industry to drive down prices (cost of a Falcon Launch or a Starlink connection) and to increase technical capacity at a brutal pace (Starship projections on mass-to-orbit). But the cavernous pockets of their billionaire owners also protect them from the rest of the "market", by which I mean their competitors waging corporate and legal warfare against them.
My primary complaint about the status quo of the US market, i.e. "only-billionaires-get-to-seriously-push-the-needle-in-innovation" really makes more sense when one considers the price of medical supplies. The EpiPen costs $500 for what I bet is less than $10 in materials and labor, even counting the strict standards its manufacturers are obliged to conform to in terms of batch creation and ingredients tracking. (A piece of metal in the aerospace industry is always more expensive than a piece of metal in the residential construction industry because it must always be possible to trace its pedigree.)
But surely the chemical process to manufacture epinephrine is easily known, and the injection molding and assembly techniques needed to make and inspect the EpiPen is trivial in a modern supply chain that can provide OLED TVs for a pittance. So why don't we have two dozen scrappy American firms competing against Pfizer's Meridian Medical Technologies to produce adrenaline auto-injectors? Does it really take a billionaire to make a company that can produce a product that can actually cause the "free market" to act on the prices of emergency allergy medication? It certainly feels that way, especially when the main out-of-pocket pharmaceutical supplier that appears to be to putting a dent in out-of-pocket medicine pricing is... GoodRx, owned by Mark Cuban.
I may have gotten some of the details wrong, but I believe the principles about which I allude to are accurate: even thought the "free market" is indeed a civilization-defining socioeconomic technology that helped give America its exceptional power, the market is not free unless you are a billionaire. It would be nice if Bezos' new Washington Post Opinion column was focused on extending the benefits of the "free market" back down to the masses, as it was in some industries during some eras of American history, but somehow I doubt that will be the case.
> That is, of course, the only reliable way to get yourself into a footing that permits innovation past the status quo.
The space race was a very govt driven thing, and there was a ton of innovation. Govt also funds (funded?) a lot of basic science. "innovation" can happen outside the free market, and might happen more "reliably" when there's no interfering profit motive
I wonder if that's part of the Silicon Valley secret sauce - there seems to be a gentleman's agreement not to sue startups.
> So why don't we have two dozen scrappy American firms competing against Pfizer's Meridian Medical Technologies to produce adrenaline auto-injectors?
The FDA approved the first generic auto-injector in 2018.
Sure, but the length of the time it took, plus the lack of any pressure on the price of name-brand EpiPens, is a huge problem, in my view. The legal barriers to market entry should be exclusively technical (i.e. can you prove that your process meets consequential technical standards), and right now they're quite removed from that.
So glad the US finally got a government focusing on freedom of speech .. And you know, not pressuring companies and the press to do their bidding /s
I’m whatever about it though, will be interesting to watch crumble
Run /s
Tight media control and media empires are nothing new. I would recommend you to read about William Randolph Hearst [0] and his media empire in the late eighteen hundreds and watch the movie Citizen Kane.
Self censorship is the worst censorship of them all, every totalitarian state does that because it doesn't cost anything but a few threat and exemplary case, and since the news are controlled by very few people there it's easy for the state to pressure them to do the right thing.
I think that 60 or 70 years ago you had many newspaper owned by small companies, very decentralized. You wouldn't have been able to do that but now every news paper, television and social network are owned by very few.
If you can't rely on professional to report on the news, and if people are forbidden to express themselves (i mean real educated opinion) on facebook, twitter and maybe tiktok you have effectively suppressed one's opinion reach.
then when people don't have the possibility anymore to voice their opinion, what prevent you from completely shutting down their voice ?
i'm probably being over dramatic, trump never expressed anything about violating usa constitution. like taking a third presidency mandate or not having the people vote for him for the next election, he didn't have close collaborators make fascist salutes to test population outcry (or lack of).
free press is always one of the first target with the army of any government that try to turn a democracy into a totalitarian state.
Seeing how every big company donated to trump investiture and now how they bow to him. All of them, microsoft, apple, amazon, meta, oracle. i think he succeeded in making the usa technology, social and news companies his own puppets.
Hopefully you learn, but I doubt it. Trump/Elon bad and all that, right?
I have never seen for instance Biden or Obama close one make fascist salute.
From their 2009 about us:
"What, besides free trade and free markets, does The Economist believe in? 'It is to the Radicals that The Economist still likes to think of itself as belonging. The extreme centre is the paper's historical position.' That is as true today as when former Economist editor Geoffrey Crowther said it in 1955. The Economist considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability. It has backed conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It has supported the Americans in Vietnam. But it has also endorsed Harold Wilson and Bill Clinton, and espoused a variety of liberal causes: opposing capital punishment from its earliest days, while favoring penal reform and decolonization, as well as—most recently—gun control and gay marriage."
https://web.archive.org/web/20090228231949/http://www.econom...
you are adults. you are the ones in charge, you have been alive for thrice as long as me, and it's left you addled, heartless, and stupid.
soon, not soon, but sooner than me, you will die, alone and filled with regret, in tatters, scorched by the fires you dismissed.
morons.