I'm pretty sure the "news" business' heyday was back in the '50s and '60s before Woodward and Bernstein started bragging about taking down a president and 60 Minutes started trashing people with heavily edited ambush interviews intended to smear people.
News outlets are not and cannot be truly unbiased because newspeople are human beings with experiences, attitudes, opinions, and their own Overton window.
But some journalists are better than others about portraying the world as it is--or as they see it clearly--and others are nothing more than nasty partisans and propagandists who see their job as pushing an agenda and a Narrative™.
That describes about 98% of all "news" these days.
So I guess it shouldn't surprise us that Jeff Bezos taking away the "journalists'" toys this year and restricting their propaganda efforts in the election to their "news" reporting was enough to trigger a tantrum at the Washington Post.
Incredible. The official Washington Post TikTok account is accusing the owner of the Washington Post of corruption for not allowing an endorsement of any candidate. pic.twitter.com/Ndy2hnQqk7
— AG (@AGHamilton29) October 30, 2024
I have to admit it's pretty funny. Jeff Bezos subsidizes these jerks' lifestyles by absorbing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses caused by these puerile poseurs' failure to report the news well, and in return, they turn on him like ravening wolves because he took away one of their toys.
The endorsement of a newspaper doesn't matter much, and the endorsement of The Washington Post matters even less. At least a local paper is local and may know the candidates better than you do; The Washington Post is so glaringly biased about people who you actually know well that not a single person in America doesn't know what people in both the newsroom and the editorial page think.
🚨JD Vance on The Washington Post and Bezos' letter:
— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) October 31, 2024
"The problem with The Washington Post is not that their editorial page has been insufficiently conservative. It's that their entire journalism department is fundamentally engaged in Democrat political activism. The New York… pic.twitter.com/t4IILdwEq9
So the endorsement is a vanity project for senior editors and DEI picks and not some Papal Bull. A candidate might laminate it and put it on their "I love me" wall, but it has zero impact on the world. It is about the preening of writers, not anything else.
But journalists are the same breed of self-important jerks as the Davos/WEF crowd, who think the fate of the world hangs on their every word.
Attacking Jeff Bezos is stupid. I don't know how thin-skinned he is, but generally speaking unemployable people shouldn't attack the employer of last resort. Journalists--unemployed journalists--are a dime a dozen, and at least brands like Taylor Lorenz have a product some people want to buy. Most of these guys are anonymous and no better than any other writer, or infuriating enough to grab attention like Lorenz.
WaPo opinion editor told angry staff they can resign if they couldn’t cope with Bezos’ endorsement decision https://t.co/iRqpEcjp6I pic.twitter.com/Y9rNiagPBO
— New York Post (@nypost) October 31, 2024
Jeff Bezos, whatever else you can say about him, built something amazing. He is no Elon Musk, but nobody is. Bezos built an empire from a garage, and as infuriating as I find him and his company often, it brings 80% of the things I buy to my home. The same can probably be said about the people bitching about him.
Employee revolts are now common, because mediocre people have been coddled and told they are unique, special flowers who deserve to be nurtured. Very few of us are, outside of our standing with our families and through the grace of God.
God may love you no matter what; an employer wants you to produce more revenue than you cost him. Literally none of the people at the WaPo do.
If The Washington Post journalists believed that Bezos used the newspaper to improperly influence the government before the non-endorsement of Donald Trump, why didn't they blow the whistle?
Because that isn't the issue for them, they literally don't care one way or the other. What they want is their toy, and he took it away from them. This is a tantrum dressed up as bravely sticking to principle. Just as The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin demanded Los Angeles Times editorial board members resign after that paper didn't endorse, but hid under a desk when it became her turn to stand on principle.
These people are beneath contempt, and I hope Bezos fires the lot of them. And realizes that whet they are doing to him is exactly what they do to anybody they dislike, including Donald Trump and all Republicans.
They are the mean girls of the modern elite.
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