Employees outraged at ‘chicken-shit’ move that breaks 30-year precedent, alleging Jeff Bezos quashed Harris support

Employees outraged at ‘chicken-shit’ move that breaks 30-year precedent, alleging Jeff Bezos quashed Harris support

There was uproar and outrage among the Washington Post’s current and former staffers and other notable figures in the world of American media after the newspaper’s leaders on Friday chose to not endorse any candidate in the US presidential election.

The newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, announced on Friday that for the first time in over 30 years, the paper’s editorial board would not be endorsing a candidate in this year’s presidential election, nor in future presidential elections.

After the news broke, reactions came flooding in, with people criticizing the decision, which, according to some staffers and reporters, was allegedly made by the Post’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos.

Karen Attiah, a columnist for the Washington Post who writes a weekly newsletter, called the decision an “absolute stab in the back”.

    • @cybervseas@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31•2 months ago

      On the other hand, journalists are among the most informed and aware professionals out there, and these endorsements are part of their editorials, not part of their factual articles. By making an endorsement, the editorials board is sharing a perspective, and perhaps that should be a lens through which to understand their reporting. That’s up to the individual reader - on that note however, I’m concerned about how blurry readers have become on news articles vs. opinions. Fox News has been the vanguard on that, and the rest of the internet was quick to follow.

      Nevertheless, I think sharing an editorial perspective as a news organization is better than Supreme Court Justices pretending to be unbiased during their Senate confirmation hearings.

      • Optional
        3•2 months ago

        What about if the FBI spikes the 4500 claims of sexual assault to smooth that process??

    • @macarthur_park@lemmy.world
      27•2 months ago

      It’s the editorial board that makes endorsements. The opinions section is completely separate from the news section - the news reporters don’t contribute to the editorial decisions or endorsements.

    • @Telodzrum@lemmy.world
      1•2 months ago

      Newsroom and Editorial Board are different things. Maybe don’t opine when you don’t have a clue what’s being discussed.

    • @zante@slrpnk.netEnglish
      -20•2 months ago

      You can tell it’s election season when a guy says fact based journalism is better than bias and gets downvoted to oblivion.

      What an embarrassment of a sub

      • @CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
        5•2 months ago

        Neutrality is not fact based, is the thing. forget the current candidates for a moment, since they have a lot of emotional investment: consider an issue like, say, vaccines. If you were to give equal consideration to both doctors vouching for their effectiveness, and some anti-vaxxers that think they’ll kill you, you would technically be neutral on that “argument”, but you would actually be biased in favor of the anti-vaxxers in doing so, because the reality of the situation is that they are simply wrong, and suggesting that both sides are equally valid by giving equal weight to their statements paints them in a better light than that. Now, for political candidates, things arent quite as simple as that, because they dont represent one single statement that can be physically demonstrated to be correct or wrong, but they do take actions that can be more or less helpful, or endorse ideas that can be shown to work or not work, or make statements that can be more or less objectively correct, and one can take a sum total of these things and suggest that one candidate or the other would have more or less desirable effects on the country than the other. Indeed, unless the candidates are exactly the same, one of them generally will. Which implies that treating them as if their positions are equally effective and their ideas equally valid is biased in favor of the worse candidate, whoever that might be, and thus, if you wish to reduce that effect, a journalistic organization should endorse the one their research leads them to conclude is preferable.

        • @conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
          6•2 months ago

          [Maggie Jordan ]: How can you be biased towards fairness?

          [MacKenzie McHale ]: There aren’t two sides to every story. Some stories have five sides some only have one.

          [Tess Westin ]: I still don’t underst…

          [Will McAvoy ]: Bias towards fairness means that if the entire congressional Republican caucus were to walk in to the House and propose a resolution stating that the Earth was flat, the Times would lead with “Democrats and Republicans Can’t Agree on Shape of Earth.”

          • @CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
            3•2 months ago

            How? Do you believe that it is somehow impossible for some side on an issue to have the truth on their side, or the other side to simply be factually incorrect? If you want truthful reporting, you cant present truth and falsehood in a neutral light, you have to be biased towards truth.