“Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose,” Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, said.
He added: “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say: ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”
The media is biased. But other than that seems a fair point to me.
About 20 columnists at the Post signed a joint statement saying the decision was “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love”.
See, they are biased.
“the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper”
Wrong sort of convictions, alas.
Whilst most people believe the media is biased they don’t see the bias equally. A left leaning person will look at an objective article and feel that it is biased to the right. Conversely a right winger will look at that same piece and perceive it as biased to the left. Bias simply means that it does not align with your viewpoint.
@andyf – what’s an “objective article” when it’s at home (always allowing that it would have a home)?
This was a fascinating essay by Bezos. It betrays the grudging acceptance that the zeitgeist is changing and that the liberal agenda is losing its grip.
The problem for WaPo or NYT or LATimes is that it is already too late.
The conservative readers have already abandoned them and in an attempt to lure them back, the liberal readers will now leave in disgust.
We could say the same about the Tories. They tried to appease groups that would never support them and lost their core support as a result.
I read the Telegraph and my favourite Austrian paper De Standard only out of habit nowadays, if I was starting from scratch I would not bother, so unreadable have they become
I now refuse to read the Speccie because Gove is editor.
A lost customer is very hard to win back.
Until there’s a collective mea culpa over suppressing Hunter Biden’s laptop and its lurid content as Russian disinformation in the previous Presidential election, they are going down with the ship and should be looking for plea bargains for their Goebbels roles.
David Hoffman, who recently won a Pulitzer prize for his Washington Post series on “new technologies and the tactics authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in the digital age”, resigned from the editorial board and stated in a letter: “I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump. I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice at this perilous moment.
“I Have No Dick, And I Must Scream”
@The Meissen Bison
An objective article is one where equal proportions of both “sides” consider it to be biased in favor of the other side.
Indeed. If Jeff Bezos had come out with this 3 years ago then I doubt it would have created more than a minor storm-in-a-teacup for the leftists, but since he’s doing it a week before a highly contested election where “their side” looks likely to lose, it looks like fear, possibly even pandering to Trump.
Appearances matter, but so does timing.
but since he’s doing it a week before a highly contested election where “their side” looks likely to lose, it looks like fear, possibly even pandering to Trump.
It does. They’ve astroturfed this dumb bitch so much she could host the Superbowl, but it doesn’t seem to be working very well outside of terminally online Boomers who still think CNN is “the news”. Those people would vote for a rat on a stick if it was the Democrat nominee.
Tripling down on the Hitler stuff is a mistake, nobody under the age of 50 gives a fuck about Hitler, and it’s embarrassing to anybody who isn’t a hysterical moron.
« An objective article is one where equal proportions of both “sides” consider it to be biased in favor of the other side. »
On that basis the BBC is “objective” – and this is precisely the defence it regularly deploys – since it receives complaints of bias from both left and right.
The difficulty is that those on the right would like it to be less partisan while those on the left would like it to reflect their views more emphatically.
‘An objective article is one where equal proportions of both “sides” consider it to be biased in favor of the other side’
I’d call that a balanced article.
To me an objective article is one that tells the truth. That is, it agrees with me!!
>About 20 columnists at the Post signed a joint statement saying the decision was “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love”.
Nobody told them they need to change their convictions. They were just told that the paper won’t use the editorial page to broadcast presidential endorsements.
Secondly, they *thought* they had editorial control – then Bezos pulled the leash. That you don’t feel the leash doesn’t mean it wasn’t always there.