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Comment by daheza | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully the market self corrects on this and washington posts loses subscribers. Forcing an opinion section to have only opinions you want is just the opposite of its purpose.

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What is the end goal there? This is not a situation where the free market has much influence. I don't particularly like the Washington Post. But I doubt that the owner cares much about subscription revenue, nor does he seem interested in selling. And if the whole organization were to wither away due to lack of readers and qualified writers would that be better than the current situation?

> And if the whole organization were to wither away due to lack of readers and qualified writers would that be better than the current situation?

That's entirely possible. There are most certainly some media outlets we'd be better off without.

As a resident of the city and former subscriber. 100% YES, that is better than the current situation.

Historically newspapers have always had some kind of slant in their opinion pages that bleeds out into their stories.

The Murdoch family made their fortune doing it, "yellow journalism" is still very much alive and well.

I'm not happy about someone losing their job this way, but then again, who reads the Washington Post for the opinion columns? You can get opinions anywhere, and they're often better researched on Substack.

From a purely selfish standpoint as a subscriber, if they axed the entire opinion section and beefed up news coverage, that would be a win.

> if they axed the entire opinion section and beefed up news coverage, that would be a win.

They're kind of doing the opposite though. They're stripping the text-based news coverage and replacing it with short form videos and podcasts.

I agree with you about opinion sections because somewhat worthless today though. The WSJ actually has great news coverage, even though the opinion columns are absolute garbage.

I stopped subscribing to the NYTimes, when 8 out of 10 "news items" promoted to me through the app were from the opinion columns. Super annoying. I know they rank and promote stuff that's popular, but we don't really need editorials/opinions in the news. It's why all those Fox/MSNBC viewers are confused by their favorite pundits, and mistaking what they say for "news" and "facts".

The other annoying thing now, even publications like NYTimes does is A/B ing inflammatory headlines to get the clicks, even though when you read the article, the facts presented are often different or opposite than the headline enticement.

I feel like it's been a long time since newspapers relied on subscribers, or even traditional advertisers. By now they're all loss leaders for the lobbying industry.

The Post has already lost a lot of the subscribers who would leave over something like this, in successive waves after: Bezos spiked the Harris endorsement, the paper blocked a political cartoon depicting Bezos and others bowing down to Trump, and the announcement of this new "two pillars" editorial policy that the blocked editorial here would have commented on. All amid a stream of resignations.

I don't know that the market can all that meaningfully discipline Bezos, even if a response had the kind of direction and magnitude that would. Though he clearly has sought profitability for the paper, running it at a loss is a drop in the bucket financially for him.

The market cant self correct here because the market is broken. Bezos is using his profits from one industry to prop up his unprofitable business in another industry, which also helps from any real competition starting up as they don't have access to Amazon profits

This behavior and its consequences are why people call for monopolies to be broken up

> the paper blocked a political cartoon depicting Bezos and others bowing down to Trump

So are we saying that Bezos is so plugged into the day-to-day operations of WaPo that he can yank the things he doesn't like, or is there some sycophant put in place that pings Bezos when they think it is something Bezos wouldn't like? I can't imagine that Bezos gives a damn enough to be checking in every day before release deadlines while cruising the globe on his super yacht.

Bezos is notorious for this sort of thing.

https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/5-years-later-jeff-bezos-...

Isn't it even worse if he only checks in after seeing something make it to print that he doesn't like? Then there's a chilling effect where everyone is guessing what might get them fired, and so they add an extra safety margin to their syncophancy and go beyond the minimum needed.

Bezos is exactly involved like this. Just go look at all the headlines at the end of February that was the precursor started all this. He cared enough to censor the opinion columns.

Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon’s retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple’s Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally – wisely – left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn’t let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they’re all still there, and Larry is not.

https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse452/23wi/papers...

> Hopefully the market self corrects

Isn't this how most newspapers have traditionally been run? I think people kind of expect their media sources to have some sort of bias.

> Forcing an opinion section to have only opinions you want is just the opposite of its purpose.

Bezos hasn't introduced ideological controls to the opinion section, he has merely replaced management's ideological controls with his own.

Sorry but I don't think you understand the newspaper business. Bezos bought the entire Washington Post for $250m. Amazon has a market cap of $2T of which Bezos owns ~9%. The capitalist incentives are very clear, the market dictates that Bezos should do practically anything to WashPo to help Amazon. Let's say that WashPo drop to 0 value, that would be a real shame! And I'm sure Jeff would sigh really quite loudly while sailing his megayatch over to Blue Origin where they're working on that $3.4B contract for Nasa that Trump could cancel any minute. That megayatch? It cost him 2 Washington Posts to build.

I don't know what you think market forces are going to do here?

> That megayatch? It cost him 2 Washington Posts to build.

Nice. I wonder... A Copilot prompt of "[...] Instead of using units of dollars, please use units of "Amazons", where 1 Amazon equals 2 Trillion dollars." gave a plausible result. And country populations in NYC's. The speed of sound is 19 Zebras (at max gallop). Great Oxygenation Event occurred at 8 gal and Cambrian Explosion at 18.5 gal (galactic year). Oscars viewing cost 100 lifetimes, superbowl 650. c is 1800 Gff (gigafurlongs per fortnight). Rewriting problems and text using alternate units. So... how to use this in education?

The Money Chart xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/980:_Money

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