Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) has been exposing two-faced news for decades. They are worthy of your attention.
IMO, the Columbia Journalism Review (https://www.cjr.org) is a better source for media criticism.
Press Gazette (UK): https://pressgazette.co.uk/
A great daily aggregator (with links to more) is Mediagazer: https://mediagazer.com/
it always makes me sad when i see this. you are not reaching your target audience. fyi this seems to be a cloudflare thing. i see it everywhere. The World Wide Web seems to be going down a dark path. perhaps i do need to update my browser, but why should that matter for just reading a news site. it's like someone wants you to not have access unless you buy a new macbook(or maybe a chromebook). maybe i should just install Chrome already? i just feel like this Big Tech has crossed the line with their customers a long time ago at this point.
btw, fair.org looks interesting. i never heard of them before. Thanks!
the sheer volume of browser exploits - including in-the-wild exploited zero-click zero days - is frankly insane. intentionally leaving yourself unprotected is a bad choice that should be shoved back in your face, often.
> i see it everywhere.
i see it nowhere. update your software! and don't use chrome.
edit: Just ran into the same page on Chromium 141.0.7390.122 without Tor or a VPN, but with NoScript, JShelter, and uBlock extensions enabled. It looks like JShelter + NoScript can trigger it.
This is the page you get:
> Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view this site properly.
> Click here for more information
The last line links here: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-challenges/#bro...
Suggests to me if certain challenges fail, or give results in a certain distribution, you'll see that page.
Disabling JShelter and allowing JS lets me use the site properly.
and software monoculture is widely considered a security threat, and so by pushing software monoculture, you yourself are pushing to weaken internet security. GP should potentially be applauded (if he's not using for example IE6)
how did we go from “update your software; don’t use chrome” to “you are pushing software monoculture and weakening internet security”?
as for “they were not informing him of an insecurity”, this seems to be deliberately obtuse. virtually every major browser includes (and references in their release notes!) fixes for vulnerabilities in stable version updates.
given the audience here, i think it's more likely that OP/GP is running an up to date browser that is of an alternate architecture that has not "mainstreamed" all of google and hollywood's ad and drm friendly CSS HTML
They used to claim reporters were biased towards the right. That used to be a left-wing claim, but it’s no longer credible. Something like 90% of reporters are left-wing.
Maybe they’ve reformed, and aren’t in the business of providing partisan talking points anymore.
Citation very much needed. Also, what percent of reporting news organization owners are left wing?
It's a persistent problem for people on the fringes of the political spectrum. I guess if they were aware of this, they probably wouldn't be on the fringe in the first place.
Glad they're still around.
'Trust' is an issue under the old rules, in a context where an essentially democratic, free society was desired by all and where therefore public trust and a well-informed public mattered.
The new rules are about power alone, which is essentially anti-democratic. Bezos has power and he demonstrates it - demonstration is essential under the new rules - by mocking and thumbing his nose at trust and at informing the public. He uses his power to bend public opinion his way; lots of people still read the Post, and in a post-truth world, truth doesn't matter to many of them. He doesn't care about trust, and he actively and intentionally demonstrates it.
It's the context of post-truth philosophy: Words are about power, they are weapons; they are not about truth, expression, or information.
The worship (rather than distrust) of power, post-truth, it all leads to the non-democratic outcome.
As unpopular as Bush was in 2008, not very many people seriously thought he would be or even should be arrested. I think the patience of good people is getting severely tested in 2025 though, I think by 2028, or sooner, people will be demanding scalps.
What, of the things I described, have Black Americans experienced more than others?
> even the most milquetoast centrists of 2020 are turning into people calling for actual consequences for the corruption going on in our government.
I see the opposite: Look at congressional and other Dem leaders - they talk about economics and healthcare despite everything else going on.
in a context where an essentially democratic, free society was desired by all, black people were systematically shut out from, (redlining, the gi bill, etc.). Like how you were supposed to trust that stop-and-frisk and the broken window policing policies were not thinly veiled attempts to over-police black neighborhoods because the paper you read or the politician you voted for told you so... but the people that were the victims knew otherwise.
My hypothesis is that his current heavy handed editorial intervention is designed to convince only a single person: the President of the United States.
It's presumably worth burning the paper's reputation in order to curry favor with a mercurial and vengeful autocrat who controls the power of the federal government's purse.
In 3 (or 7?) years, perhaps he will reevaluate.
It is a bit more interesting than "everyone took their mask off the day after the election". Plenty of hard-line right wing people in the world, of course, but at one point if you're that deep in the right all the posturing pre-2024 would be really hard to do. But if it's all cynical then any amount of posturing makes sense!
He even wrote an editorial saying "the news media isnt trusted, we have to do better".
Then he decided he didnt want to do better.
I am fairly certain he decided to and is executing "do better" - nevertheless the 1 or 2 people with net worths of 100's of billions have different opinions on what "better" looks like than the other 8 billion of us.
I would bet that something like 80 or 90% of Washington Post subscribers don’t know who owns the paper, and I would save you the same thing about the Wall Street Journal.
The world's richest man has at most a few hundred.
Their news reporting is, for now, still decent (and retains its familiar slant).
It's fun to jump into the comments, they added voting to the comments and Wapo editorials are really not coming off well.
I am always wondering about the hacks writing these pieces, in what place do you have to be mentally to be, essentially, a paid propagandist?
Trump was annoyed enough that he started threatening to start a Trump TV network and poach their stars.
By all means skip the Wall Street Journal's sneering editorials, but don't ignore the reporting. For example, the Theranos scandal was blown open by the WSJ's John Carreyrou. They've done good reporting on Tesla, Epstein, Amazon, and others.
Do you think Murdoch wouldn't do that at the WSJ?
With that signal and the editorial page, I think it's wishful thinking to think the rest isn't biased - people just don't want to lose that institution. Much can be done without the reader knowing - omissions, slant, etc. In the end, you must trust them to a degree.
You can treat even the facts with doubts, and understanding that the descriptions used can be influenced by what the writers believe. You can come away and consciously say "I know nothing more about the world than I did before reading this article, except for what Murdoch thinks about this".
And sometimes you'll see something that is "merely" true and you can absorb that information. Or mentally correct based on the biases.
Information collection works even when the person presenting the information has an agenda! It's often possible to mentally unbias reporting when you have a good understanding of the paper's tendancies, and then pull out useful information!
You overestimate your and my ability to not get fooled, even when reading and thinking critically. In studies, more educated people are more easily fooled because they think they can detect it.
> "I know nothing more about the world than I did before reading this article, except for what Murdoch thinks about this".
Right, but how is that worth your time? It's not worth my time. There are still plenty much more trustworthy sources out there.
If I'm stuck reading a WSJ article, I do the same as you. But why not find something better?
Adding to my prior comment: The more important the subject is, the more likely they will try to manipulate you.
Very good point, you don't _need_ to read this stuff, and you can go towards things that are "better".
I find that Wapo has decently comprehensive coverage on some issues. The journalists draw "wrong" conclusions, and I just no-op that, but I've found it helpful, and there's often more detail than provided in other places. But I generally do some subsequent research after reading most of their articles. But maybe there's something else I could be reading instead.
The Financial Times is good but insanely expensive. The Economist has a clear bias they are open about and is excellent but not really journalism - they don't give both sides a voice, dig up facts; the provide (succinct, sophisticated, lively) analysis. The Guardian obviously has a leftward bias but seem intellectually honest to me.
The Associated Press and Reuters, but they output too much. Curated news feeds can be very good, especially at finding a range of sources.
It's better when you have newspapers you can trust to do this in a way you like for you, but absent that... time to read a couple different articles
It kind of shocks me how someone seemingly can understand those things, but then continue to try to helm the ship. You know you're having a negative impact, why stay at that point, unless you have some ulterior motive?
I don't feel like Washington Post becoming a shadow of itself is any surprise, when even the owner is aware of the effect they have on the publication, yet do absolutely nothing to try to change it.
Disclaimer: former subscriber, part of the exodus that left when the publication became explicitly "pro-capitalism" under the guise of "personal liberties" or something like that.
So he's basically the absentee owner of a property that's more interesting to the women in his life than to him. Current management at the paper is probably eager to make sure that the paper doesn't embarrass (or "complexify") his bigger business priorities. Their desire to mollify may be excessive. I've seen such things happen inside large organizations.
https://www.theguardian.com/about/history
And it has survived without continual extra investment. Possible that WaPo is just managed badly.
Not sure how that translates into US media context.
The second lesson from UK media is that the Daily Mail General Trust is usually assumed to be a vehicle for whatever the owning dynasty wants, despite encompassing multiple newspapers with different editorial stances (this is also certainly historically accurate: in the 1930s the man who set up the trust was writing letters to the PM offering editorial support in exchange for being allowed to veto any government appointments the PM wanted to make). So I don't think a trust structure alone will make people believe Bezos has no influence over it.
Axios has an article about The Guardian's success in the U.S., but I don't have access behind the paywall.
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/06/the-guardian-us-expansion
Better resource:
https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2025/09/11/Guardian_Annual_Report...
> It’s been owned by the Scott Trust since the 1930s
It's now The Scott Trust Ltd. In 2008 they wound up the original trust and transferred assets to a limited company which has gutted a lot of what it was. They sold off local papers to Maxwell's empire, their radio interests and Autotrader. They even sold off their properties to private equity.
They sold off the Observer, essentially The Guardian's Sunday edition, which was condemned as a betrayal of the OG trust. The original trust was bound by deed to pursue it's mission but the limited company can sell off the Guardian or change it's purpose with a 75% board vote.
It has not. The Guardian loses millions every year. I think it made money one year in the late 90s iirc.
https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2025/09/11/Guardian_Annual_Report...
>Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel
Further down the article:
> O'Neal was brought in by Bezos this summer after the corporate titan tore up his paper's opinion section.
> Bezos said he wanted a tight focus on two priorities: personal liberties and free markets. The top opinion page editor resigned. A raft of prominent columnists and contributors resigned or departed as well. Some were let go.
That didn't happen without vigorous help from the "servants of the people".
> I don’t think there has to be an ulterior motive per se, it’s simply human nature.
It's both, of course. Ulterior motives and human nature aren't mutually exclusive, in fact they overlap quite a lot given the chance.
It’s a classic hallmark technique of advanced psychopaths wherein you agree with reality but don’t change it because as long as you acknowledge it, most people assume you’ll “do your best.”
So all you have to do is acknowledge it, and as long as there’s nobody who can force you to do anything then there’s no obvious way to address it without escalation - that escalation being the reason then for claiming you’re attacked and then you have carte blanche to “simply defend yourself”
Do that long enough and people get tired and move on and you just cemented your place further
The Post was always terrible, always extremely conservative, and always blatantly mixed editorial in with its news reporting (unlike most other outlets in the past.) A bunch of anti-Trump people decided it was movement liberal because it didn't like Trump (like every other Republican and Republican outlet until people started voting them out over it.)
WaPo was the most right-wing non-tabloid major paper in the country other than the WSJ before Bezos, the only thing that changed afterwards was that the headlines became more linkbait (5 minutes earlier than every other paper) and their coverage of Bezos properties became lighter.
The idea that the WaPo was ever anything but rabidly capitalist is nonsense.
They were planning to endorse Kamala Harris before Bezos quashed it.
You have a pretty idiosyncratic definition of "conservative"
After reading “Amusing Ourselves to Death” last week I’m convinced that in a democracy, political media consumption format is destiny (or at least shapes the equilibrium) and has more to do with the information bias in the system (when that system consists of profit maximizing news sources).
Current major models seem fundamentally less biased (on average) as a form of media than either television or social media. And they have a built-in incentive not to be too biased in the long run (maybe, this is just a vague thought): being too biased makes you have more incorrect predictions.
Could the right kind AI consumable media reverse the trend of ever more biased media?
https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...
Forgive me if I find his opinion and the article useless.
Let's say an editorial piece says "AWS is the best cloud service" but fails to disclose that its owner also owns AWS, that would be a breach of journalistic ethics. Similar case here.
This is what it’s really (still) about. Partisans are mad that the publisher of this paper didn’t let them rubber-stamp Team Blue - regardless of the incredibly deep flaws of the candidate[1]. Note that not endorsing Harris didn’t mean endorsing the also deeply flawed and corrupt Trump.
I voted for neither of those hacks and endorsing either would have been an embarrassment.
[1] coronating a nominee - without a primary - who was known to be so deeply disliked by so vast a majority of the Democratic voters that she had dropped out of the 2020 race before Iowa should have been a huge red flag to anyone.
That subscription money now goes to my local NPR station. Anytime NPR covers anything related to Microsoft, they always provide the disclosure of receiving funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. That is what legitimate news sources are supposed to do.
Wonder about LA Times too, they used to also endorse Dems.
Right: it's not just that they didn't endorse Harris. [1] It's that they had a 36-year tradition of endorsing a presidential candidate, had planned to endorse Harris, and then were overridden by their owner in a way that became really public. I expect the editorial positions (or lack thereof) to be chosen by senior journalists, not billionaires.
My subscription may or may not be among the 300,000 cancellations mentioned in the story. I turned off autorenew nearly a year ago; my subscription expires in a few days.
[1] Though I did feel that endorsement would be appropriate. I voted for her, and everything that's happened since has only confirmed to me that she would have been a far better choice than Trump.
Especially endorsing the same party for nearly 50 years to the point where it's expected as a sign of allegience, and non-allegience if they stop. It meant a lot.
You can see a full list of donors in their latest annual report: https://media.npr.org/documents/about/annualreports/2024%20A...
Having said that, I would expect NPR to disclose, if editorializing a piece on Ms Kroc, the donation that Ms Kroc made to NPR (and they likely do that already).
You are attempting to draw a parallel where there simply is none.
Journalism has always been under attack from the wealthy robber barons of the time. Rockefeller famously bought out the magazine/newspaper that muckraker Ida Tarbell wrote for after she wrote a damning book about Standard Oil. However, it only hardened her and other muckrakers, who later led to the break up of Standard Oil, term limits, and other restrains on the abuse of power.
I find the parallels between then and now quite striking. Except today's boogeymen have rebranded and call themselves tech billionaires. They got ahead of muckrakers by owning journalism, media, and social media, and have used there Pinkertons (Trust and Safety Teams) to censoring anyone who speaks out against them.
There are good journalists out there though. I think a modern equivalent of Ida Tarbell may be Whitney Webb for writing One Nation under Blackmail about the Epstein Files.
One standard.
Sometimes quantity of money has a quality all of its own.
Edit: people saying I didn’t read the article apparently didn’t read it themselves. From the article:
> The Post has resolutely revealed such entanglements to readers of news coverage or commentary in the past … since 2013, those of Bezos, who founded Amazon and Blue Origin. Even now, the newspaper's reporters do so as a matter of routine.
So at minimum the article disagrees with itself, but it seems the outrage bait is working hook line and sinker.
Edit 2: To try and be a little clearer here: the article is trying to (but in my opinion doing a really poor job of) make a distinction between the disclosures that the non-editorial WaPo authors do, and the disclosures that the editorial authors do, with the assertion that the editorial authors are worse at it.
> On at least three occasions in the past two weeks
Bezos announced a relaunch of the Opinion section earlier in the year, I don't think it's unreasonable to wonder if there has been a policy change. Three times in two weeks is a lot.
> potentially a mistaken omission that was fixed within 24 hours
potentially, yes. Responsible news organizations post correction notices when they make an omission like this, but WaPo did not (despite having a history of doing so, again, a notable change in practice)
And this is an honest question, I don't know what the WP standard for their Editorial and Opinion pages were prior to Bezos' ownership, nor what the broader industry standard was before say 2016.
Fortunately, the NPR journalists do know, as the article states:
>> The Post has resolutely revealed such entanglements to readers of news coverage or commentary in the past[...]
So, we know they "resolutely revealed" this in the past (but that is of course not the same word as "unfailingly" or even "always"), and we know that they continue to do so even to this day "as a matter of routine". But neither of those tells us anything about the current frequency compared to the past frequency. Likewise it tells us nothing about whether the "matter of routine" changed since before Bezos took ownership.
Similarly it says nothing about the wider industry. Oh sure, they tell us: > Newspapers typically manage the perception with transparency. And they tell us that viewing it as a conflict of interest is "conventional", but again no information about how the WPs frequency (either before or after Bezos took ownership) compares to the industry as a whole, nor whether that frequency has actually changed.
Again some numbers would be instructive here. The article says "at least 3 times in the last 2 weeks" this has occurred (and apparently been subsequently corrected). But how many times was it necessary in the last 2 weeks? If the WP published 4 articles in the last 2 weeks that would have normally had one of these disclosures, missing 3 out of 4 is a different thing than if the WP published 200 such articles in the last 2 weeks.
I know it's always been a lot to ask our news reporters to actually do some fact gathering, but it hardly seems unreasonable to ask for any sort of comparative information when asserting there is a change people should be concerned about.
What's the issue with the follow up?
The headline says "WaPo no longer does B". I quoted the bit that says "in the past, WaPo used to resolutely do A and B" to answer your question about whether we should expect B at all, and your riposte is "the NPR article continues to say WaPo still does A". The NPR article is about WaPo stopping B, and now you have a historical baseline for B.
I'm not interested in the pivot to arguing about whether news articles ought to share raw data; the way it works now is via editors, editorial standards and fact-checkers that determine if the facts support the wording. Ultimately, news outfits like NPR and the Washington Post live and die by their reputations.
edit: more thoughts on quantification
"Resolutely" is a stout word, IMO, which to me is a word one might be talked down to using when they mean "always" but do not have the time to prove before the publishing deadline, or need to add linguistic error-bars. If it were an option in a survey, I'd place it higher than "almost always" and just below "always"
"Bernie Sanders has reduced is fighting for civil rights in worrying ways"
And in a second breath tell you that:
"Bernie Sanders has resolutely fought for civil rights in the past and even now does so as a matter of routine"
You would probably find those statements at odds with one another. You quite reasonably might want me to quantify what is different currently from recent and also prior past behavior. You might also reasonably want me to quantify his behavior in "fighting for civil rights" against his contemporaries, both past and current. What I would not expect is for you to take and hold those two statements at face value, finding that a satisfactory report on the state of things.
It's certainly possible that there is no contradiction. It might be true that he was resolute in the past, and routinely did do to date, but in the past month has missed 50 votes on civil rights legislation. But even then you'd probably want to know how many votes he misses as a regular course. You might want to know how many votes he did enter during that same time period. You might want to know whether or not he was sick or otherwise absent for health reasons.
And that's my issue at the moment. The article says "3 times in the last 2 weeks an event happened". It also tells you that the WP "resolutely" (but again notably not "always") does not allow the specific event to happen. It also tells you that the WP "routinely" (but again not "always" and without any relative comparison to "resolutely") does not allow the specific event to happen even to this very day. So why are we supposed to be worried that it happened 3 times in this last 2 weeks? By their own words, it must have happened at other times in the past, or they would have used words like "always" and "unfailingly" to describe both past and current behavior. So what makes these particular 3 times worrying? Have they never failed to do so 3 times in 2 weeks ever in their history? What about 2 times? They don't say, we have no numbers and without numbers or any sort of relative comparison we have no way to gauge whether the current behavior is or is not worrisome.
I see where the disconnect is. Please read the sibling thread about the differences between Opinion (responsible for editorials, and subject of the NPR article) and news department (does reporting on actual news journalism). Opinion & News have different org charts under the WaPo banner. In my prior comment, A = disclosures in journalism, B = disclosures in editorials. They are not the same thing in a way that can be applied to a singular Bernie.
> They don't say, we have no numbers and without numbers or any sort of relative comparison we have no way to gauge whether the current behavior is or is not worrisome.
The number of op-eds are a small part on this article about the vibe-shift at the Washington Post: NPR provided additional context with the words of people who used to work there, mentioned thr waves of resignations and subscriber cancellations, noted WaPo declined to comment on this story. Make of that what you may.
I can see that reading but even with that, comparative numbers are still useful. If we continue to assume that the words in this story were carefully chosen to be what they are (which I think we both are doing that, so I don't think I'm making an out of bounds assumption here), why the "3 times in the past 2 weeks" phrasing? Why not "has stopped" (or even "appears to have stopped" if you want to hedge)? Back to my original question of "is 3 times in the past 2 weeks" 100% of the time? Is it 50%? 1%?
If 3 times is 100% of the number of times it should have happened, how many times did it happen in the 2 weeks prior to that? Or the month prior? Is 3 "conflicted" op-eds in 2 weeks high? normal? low?
Have they missed disclosures in the past? Multiple in a short window? How frequently? How many?
The current incidents were apparently corrected without any specific call out (a practice becoming far too common in the news I agree), how does that compare to previous times when they have corrected a disclosure?
We have no facts to go on. We have information, as you put it:
> about the vibe-shift at the Washington Post ... words of people who used to work there ... [mention of] the waves of resignations and subscriber cancellations, noted WaPo declined to comment on this story.
So we have implications that this means something, and maybe it does, but again we have implications. What I "make of it" is that the Post continues to be in a state of disarray, as it has been for some time now. And that's about all I make of it. And I specifically decline to make anything about "declining to comment" on a story. Second only to the police, you should shut your mouth and say nothing to the press. Everything you say can and will be used against you.
Reporting and editorial are separate units in newspapers; the point being made is that, while reporting continues to properly disclose potential ownership conflicts of interest, editorial and op-ed, following Bezos taking direct control of them, are not doing so.
Of course, the Post is Bezos' toy, and there's no law that says he can't use editorial as a megaphone for his personal interests without disclosing them (or, in fact, even use the reporting side for the same purpose!), but you can't do that and still claim that the paper has any of the Grahams' pedigree left in it, and this is very much a change from Bezos' earlier ownership, in which he largely stayed hands-off on editorial decisions.
> On Oct. 15, the Post heralded the military's push for a new generation of smaller nuclear reactors. "No 'microreactor' currently operates in the United States, but it's a worthy gamble that could provide benefits far beyond its military applications," the Post wrote in its editorial.
> A year ago, Amazon bought a stake in X-energy to develop small nuclear reactors to power its data centers. And through his own private investment fund, Bezos has a stake in a Canadian venture seeking nuclear fusion technology.
and
> Three days after the nuclear power editorial, the Post weighed in on the need for local authorities in Washington, D.C., to speed the approval of the use of self-driving cars in the nation's capital. The editorial was headlined: "Why D.C. is stalling on self-driving cars: Safety is a phony excuse for slamming the brakes on autonomous vehicles."
> Fewer than three weeks before, the Amazon-owned autonomous car company Zoox had announced D.C. was to be its next market.
Edit to respond to your edit: these are the opinion pages, not reporting.
What this is saying:
- Previously, WaPo disclosed conflicts of interest.
- They still disclose in their news articles (as opposed to in their editorials).
> So at minimum the article disagrees with itself
No.
> Edit 2: To try and be a little clearer here: the article is trying to (but in my opinion doing a really poor job of) make a distinction between the disclosures that the non-editorial WaPo authors do, and the disclosures that the editorial authors do, with the assertion that the editorial authors are worse at it.
Everyone else seems to understand but you. By the way, "non-editorial WaPo authors" are called reporters or journalists.
No, because they aren't doing so for Amazon and Blue. That's the entire point. Find an Amazon article with a disclosure on it.
"On at least three occasions in the past two weeks, an official Post editorial has taken on matters in which Bezos has a financial or corporate interest without noting his stake. In each case, the Post's official editorial line landed in sync with its owner's financial interests."
So, no, this isn't one-off. You need to re-read the article more closely.
And it wasn't fixed entirely - usually fixes to an article are declared in the article, and they didn't do that when they inserted the disclosure after the fact.
I’m more neutral on it now. I don’t really know what facilities the White House needs, but think the case should be made on practical grounds. Perhaps some other writer could go into that in more depth? But as editorials go, it didn’t seem like a bad one, and I don’t think adding a disclaimer about a conflict changes that much.
Separately, raising money through corporate “donations” seems like a huge loophole for corruption.
This shows that the organization is getting rotten from the inside, otherwise stuff like this is flagged up front, if the journalists and editors there have any journalistic integrity left in them.
By law, any money spent by the executive needs to come from Congressional appropriation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act
> The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal employees from ... accepting voluntary services for the United States, or employing personal services not authorized by law, except in cases of emergency involving the safety of human life or the protection of property. 31 U.S.C. § 1342.
Trump said the project "won't interfere with the current building. … It will be near it but not touching it. It pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of. It’s my favorite place. I love it." Then, he sent in bulldozers to bring the whole thing to the ground.
Trump is also requesting the government, of which he is the head, to cut him a check for nearly a quarter of a billion dollars.
Trump has engaged in illegal impoundment and rescission of funds and programs appropriated and authorized by Congress.
Republicans in Congress and serving on the Supreme Court are failing to check Trump's lawlessness.
Trump has stated that he would like to serve an unconstitutional third term as president. If this comes to pass, it would mark the end of the American democratic experiment.
This may be true, it's simply the way that it's approached that has my hackles up. This is something that should have been provisioned and approved by congress.
> Separately, raising money through corporate “donations” seems like a huge loophole for corruption.
The US corruption laws are laughably bad. You don't even need this sort of loophole other than to avoid reporting on who's doing the donations.
There's basically nothing that really prevents someone from giving a Justice, Senator, congress person, or the president a yacht, airplane, home, or a "loan" that gets forgiven. The only real limits is that's supposed to be reported (and that foreign governments can't do the same). Yes yes, the bribery law states that you can't pay someone to perform an official act. However, if you simply give them a gift that doesn't count. Even when that person is actively working on official acts that directly impact you.
The crazy thing is that if you are a low rank Congress staffer or other government employee, the anti corruption rules are actually quite strict. It only loosens up the higher you go.
Even for the FBI and most of the other police agencies there was a decent amount of checks in place to make sure they weren't acting out of pocket. It's ICE and the CIA that have had much less restrictions.
There is no loophole. What Trump is doing is flatly illegal.
An honest editorial might say something like "this addition is a good idea, but why are these specific people (including my employer) paying for it"?
Now scale your annoyance based on how important you think the White House and presidential power are relative to some random Launch HN post. In this case, knowing the financial motivations of the publisher, was the editorial actually valuable? They say: "this project would not have gotten done, certainly not during his term, if the president had gone through the traditional review process. The blueprints would have faced death by a thousand papercuts." Is this a misleading premise, was there actually a lot of process and red tape preventing a president from doing this renovation the "traditional" way? I have no idea, and since I can't trust this source I have to go find out some other way.
Did they leave out any other important information? They say: "Privately, many alumni of the Biden and Obama White Houses acknowledge the long-overdue need for an event space like what Trump is creating. It is absurd that tents need to be erected on the South Lawn for state dinners, and VIPs are forced to use porta-potties." Is this true? Again I don't know and I can't trust the authors.
Like the HN investor example, we can't tell if this editorial was primarily driven by "observer knowledgeable about the needs of the presidential office" or "guy who wants the president to eliminate the NLRB". It doesn't mean the editorial is wrong, but it does mean it isn't really valuable because you'll have to find other sources to verify its claims.
I wouldn't really care if the claims they made were correct. An opinion is an opinion (and we are talking about the opinion rather than news section here) and I find that peoples personal emotional and ideological biases are actually a lot stronger than commercial interests in most cases. So really every single editorial should have a disclaimer "this entire article is biased as hell" at the end, but if it applies everywhere do we really need it at all?
disclaimer: this comment is biased as hell
- How much is the editorial board influenced by Bezos? Is he actually involved in writing each article?
- What are the discussions like? How do they write these articles?
Without knowing that, which would require insider journalism, not just a disclaimer, I don't really know the authors' point of view. It's basically anonymous. I assume Bezos has a hand in it somehow, if only by choosing the editorial staff. A disclaimer doesn't change that.
Opinions written by strangers are always suspect, but they can still be interesting.
We aren't even getting bread and circuses, just Nero at this point.
The actual White House, yes. Some out building of the compound, no. If you showed me a picture of it a month ago I would have no idea what it was. This whole thing is bribery, no doubt, but compared to all of the other Trump corruption this one is the least bad.
Silicon Valley, Venture Capital: they're the sociopaths whose current project is "disrupting" democratic governance.