saturniata

beachdeath:

ooooooookay couple things

1. the owner of a newspaper is not the same thing as the editor of a newspaper. the owner may have a say in the business operations of the newspaper – i.e., how the paper’s website is designed, how the paper is advertised, how subscription systems will work – but the owner does not control the actual content of the paper. as such, the editors and reporters of the washington post maintain full editorial independence from jeff bezos.

2. shitty takes like the above are the responsibility of the washington post’s editorial board, not the result of jeff bezos acting as puppet-master. journalism is under attack right now, and promoting a wholly false narrative of editors and reporters as mindless drones repeating the propaganda of their corporate overlords does nobody any favours. the washington post frequently publishes criticism of amazon – check out a few excerpts from this article:

like. they’re not exactly bowing and praying to Lord Bezos here.

3. i would love to live in a world where billionaires don’t own newspapers, but i also understand that there are impenetrable barriers in place between the business heads of any given paper and its editorial staff.

a good illustration of this is the case of theranos, the medical tech start-up owned by elizabeth holmes, who purported to have invented a device which could conduct thousands of blood tests using only a single drop of blood. in fact, she had invented no such device, and she was running all her tests on other companies’ machines, but she concealed this deception so well that she was able to keep up the ruse for years. she was named to the time 100. she landed major magazine covers. she befriended (and solicited investments from) tons of influential people, from james mattis to betsy devos to henry kissinger. media coverage of her and her company was universally adoring. but then, in mid-2016, john carreyrou from the wall street journal began interviewing former staff members and discovered that theranos had lied about its technology and defrauded investors. over the course of several months, he worked to uncover evidence and prepare an article exposing theranos. elizabeth holmes got wind of this story fairly early on, and she was desperate to shut it down. she decided to cultivate a personal relationship with rupert murdoch, who owns the wall street journal, eventually getting him to invest $121 million in her company. a couple of weeks before carreyrou’s article came out, she booked a private meeting with rupert murdoch and asked him to kill the story. he declined to do so, reminded her that he had no control over the paper’s editorial decisions, and scolded her for trying to instigate an egregious breach of journalistic ethics. the wall street journal went on to publish dozens of articles exposing theranos, and the company eventually collapsed, and elizabeth holmes was charged with wire fraud. rupert murdoch literally chose to lose his $121 million investment rather than interfere with the work of the wall street journal’s reporters. ownership of a paper does not give rupert murdoch, or jeff bezos, or anyone, carte blanche to control what the paper prints.

4. the notion that journalists only exist to lie on behalf of billionaires is a far-right conspiracy theory that is getting innocent reporters killed. like, i get why the mere fact of jeff bezos owning the washington post raises people’s hackles, but there’s no truth to the claim that jeff bezos is compromising the post’s editorial independence. it’s a lie. it’s the essence of every far-right rant about how the mainstream media is pushing ~fake news~. be better than this.