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submitted 5 days 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”.

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[-] zante@slrpnk.net 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days 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 5 days ago

That's exactly not what he said.

[-] CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 5 points 5 days 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.

[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 5 days ago

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

[-] zante@slrpnk.net 2 points 5 days 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)

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