499
Second Washington Post writer quits over failure to back Kamala Harris
(www.theguardian.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
499 points (99.8% liked)
politics
19159 readers
4571 users here now
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! 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.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I'm having a hard time understanding the timeline and chain of events and the logic behind some of the actions taken.
Presumably WaPo was going about their routine prepping a presidential endorsement as they've done since 1976. Bezos gets wind of the impending Harris endorsement and the order comes through to kill the endorsement. Now I'm assuming that order did not also come with orders of strict confidentiality beyond what an organization like that would already have in place, otherwise we'd likely hear about the extra stuff along with the endorsement killing.
At this point did Bezos truly think that would just be the end of it? Did he not think a newspaper that had endorsed a presidential candidate since 1976 suddenly not doing so wouldn't at the very least be investigated by others? Did he trust the company to not have any leaks?
Like at this point WaPo has defacto endorsed Harris. Is there some benefit to an "official" endorsement that is missed by a defacto one?
The point of a billionaire owning a newspaper isn't to be profitable or maximize readership. It's to leverage the readership you do have into power and control. It doesn't matter if this came out, and it doesn't matter if it loses, say, a quarter of its readership. Bezos still gets to use it on the remaining readership and he successfully converts or kills one of the most significant Democratic-sympathizing papers in the nation.
Rupert Murdoch bought up the New York Post when it was a failing paper, and it continued to lose money for decades. I believe it's profitable now, but that was never the purpose. It wasn't for Bezos either.
Edit: a great parallel example of this is Musk/Twitter - huge financial loss, but it doesn't matter, because that wasn't the point. And if the polls are any indicator, it's been incredibly effective and worth every penny.
Twitter’s a bit of a bad example. Musk may be using it that way now in order to make the best of a bad situation, but it’s pretty clear that he didn’t actually intend to buy it in the first place.
Even someone like Musk doesn’t ever intend to go out and lose tens of billions of dollars on a single purchase.
Bezos might expect Trump to win and wants to avoid retaliatory actions from Trump if he does.
He knows Harris won't hate him for the lack of an endorsement, or at least won't vindictively come after him. Trump is... less mature.
This is the only one close to making sense. That's only because Trump would be stupid and petty enough to think it would help him, and Bezos is fine lighting a relatively miniscule amount of money on fire just to seem favorable to trump.
I don't buy my own hypothetical here, but the fact that this was such a public big deal of not endorsing Kamala means that Trump will probably remember it more.
This is 100% the answer.
I dunno, I figure it was more like “pfft. What are they gonna do? quit?! HaHAH?!! Cancel their subscwkptions?!? HAHAhahahahaaaaa . . .” and so on.
You summed up my questions about the situation. I do not understand the change in course late in the election.
If WaPo announced this in February, sure. It’s a little weird that news orgs officially endorse candidates.
Democrats are doing stuff like calling google a monopoly and forcong companies to do 1-click cancellations.
All threats to his larger businesses.
Sure. But did preventing WaPo from officially endorsing Harris hurt her chances or help trump's? Quite the opposite I'd imagine after all this Streisand effect going on.
WaPo is a mouthpiece for Bezos, and he'd rather have AWS AI be the writers.
Bezos does not give a fuck