We Already Know What Kind of Newspaper Owner Jeff Bezos Will Be
coreypein.net
coreypein.net
You don't trust powerful people, plain and simple. Not because they're any worse than the average person, but because you can't do anything to stop them when they do something wrong.
There's a reason why we have three arms of government.
Take a look at who owns The Guardian:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Trust
- To secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity: as a quality national newspaper without party affiliation; remaining faithful to liberal tradition; as a profit-seeking enterprise managed in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
The Trust sees its main functions as being the following:
- To secure the Trust's own continuity by renewing its membership and by dealing with threats to its existence;
- To monitor the organisation, financial management and overall strategy of the Group, holding the board accountable for its performance;
- To appoint and 'in extreme circumstances' to dismiss the editors of The Guardian and The Observer,
- To act as a 'court of appeal' in the event of any dispute between the editorial and managerial sides of the operation.
That's a reason why people are made to believe there are three arms of government. In reality, government is just a bunch of people with a lot of self-interest fighting for power here and there between each other. But all of them are interested in keeping this myth going that because there are > 1 power-hungry guys it somehow represents "checks and balances" for a worried general public. It's a joke.
Government is a violent institution to extract resources from unarmed people under a promise of "fairness" and "interests of the nation". Being a "democracy" its nature does not change. Only extreme risks like "dictator kills 100000 people at once" are reduced, but the nature is the same: the will of people to command violence (politicians) and the will of bribed others to execute it (cops and army).
Just check the news about anything that people don't like about the government. E.g. NSA scandal. What do the branches do? There's a "secret court", congress does not care to fight against NSA and every government official still extracts your taxes for the same NSA, judges and congressmen.
This doesn't seem that complex to me.
He's complaining about how the new guard isn't really serious about the news and is nouveau riche (see: "$42 million, 10,000-year clock in West Texas.").
Not that it's falsifiable, but I bet you that if MacGillis was a staffer at the Post, he'd be crowing about how this represented 'new digital synergies' (barf) just like Blodget is.
"the faster-cheaper-further mindset"
I have serious issues with Amazon, ranging from the work/life balance of their engineers (I live about 10 minutes away from their South Lake Union headquarters, and have no desire to ever work there), to the treatment of their warehouse workers, but this is just pontification for the sake of page views.
Yeah, that's nice. But is he wrong?
IMHO he brings to the table a very relevant point that others have not.
The classified documents being hosted on AWS were in fact illegal to do so, and thus against the AUP of AWS so it was perfectly reasonable and appropriate to pull the plug.
The wikileaks data dump is in no way comparable to Watergate and singular reporting and investigation of specfic illegal acts.
If you get bombed/terrorised that's policy changing, nation wide traumatic event and a good reason to bomb the shit out of the one attacked you. If you do the same thing to another country (read plethora of countries) then you first tag the journalist who has the balls to expose you, denounce him as a criminal and then call it incomparable to your little presidential problems.
I don't care much about many traits you have just displayed arrogance, ignorance and indifference being the leading ones but such ugly patriotism is perhaps the worst of all and is the leading cause of where we are now as a world.
I know this is the kind of comment that will get downvoted and considering the general climate of HN it should be downvoted but some people really deserve such harsh comments because their claims written in nice and harmless language is plain offensive to all the people US decided to fuck up in their history (and that's lots and lots of people all around the world).
http://www.salon.com/2010/11/29/wikileaks_yemen_revelations/
Try interpunction, you'll get significantly fewer downvotes.
For example, from the Manning leaks we learned that the U.S. railed against a proposed increase in the minimum wage in Hati. It would have raised wages from 24¢ to 61¢ an hour. American corporations that take advantage of Hati for cheap labor couldn't have that. I'm looking at you Hanes and Levi Strauss.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2011/06/us-haiti-wik...
The comment I made states it is illegal to host classified material if you aren't authorized to do so. That's it.
There are plenty of legitimate AWS competitors.
99% of the software (which is all that really matters) running on those instances is open source.
It's not like you have to use the PEM they generate. In fact, you could pay them to store a whole virtual machine of zeroes. They don't care.
He lost me at the AWS conspiracies. Being the world's largest online retailer, and especially the largest retailer of books, is a much bigger deal.
Yes, it was perfectly legal for him to pull Wikileaks. However, that fact that he pulled Wikileaks when he didn't have to (there was no court order or anything like it), showed that he isn't the big defender of free press that he claims to be.
If they were illegal, then what law was broken in hosting them?
Remember, newspapers are in the business of getting information sent to them by people who broke rules in doing so, and then hosting/publishing/otherwise distributing said information to the public. Despite the fact that there are powerful people who do not want that to happen. And said powerful people are quick to claim that the law is on their side, whether or not it is.
Examples include Watergate, The Pentagon Papers, Snowden's revelations, and (of course) Wikileaks. In every case newspapers were threatened.
The wikileaks data dump is in no way comparable to Watergate and singular reporting and investigation of specfic illegal acts.
So exposing one crime is OK, but exposing 1000 is not?
With EVERY case there are people telling us that this case is different, and not like famous cases of the past. They are wrong. We have amnesia about how similar they, in fact, are.
Take Watergate since you brought it up. The burglars were arrested June 17, 1972. Bob Woodward reported that they had connections to Howard Hunt on June 20, 1972. This began a continuous series of reporting that the country as a whole did not care about. Were you alive back then, I would be willing to bet that, like the majority that re-elected Nixon in a landslide on November 7, 1972, you would have thought that this was not an important story, and would have objected to the witchhunt.
Public opinion did not begin its slide until January, 1973. (http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/wait-about-two-month... has a graph showing the shifts in approval.)
It is illegal to disseminate, store, transmit, etc, classified material if you aren't allowed to do so. That is the crime, and it also against the AUP and is laid out right near the beginning of the document here: http://aws.amazon.com/aup/
Really? Which law? Can you point to examples of judges agreeing with this theory?
Why did nobody come down on various newspapers for transmitting the clearly classified information that they got from Snowden?
> Access is restricted by law or regulation to particular groups of people and mishandling can incur criminal penalties.
I'm sure someone could have tried to throw the hammer down about the Snowden leak, but they probably realized they would look ridiculous doing that over a few Powerpoint slides vs. thousands of diplomatic cables and other information which were released by Manning. Also note: Snowden is releasing specific information related to a specific crime. I keep repeating this because it is highly relevant to whistleblower protections && reporter shields etc.
Some years back, a webhost whose terms of service said "no illegal content" yanked the account of a client who was hosting some illegal content, as they do routinely. The webhost is part of a large corporate structure that ultimately has Jeff Bezos as CEO. Because of this, we know that Bezos, in his role as a private individual, as the new owner (not manager, editor, or CEO) of the Washington Post will, at some point in the future, exert undue influence to kill legal but uncomfortable stories for the rich and powerful.
....wait, what?
I have no idea if Bezos will be a good owner or not, but this is the most tenuous argument. AWS yanking Wikileaks account may or may not have been a good idea; publishing the Pentagon Papers may or may not have been a good idea. Let's just accept that the former was a travesty and the latter was heroic. They're still radically different things.
TL;DR: We have absolutely no idea what kind of newspaper owner Jeff Bezos will be, but we are getting a good idea of what kind of blogger Corey Pein is...
(And if we're reading tea leaves, Bezos has supported libertarian causes in the past. Like them or loathe them, libertarians are the only real organised anti-establishment force in America; the flip side of a coin where Democrats and Republicans are only one face. As unlikely as it is, wouldn't it be amazing if Bezos leaned on the WaPo to hire Radley Balko? Now that would do some comforting of the afflicted and some afflicting of the comfortable...)
If he will really stop some real investigative journalism story, which the public has the right to know, like gov corruption etc., THEN I'll be concerned. For now, let's watch what he is up to.
> real investigative journalism story
So are you saying the the collateral murder story was in no way "investigative journalism" ?
Also, for it to mention Bill Gates without contrasting what he did to the tech world through Microsoft during the 90s with what he is accomplishing for the whole world as a philanthropist now is striking.
The mistake may have been inexcusable for anyone who believes that transparency leads to better governance, but it was one decision, and we now know that every company we thought had a whole set of established practices as common carriers eventually caved to the federal government.
I don't think it's clear internet infrastructure providers experienced less pressure from the Fed than the press did in the 1970s. Bezos may also have considered his obligations to the stock holders of a public company without the context of something equivalent to journalistic ethics.
Anyway, I'd agree that we don't actually know what role he'll play with the Washington Post, or what he will do during the next 30 years, but we also don't know whether he'll be courageous or not in journalism from one incident.
Now he has a weapon and can fight back. We might actually see much more reporting on the network of multibillion dollar bureaucratic TLAs that control our GOV, with the IRS, NSA, and now DEA scandals being just the beginning.
[1] http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-empl...
Q: What would you ask Bezos if you sat down with coffee
for him today?
Shel Kaphan, First Amazon Employee: “The first (questions)
that come to mind are personal, but one that I’d like to
ask him is whether, even after what’s happened in the
economy since 2008, if he would still contend that less
government regulation is always better.”
Interesting perspective. I hope it's true, but if it is, I'd appreciate if he said so.