380
submitted 4 weeks ago by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world

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”.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] zante@slrpnk.net 4 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks 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

[-] Blackbeard@lemmy.world 11 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 days ago)
[-] CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 5 points 4 weeks 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 5 points 4 weeks 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."

[-] ThirdWorldOrder@lemm.ee 3 points 4 weeks ago

Why do you care about downvotes so much. They don’t matter

[-] zante@slrpnk.net 2 points 4 weeks ago

Because it shows the sentiments of the people I share this sub with .

this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
380 points (100.0% liked)

News

23376 readers
1713 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS