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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

I really didn’t have Bezos being so grotesquely subservient in my bingo card. Shame on him and on WaPo CEO.

The scarier option is that this ain't subservience, he's doing this because he likes enough of what's happening that he wants it to continue.

This could all be the world's shittiest up jumped RTO, creating world misery to make everyone desperate for any jobs at all. Let a couple hundred million people starve and suffer, destroy prosperity, bring everything down a couple notches, and watch how the world wraps itself around this new axis of power.

Maybe he too salutes what's happening, believes in the chainsaw.

At his level, the only thing he cares about are tax breaks.

For comparison, even Rupert Murdoch refused to kill the WSJ expose on Theranos when asked to do so by Elizabeth Holmes. He did this, despite being a major investor.

Shame on Bezos indeed.

WaPo editors were broken records, engaging in ideological activism rather than journalism day after day.

In contrast, the WSJ reporters did their actual job, even if it was counter to Murdoch's financial interests.

Big difference.

It's not a character thing, really. Grotesque subservience is a firm requirement to be successful in authoritarian environments. He wants to remain successful and will play the game by the rules presented. Lots of people operate that way, probably more than those that don't.

That this has not been historically true in the United States is the notable outlier.

"Grotesque subservience" is what _creates_ authoritarian environments.

Meh, so does violence and conquest and coups. Certainly there's a feedback cycle between them, but the path to autocracy has many forks. Again it's the rule of law that's the exception, not autocracy.

> That this has not been historically true in the United States is the notable outlier.

So, bootlicker, got it.

And yes, it is very much a character thing...

It's still a character thing, though.

To be clear: it's not a notable character thing. Yes, yes, some people are uncorruptible paragons who'd never bend to the will of an autocrat, not matter the personal cost. Most of us aren't. Bezos isn't. The notable people are the paragons, not the bland rule-followers.

I wonder what deal was made with the tech billionaire set. I can’t believe they all got in line without some explicit deal presented to them.

For all the conspiracies spun up in the world like Bilderberg this is actually one that seems to be in plain daylight.

Bilderberg is an actual doors-closed conference of many of the world's most powerful people, you know. It's in plain daylight too, comparatively speaking.

Big tech regulation.

How is supporting freedoms and free markets "subservience?"

Freedom is literally the opposite of subservience.

If a journalist, who is being paid to write, has to withhold from expressing oppressive ideas in order to protect the freedoms of their readers, who are paying them to write, then that's a fair tradeoff.

Any furthering of 'altruistic' causes which requires the oppression of other people's freedoms is not worth it IMO.

Freedoms? Freedom to squash an opinion article? Snap out of it.

Nothing wrong with that. Every other job requires that paid workers meet the requirements of their boss whom themselves must meet the requirements of their customers. Jeff Bezos is responding to his customers' requirements, so should the journalists who work for him.

Journalists who work for these big media platforms can basically bypass the need to compete for attention on the global marketplace of ideas. This has allowed them to spread bad ideas and the scale of the platform means that the repercussions have had a delayed effect which Jeff Bezos is now trying to rectify.

Customers are leaving in droves and he doesn't have to respond to customers because he is a billionaire oligarch. He can keep wapo around as a propaganda outlet. See also: twitter.

Journalists have more integrity in one pinky than all the oligarchs combined.

There is the label on the thing, and the thing itself. I like the label, like you do. I assume parent does not like the thing.

Well they got half of the voters voting against their interest for a guy who by that point had history of incredible moral and legal shortcomings.

Of course that emboldens greedy billionaires, the little good they did was just a fig leaf. Now they realized that they got the permission to even leave that out.

Ironically "free speech" was kind a talking point on the right for decades, only to crumble the instance they are in power. But to people who know their history it was clear before that "free speech" when used by the far right does only include their choice of what they see as free speech. And if I pointed that out a year ago on this very website, people would have told me I was wrong — hope you're not a government researcher in electrical engineering trying to use the word "bias" then.

Good luck to the US and good luck to the world.

The Washington Post has always been a shitty right-wing rag with no separation between editorial and news. The only thing Bezos changed was turning the headlines linkbaity.

The only reason it has a current reputation as a left-of-center paper is 1) because the people talking about it didn't read it at all before it became the Trump News, like every other paper, and 2) because the Democrats completely embraced every single Reaganite policy.

The WaPo being about "free markets" and "civil liberties" (from Bezos' statement) is only a surprise because of the second part. I also do not trust them on the second part, at all; I just think the branding of free speech as "so-called free speech" by a bunch of people calling themselves journalists was starting to make people who actually believe in the profession physically ill.

edit: It's also important to point out that Ruth Marcus is not a person who quit the WaPo because of a neutral-sounding editorial edict from the owner. She's a person who didn't quit until months later.

Lefty here. I didnt consider the WaPo left of center. I considered them moderate right.

What’s really interesting about this is that the Overton window has shifted so far to the right with this presidency that even moderate right is now experiencing a chilling effect of its discourse.

Unlike previously when he was subservient to the Dems, that wasn't grotesque at all...

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