Either an Editorial Board can publish what it wants to publish, or it can’t. Remember, none of this is about “straight reporting”—it’s about an editorial that by insider accounts was already written. The WaPo board had decided to endorse.
The owner, presumably fearing his own wealth was threatened by the editorial, said ‘no’ you can’t publish this.
In your analogy, with a pro-women’s rights owner who hired anti-women’s rights staff (and editorial board, presumably), the board decides to publish an anti-woman editorial and the owner, in response, fires them.
Okay, fine.
That’s not what happened at the Washington Post, though. What happened at the WaPo was censorship–not the firing of personnel whose views differed from those of the owner.
I think most would agree with you that owners of a paper can hire staff to their taste, and fire those who have opposing views if they like. (Though reporting on that situation—the firing of those whose views are opposite to the views of the owner—is legitimate journalism.)
And which they should have seen coming and dreading since the day he bought it to begin with. Why else would such a person, entirely from outside the news media sphere, buy an establishment newspaper when we know establishment newspapers barely sustain themselves anymore? As a prestige project? You could endow a museum or a scholarly foundation instead.
Oh sure he’d be hands off on the actual journalism part. Until it would run contrary to his own interests. Was anyone really that naive?
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Y’know, say what you will of Rupert Murdoch, the bastard is a media man. He wants to shape public opinion and anyone paying attention knows that is his life and can tell in what direction and to what purpose. When you work there you know what the mission and vision is unless you really are an idiot. One can actually grudgingly respect that.
Bezos OTOH as someone else said cares little about that part of the journalistic mission. The paper’s reputation is being thrown away protecting interests related to extraneous parts of Bezos’ businesses, and by doing this he’s validating that Trump was right to be mad at him in his other businesses for things WaPo published, because he has proven he does control what WaPo publishes.
First of all, there are very few people left in in the “news media sphere” because, as you said, establishment newspapers barely sustain themselves. Second, even those in the news media sphere weren’t always so; Katharine Graham’s father wasn’t when he bought the paper. I think the hope when Bezos bought the paper (certainly this was my hope) was that he would be willing to back it whether or not it was profitable. In short, that he would be willing to throw money at it. Ideally, it would compete with the New York Times as the leading paper in the country.
It wasn’t necessarily naivety–it was plausible that Bezos was in it for the prestige. Make WaPo the “paper of record” instead of the NYT: that’s not impossible as a goal for a rich man who wanted to be praised. (In the case of being a hands-off owner of a major paper, for being an adherent of truth who could put aside self-interest in favor of the public good.) As Dewey_Finn just said:
It wasn’t crazy to think that possible. Some rich men DO want to be looked up to as public benefactors.
Quite true. Bezos has lost any ability to claim he’s different from Murdoch, certainly. Or from Trump himself.
“Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do, and then met with the Blue Origin people,” he said on Saturday. “Which tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo.”
The poor rich sap still doesn’t realize that with Trump you pay plenty of quid but never see the pro quo.
Trump has been threatening Bezos all along. He did his best to punish Amazon while he was president through legislation. He hates Bezos, mainly because of the Post.
For Bezos, the Post is a money-losing toy he can well afford to let fail. Not so Amazon.
I cancelled my subscription today, and sent a letter to the editor about it. We’re also cutting back on our Amazon subscriptions. Now I’m looking for an alternative news source, and alternative online stores.
Which is hard - my wife and I went to a physical store yesterday to buy something specific, and they didn’t have what we wanted.
Yeah–Walmart is also virulently anti-union, and their “charitable” arm has done a lot to push a school-choice agenda that I think is fundamentally harmful to society.
We canceled our Amazon Prime more than a year ago, and miss it a lot less than we thought we would. If you’re considering canceling it, it’s worth a shot: it’s not like there’s a reinstatement fee if you find you can’t live without it.
Honestly, though, if you’re going to strictly choose companies you deal with based on whether you agree with the political views of the companies themselves or their majority owners, you are going to have a hard time finding anyone to deal with.
True. It can even be a problem with genuine indies. I have ceased using the gas station with the huge Trump signs all over the inside – for all I know the ones I’m using instead share the politics, but at least they’re not trying to hit their customers over the head with them.
However, if one’s going to make some judgements on those lines, it seems to me that if there are multiple issues one cares about then a certain amount of balancing them before boycotting (or ending a boycott) is a good idea; and simply pretending they’re not there is a bad idea. Of course, in a lot of cases it’s hard to tell; not every position or action is publicized.