It’s a classic hallmark technique of advanced psychopaths wherein you agree with reality but don’t change it because as long as you acknowledge it, most people assume you’ll “do your best.”

So all you have to do is acknowledge it, and as long as there’s nobody who can force you to do anything then there’s no obvious way to address it without escalation - that escalation being the reason then for claiming you’re attacked and then you have carte blanche to “simply defend yourself”

Do that long enough and people get tired and move on and you just cemented your place further

Further down the article:

> O'Neal was brought in by Bezos this summer after the corporate titan tore up his paper's opinion section.

> Bezos said he wanted a tight focus on two priorities: personal liberties and free markets. The top opinion page editor resigned. A raft of prominent columnists and contributors resigned or departed as well. Some were let go.

The Post was always terrible, always extremely conservative, and always blatantly mixed editorial in with its news reporting (unlike most other outlets in the past.) A bunch of anti-Trump people decided it was movement liberal because it didn't like Trump (like every other Republican and Republican outlet until people started voting them out over it.)

WaPo was the most right-wing non-tabloid major paper in the country other than the WSJ before Bezos, the only thing that changed afterwards was that the headlines became more linkbait (5 minutes earlier than every other paper) and their coverage of Bezos properties became lighter.

The idea that the WaPo was ever anything but rabidly capitalist is nonsense.

Glad they're still around.

IMO, the Columbia Journalism Review (https://www.cjr.org) is a better source for media criticism.

https://www.npr.org/donations/support

They used to claim reporters were biased towards the right. That used to be a left-wing claim, but it’s no longer credible. Something like 90% of reporters are left-wing.

Maybe they’ve reformed, and aren’t in the business of providing partisan talking points anymore.

> On Oct. 15, the Post heralded the military's push for a new generation of smaller nuclear reactors. "No 'microreactor' currently operates in the United States, but it's a worthy gamble that could provide benefits far beyond its military applications," the Post wrote in its editorial.

> A year ago, Amazon bought a stake in X-energy to develop small nuclear reactors to power its data centers. And through his own private investment fund, Bezos has a stake in a Canadian venture seeking nuclear fusion technology.

and

> Three days after the nuclear power editorial, the Post weighed in on the need for local authorities in Washington, D.C., to speed the approval of the use of self-driving cars in the nation's capital. The editorial was headlined: "Why D.C. is stalling on self-driving cars: Safety is a phony excuse for slamming the brakes on autonomous vehicles."

> Fewer than three weeks before, the Amazon-owned autonomous car company Zoox had announced D.C. was to be its next market.

Edit to respond to your edit: these are the opinion pages, not reporting.

> On at least three occasions in the past two weeks

Bezos announced a relaunch of the Opinion section earlier in the year, I don't think it's unreasonable to wonder if there has been a policy change. Three times in two weeks is a lot.

> potentially a mistaken omission that was fixed within 24 hours

potentially, yes. Responsible news organizations post correction notices when they make an omission like this, but WaPo did not (despite having a history of doing so, again, a notable change in practice)

"On at least three occasions in the past two weeks, an official Post editorial has taken on matters in which Bezos has a financial or corporate interest without noting his stake. In each case, the Post's official editorial line landed in sync with its owner's financial interests."

So, no, this isn't one-off. You need to re-read the article more closely.

And it wasn't fixed entirely - usually fixes to an article are declared in the article, and they didn't do that when they inserted the disclosure after the fact.

No, because they aren't doing so for Amazon and Blue. That's the entire point. Find an Amazon article with a disclosure on it.

Reporting and editorial are separate units in newspapers; the point being made is that, while reporting continues to properly disclose potential ownership conflicts of interest, editorial and op-ed, following Bezos taking direct control of them, are not doing so.

Of course, the Post is Bezos' toy, and there's no law that says he can't use editorial as a megaphone for his personal interests without disclosing them (or, in fact, even use the reporting side for the same purpose!), but you can't do that and still claim that the paper has any of the Grahams' pedigree left in it, and this is very much a change from Bezos' earlier ownership, in which he largely stayed hands-off on editorial decisions.

What this is saying:

- Previously, WaPo disclosed conflicts of interest.

- They still disclose in their news articles (as opposed to in their editorials).

> So at minimum the article disagrees with itself

No.

> Edit 2: To try and be a little clearer here: the article is trying to (but in my opinion doing a really poor job of) make a distinction between the disclosures that the non-editorial WaPo authors do, and the disclosures that the editorial authors do, with the assertion that the editorial authors are worse at it.

Everyone else seems to understand but you. By the way, "non-editorial WaPo authors" are called reporters or journalists.

We aren't even getting bread and circuses, just Nero at this point.

This shows that the organization is getting rotten from the inside, otherwise stuff like this is flagged up front, if the journalists and editors there have any journalistic integrity left in them.

An honest editorial might say something like "this addition is a good idea, but why are these specific people (including my employer) paying for it"?

This may be true, it's simply the way that it's approached that has my hackles up. This is something that should have been provisioned and approved by congress.

> Separately, raising money through corporate “donations” seems like a huge loophole for corruption.

The US corruption laws are laughably bad. You don't even need this sort of loophole other than to avoid reporting on who's doing the donations.

There's basically nothing that really prevents someone from giving a Justice, Senator, congress person, or the president a yacht, airplane, home, or a "loan" that gets forgiven. The only real limits is that's supposed to be reported (and that foreign governments can't do the same). Yes yes, the bribery law states that you can't pay someone to perform an official act. However, if you simply give them a gift that doesn't count. Even when that person is actively working on official acts that directly impact you.

By law, any money spent by the executive needs to come from Congressional appropriation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act

> The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal employees from ... accepting voluntary services for the United States, or employing personal services not authorized by law, except in cases of emergency involving the safety of human life or the protection of property. 31 U.S.C. § 1342.

Trump said the project "won't interfere with the current building. … It will be near it but not touching it. It pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of. It’s my favorite place. I love it." Then, he sent in bulldozers to bring the whole thing to the ground.

Trump is also requesting the government, of which he is the head, to cut him a check for nearly a quarter of a billion dollars.

Trump has engaged in illegal impoundment and rescission of funds and programs appropriated and authorized by Congress.

Republicans in Congress and serving on the Supreme Court are failing to check Trump's lawlessness.

Trump has stated that he would like to serve an unconstitutional third term as president. If this comes to pass, it would mark the end of the American democratic experiment.

Let's say an editorial piece says "AWS is the best cloud service" but fails to disclose that its owner also owns AWS, that would be a breach of journalistic ethics. Similar case here.

By all means skip the Wall Street Journal's sneering editorials, but don't ignore the reporting. For example, the Theranos scandal was blown open by the WSJ's John Carreyrou. They've done good reporting on Tesla, Epstein, Amazon, and others.

Their news reporting is, for now, still decent (and retains its familiar slant).

Having said that, I would expect NPR to disclose, if editorializing a piece on Ms Kroc, the donation that Ms Kroc made to NPR (and they likely do that already).

You can see a full list of donors in their latest annual report: https://media.npr.org/documents/about/annualreports/2024%20A...

Forgive me if I find his opinion and the article useless.

Sometimes quantity of money has a quality all of its own.

He even wrote an editorial saying "the news media isnt trusted, we have to do better".

Then he decided he didnt want to do better.

'Trust' is an issue under the old rules, in a context where an essentially democratic, free society was desired by all and where therefore public trust and a well-informed public mattered.

The new rules are about power alone, which is essentially anti-democratic. Bezos has power and he demonstrates it - demonstration is essential under the new rules - by mocking and thumbing his nose at trust and at informing the public. He uses his power to bend public opinion his way; lots of people still read the Post, and in a post-truth world, truth doesn't matter to many of them. He doesn't care about trust, and he actively and intentionally demonstrates it.

It's the context of post-truth philosophy: Words are about power, they are weapons; they are not about truth, expression, or information.

The worship (rather than distrust) of power, post-truth, it all leads to the non-democratic outcome.

My hypothesis is that his current heavy handed editorial intervention is designed to convince only a single person: the President of the United States.

It's presumably worth burning the paper's reputation in order to curry favor with a mercurial and vengeful autocrat who controls the power of the federal government's purse.

In 3 (or 7?) years, perhaps he will reevaluate.

I would bet that something like 80 or 90% of Washington Post subscribers don’t know who owns the paper, and I would save you the same thing about the Wall Street Journal.

Right: it's not just that they didn't endorse Harris. [1] It's that they had a 36-year tradition of endorsing a presidential candidate, had planned to endorse Harris, and then were overridden by their owner in a way that became really public. I expect the editorial positions (or lack thereof) to be chosen by senior journalists, not billionaires.

My subscription may or may not be among the 300,000 cancellations mentioned in the story. I turned off autorenew nearly a year ago; my subscription expires in a few days.

[1] Though I did feel that endorsement would be appropriate. I voted for her, and everything that's happened since has only confirmed to me that she would have been a far better choice than Trump.