Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

https://www.npr.org/2025/10/28/nx-s1-5587932/washington-post-editorials-omit-a-key-disclosure-bezos-financial-ties

by ilamont • 9 months ago

620 198 9 months ago

When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post. - https://archive.is/flIDl

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.

JohnMakin2• 9 months ago

It’s part of the centi billionaire class power grab playbook. each one of them for the most part has some major media interests. if you can control and dictate the narrative, for a while no one can protest you, and maybe they won’t notice for a while that their futures are being robbed to enrich a handful of extremely vain white men. by the time they do, it’s likely too late.

makr17• 9 months ago

I feel like Bezos has well more than $10M, $1B/100 (centi). Perhaps you were looking for "hecto" (SI prefix for 100)?

AndrewKemendo• 9 months ago

This is called “managing the narrative”

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

jacquesm• 9 months ago

That's because even if he realizes the conflict of interest having a massive media outlet at your disposal is just too powerful a temptation to ignore for these fat cats.

morkalork• 9 months ago

I think they took the wrong lesson from that Mark Twain quote

Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel

flatline• 9 months ago

The Post is a plaything to him that has a disproportionate impact on the rest of the world. We’ve created systems that allow a few individuals to control resources beyond the wildest dreams of the monarchs of days past. Whether it is about power, control, self-aggrandizement, or simply a special interest to him, there is no accountability at the end of the day, and we are all excellent at justifying and rationalizing our decisions to ourselves. I don’t think there has to be an ulterior motive per se, it’s simply human nature.

bigbadfeline• 9 months ago

We’ve created systems that allow a few individuals to control resources beyond the wildest dreams of the monarchs of days past.

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.

afavour4• 9 months ago

Yeah, this was always the tell. If he truly cared about journalism and wanted to use his money to support it he could very easily place WaPo in some sort of trust he has no power over. And yet, despite publicly admitting the conflict of interest, he hasn’t. Only one reason why you do that and it's because you intend to make the most of your control.

nickff• 9 months ago

It seems like the problem with WaPo is that it’s constantly losing money, and has been since well before Bezos bought it. This makes it difficult to be hands-off for (at least) two reasons: he can’t just put it in a conventional trust, because he has to constantly give the organization money (which is abnormal for such a trust), and (secondly) in order to be sustainable, WaPo needs to be significantly changed so that it stops hemorrhaging money.

uvaursi• 9 months ago

What’s the relation between Journalism, Facts and Truth? I’d like a three-way Venn diagram to understand if there are any overlaps.

GCA10• 9 months ago

It's worth reading former WashPost editor Marty Baron's memoirs for a little more insight about Bezos's priorities. Back when Bezos was married to MacKenzie Scott, she was a surprisingly strong voice about how to do things. (The slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness" got approved after her blessing.) Lately, my sense is that his new wife, Lauren Sanchez, has more of an interest in the Post than Bezos does.

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.

terminalshort11• 9 months ago

That doesn't solve the problem (because it can't be solved). Someone is in control, and the paper will be biased in their interest.

heroprotagonist• 9 months ago

There was an ulterior motive and the impact was deliberate.

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.

terminalshort11• 9 months ago

It's not ulterior if he said it

HPsquared• 9 months ago

Don't ask what you can do for your property; ask what your property can do for you.

pessimizer2• 9 months ago

Washington Post becoming a shadow of itself

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.

senderista5• 9 months ago

always extremely conservative

You have a pretty idiosyncratic definition of "conservative"

metabagel8• 9 months ago

I would say that the Washington Post was pretty centrist before Bezos decided to target MAGA readers.

They were planning to endorse Kamala Harris before Bezos quashed it.

ratelimitsteve• 9 months ago

the temptation is to take him at his word for what he wants and then ask why he doesn't do the obvious thing to get it. try something different: assume he wants what he gets and then ask yourself why he might want that. it's shocking how often that tends to make things very clear.

davisr• 9 months ago

If you think this kind of reporting is cool, you should donate to https://fair.org.

Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) has been exposing two-faced news for decades. They are worthy of your attention.

kridsdale32• 9 months ago

And now that Zuck has nuked Facebook AI Research org, they get their acronymic exclusivity back.

zargon• 9 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAIR_(Mormon_apologetics_organ...

BeetleB• 9 months ago

I second that. When I was a news junkie, I would love reading their (occasional) posts.

Glad they're still around.

jonas21• 9 months ago

FAIR has its own biases, and these can be quite strong (have a glance at the studies on their website and judge for yourself).

IMO, the Columbia Journalism Review (https://www.cjr.org) is a better source for media criticism.

metabagel8• 9 months ago

Also, Poynter.

https://www.poynter.org/

senderista5• 9 months ago

FAIR has always been like this since the 80s. I don't really expect these media watchdogs to be "neutral" though; it's enough that they only call out bias against their favored positions. If there are enough such orgs across the spectrum then they serve their purpose.

mmooss7• 9 months ago

Also Nieman Lab: https://www.niemanlab.org/

Press Gazette (UK): https://pressgazette.co.uk/

A great daily aggregator (with links to more) is Mediagazer: https://mediagazer.com/

8ig8• 9 months ago

Or NPR…

https://www.npr.org/donations/support

pyuser583• 9 months ago

Fair has its own issues - or did last I checked which was a while ago.

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.

jquery3• 9 months ago

90% of reporters are left wing

Citation very much needed. Also, what percent of reporting news organization owners are left wing?

bpt32• 9 months ago

They're so far left that nearly everyone seems right wing to them.

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.

placardloop• 9 months ago

The title makes it seem like this is a major or systemic issue, but the article content essentially says this was a one-off, potentially a mistaken omission that was fixed within 24 hours. The article itself even states that the Post routinely discloses its ties to Bezos in its reporting and this was an anomaly. I used to read the Post (I’m not a subscriber anymore) but I do distinctly remember seeing such a disclosure all over the place. Is this an attempt at outrage clicks?

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.

arusahni• 9 months ago

There are two additional recent ones mentioned in the article:

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.

afavour4• 9 months ago

The article does not say this was a one-off:

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)

terminalshort11• 9 months ago

In journalism you can safely assume that the truth is the absolute minimum claim that can possibly fit with the exact words used.

tpmoney4• 9 months ago

Do Editorial and Opinion sections of news papers do "conflict of interest" disclosures as a matter of course? It seems like it should be assumed that an Opinion article is expressly a biased article, written by someone with an interest in the topic at hand. If the NY Times wrote an editorial on schools or on medicaid, I wouldn't really expect to see a line disclosing the number of editorial staff members with children in the school systems or with family members receiving medicaid.

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.

xrd• 9 months ago

It doesn't appear that you read the article at all. It states the first disclosure was added later, and without comment. And there are two other mentions of conflict of interest. Nothing you wrote is true other than that you aren't a subscriber to the Post.

miltonlost• 9 months ago

The very second sentence of the article disproves your first sentence.

"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.

unethical_ban• 9 months ago

It says the news section is more diligent and that the opinion pages/editorial are the ones omitting disclosures repeatedly.

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.

philipwhiuk• 9 months ago

So at minimum the article disagrees with itself, but it seems the outrage bait is working hook line and sinker.

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.

HillRat• 9 months ago

Even now, the newspaper's reporters do so as a matter of routine.

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.

overfeed4• 9 months ago

Not only does gp seem to have a poor grasp on the differences between Opinion and news reporting, they also fail to correlate the problem with Bezos' ownership, so it seems to them like NPRs article is conflicting with itself when it isn't, in the slightest.

HelloMcFly• 9 months ago

Respectfully, you either skimmed this article to support your point or didn't pay proper attention. I see no ambiguity in this article - none - whatsoever. This is about Bezos's changes to the WaPo opinion pages (including their opinion editorial board), a shift to topics that matter to Bezos, and a clear loss of discipline or intent in conflict of interest disclosures when discussing such topics.

metabagel8• 9 months ago

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.

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.

skybrian3• 9 months ago

My initial reaction to the White House ballroom was “the next president should tear it down and put it back the way it was, just on principle.” I was surprised by that editorial and thought it made a good (or at least arguable) point that it’s needed and the next president will be glad to have it, instead of doing large official gatherings in tents.

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.

mey2• 9 months ago

Is the Whitehouse fit for purpose in the modern age? Probably not. Is it a symbol of the country? Yes. Messing with that symbol on what seems to be a whim funded by corporate interests rather than doing something public and methodical is disgusting. Especially with a government shutdown.

We aren't even getting bread and circuses, just Nero at this point.

buellerbueller• 9 months ago

Sorry you're getting downvoted, but you're commenting on an article about conflicts of interest, among the crowd with the conflicts of interest.

Silicon Valley, Venture Capital: they're the sociopaths whose current project is "disrupting" democratic governance.

eszed• 9 months ago

It's a much more fitting symbol now than it was before.

terminalshort11• 9 months ago

Is it a symbol of the country? Yes

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.

embedding-shape4• 9 months ago

The ballroom discussion isn't even part of the topic here, the point is that an article with clear conflict of interest didn't note the conflict of interest, and didn't do a correction until a 3rd party basically forced them to. And it isn't a one-off, it's now a pattern.

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.

burkaman4• 9 months ago

The issue is not whether or not the White House needs a new room, it's that the private funding model is an incredibly obvious avenue for bribery. Every single "donor" has immediate business with the federal government, and they've seen how easily Trump will sell pardons or diplomatic favors or merger approvals to anyone who pays him enough. There is no other plausible explanation for the list of funders. If this were an important and practical addition to the building, then the government could pay for it without any corruption necessary.

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"?

skybrian3• 9 months ago

Such an article would just be repeating what everyone else already said. The editorial actually said something new (new to me, anyway) that added to the discussion, which seems valuable.

terminalshort11• 9 months ago

It's absolutely bribery, but does it really even bear mentioning compared to the other flagrant forms of bribery going on perfectly legally? Even before Trump turned the corruption levels up to 11, paying retired politicians millions for speeches and massive super PAC donations seem much worse than a project like this where the public actually gets some benefit from it.

cogman102• 9 months ago

it’s needed and the next president will be glad to have it, instead of doing large official gatherings in tents.

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.

metabagel8• 9 months ago

You don't even need this sort of loophole other than to avoid reporting on who's doing the donations.

There is no loophole. What Trump is doing is flatly illegal.

https://www.gao.gov/legal/appropriations-law/resources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act

vjvjvjvjghv• 9 months ago

“ The US corruption laws are laughably bad”

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.

metabagel8• 9 months ago

Trump doesn't have the right to tear down the White House. It doesn't belong to him. It needs to go through a design approval process.

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.

webdoodle• 9 months ago

Citizen's United destroyed journalism by making it for profit propaganda for the wealthy, but its always been under attack.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_Tarbell

https://unlimitedhangout.com/

clircle• 9 months ago

Do we really hold editorials to the same standard as the rest of the news? These are opinion pieces, you should expect bias, no?

delfinom• 9 months ago

People are upset over the wrong bias lol

embedding-shape4• 9 months ago

Regardless if it's in the opinions sections, if the author/publisher has clear biases, especially financial ones, they're disclosed somewhere in/next to the piece.

next_xibalba• 9 months ago

I just can’t believe people even read editorials. In the news outlets I read, they are clearly marked and it makes an easy and instant “skip”.

balozi• 9 months ago

There is a reason they publish opeds right next to hard news. Its not by accident.

insane_dreamer2• 9 months ago

Because the editorial authors are employees of the news organization, they must disclose the conflict of interest between their employer and its owner or parent organization and the matter they are reporting on.

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.

tclancy2• 9 months ago

An individual editorial? No. At the meta level when an outlet only allows a specific direction of bias, that doesn't feel like a good idea to accept.

serial_dev• 9 months ago

Honest question, don’t all newspapers do this? Sure there are subjects where they publish articles representing different opinions, but on core issues (to them) there is only so much wiggle room before they will pull an opinion piece.

mmooss7• 9 months ago

You can have bias without losing honesty and accuracy. The latter is the problem.

eviks• 9 months ago

You should respect bias in the news as well, so pick a different criterion. Also the substance of bias doesn't become irrelevant just because you expect bias.

coliveira7• 9 months ago

The ideal solution is to stop reading newspapers/sites owned by Bezos. I give the WP zero credibility for anything that is not factual. Even then they will distort the facts with opinions that are aligned to Bezos.

ilamont• 9 months ago

WSJ is not owned by Jeff Bezos, but by another billionaire Rupert Murdoch.

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.

mmooss7• 9 months ago

How do you see the WSJ as not biased, when it's owned by Murdoch, who openly interferes in and biases Fox News, as has been demonstrated numerous times including in massive losses in court.

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.

whimsicalism• 9 months ago

wsj newsroom is probably the best national reporting entity, but sure

throwworhtthrow• 9 months ago

The same week that WaPo announced their new editorial policy, I added a uBlock Origin rule to delete the opinion sidebar. It's basically ads run by Jeff Bezos now. There's no reason to expose oneself to it.

Their news reporting is, for now, still decent (and retains its familiar slant).

rtpg5• 9 months ago

The editorial section is really embarrassing. It wasn't really great before but now so many "Editorial Board" pieces are some of the most fact-free power-praising pieces. I rolled my eyes at the "democracy dies in darkness" stuff but that was at least something.

It's fun to jump into the comments, they added voting to the comments and Wapo editorials are really not coming off well.

nitwit005• 9 months ago

The news part of Fox News was essentially fine for a long time. When Trump got angry about their election coverage of Arizona (they correctly called it for Biden), the response was to reorganize the department, and that ceased being true.

Trump was annoyed enough that he started threatening to start a Trump TV network and poach their stars.

coliveira7• 9 months ago

I 100% agree, but need to add that npr also has financial ties to very powerful oligarchs that need to be disclosed. For example, here is what I get when researching the largest donors to npr: "NPR's largest single donor was the estate of Joan B. Kroc, who left a bequest of over $200 million in 2003. Other major donors include foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which have contributed millions to specific projects, as well as the Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation"

archagon2• 9 months ago

Estate bequeathals and foundation grants are a far cry from direct ownership and editorial control by a single oligarch.

coliveira7• 9 months ago

Far cry or not, they're also funded by oligarchs as well.

istjohn• 9 months ago

Donations from multiple foundations, most of which were created by people long dead, are hardly comparable to ownership by a wealthy, living business magnate.

coliveira7• 9 months ago

While the original owners are dead, this doesn't mean the foundation can do whatever "good" you imagine. These foundations are vehicles to keep doing the political bidding of these families and they still operate according to the wishes of the original donors, which are all oriented towards major industries. Or do you really believe people give millions of dollars to whatever cause with zero strings attached?

insane_dreamer2• 9 months ago

The issue is that donors don't have a _controlling interest_ in the organization.

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).

coliveira7• 9 months ago

They don't have control, but these foundations certainly have influence. Similarly for major advertisers, which also have influence in what is aired since editors don't want to anything that will alienate major sources of funding.

burkaman4• 9 months ago

They do disclose them when they are relevant to a story. For example, https://www.npr.org/2025/10/08/nx-s1-5564684/macarthur-overd... and https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/04/15/nx-s1.... They also mention them very frequently on air, anybody who has listened to NPR for more than like ten minutes probably heard them mention the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

You can see a full list of donors in their latest annual report: https://media.npr.org/documents/about/annualreports/2024%20A...

anigbrowl• 9 months ago

I don't listen to NPR, but when I watch PBS Newshour they announce all their sponsors at the beginning of every program and mention the fact of their sponsorship again when there's any connection to an individual report. A recent example that springs to mind if the train derailment and subsequent pollution problems in East Palestine, Ohio; the rail firm BNSF sponsors the newshour but this didn't seem to have any impact on the volume or tone of coverage.

senderista5• 9 months ago

NPR does the same.

senderista5• 9 months ago

And they constantly mention those donors during their news programs!

mhb3• 9 months ago

I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.

https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...

neaden• 9 months ago

What does this have to do with the article?

drak0n1c• 9 months ago

The hollowing out of the readership by ideologically partisan staff is what led to publications becoming overly dependent on the subsidy of wealthy owners, rather than a wider pool of paid subscribers.

morshu90016• 9 months ago

Article is NPR's

samtp• 9 months ago

So a proud 2 time Trump voted says that NRP lost America's trust because they attacked Trump too many times to a new outlet founded by Bari Weiss? Then after resigning from NPR goes on to work for that same outlet?

Forgive me if I find his opinion and the article useless.

mhb3• 9 months ago

You don't seem to have refuted anything he has written.

fdschoeneman• 9 months ago

I agree that Bezos should have disclosed his links to the construction through Amazon, but I also think every single reporter for NPR, including and especially the one who wrote this, should disclose their personal, family, and political relationships to political parties and politicians before reporting on them.

One standard.

seattle_spring2• 9 months ago

You're saying that the rank-and-file employees of a public radio station should be held to the same standard as billionaire owners of private news media conglomerates?

axpy9062• 9 months ago

Probably relates to some of the political controversies surrounding the source NPR here: https://grokipedia.com/page/NPR_controversies

jgeada• 9 months ago

Right, because the guy earning a normal salary has as much influence as the billionaire that is rubbing shoulders with and paying bribes to the decision makers, and also controls the editorial policy, salary and employment of the newspaper in question.

Sometimes quantity of money has a quality all of its own.

ideonexus• 9 months ago

The Saturday editorial "Trump's undertaking is a shot across the bow at NIMBYs everywhere," was the final straw for me. I can forgive an editorial defending Trump's actions--no matter how misguided, but the fact that the WaPo did not disclose Bezos' personal interests in the matter infuriated me bitterly. According to NPR, they corrected the omission on Sunday, but I'm done.

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.

IIAOPSW• 9 months ago

Its impressive how well Bezos has convinced everyone to stop trusting WaPo rather than WaPo convincing everyone to trust Bezos. A paper owned by a wealthy financial interest was hardly unique or novel at the time he took them over, and no one would have been more concerned about it than they already were, and all he had to do was not be overt in his influence and bias of it, but he couldn't refrain.

softwaredoug• 9 months ago

These billionaires don't have a solid feedback loop back to reality

findthewords• 9 months ago

Think about the world's poorest man, and how disconnected he is from the rest of humanity. Now think of the world's richest man. They are equally disconnected.

atmosx• 9 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBZTHxZvOwg - this show was soooo good...

pydry• 9 months ago

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezo...

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.

blitzar• 9 months ago

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.

mmooss7• 9 months ago

I think many people (and the parent comment) are getting played because they don't realize the game and its stakes:

'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.

jquery3• 9 months ago

IMO, the rules haven't changed at all, shit has always been bad. Ask any Black American. The silver lining to all this open corruption is that even the most milquetoast centrists of 2020 are turning into people calling for actual consequences for the corruption going on in our government.

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.

JeremyNT• 9 months ago

Its impressive how well Bezos has convinced everyone to stop trusting WaPo rather than WaPo convincing everyone to trust Bezos. A paper owned by a wealthy financial interest was hardly unique or novel at the time he took them over, and no one would have been more concerned about it than they already were, and all he had to do was not be overt in his influence and bias of it, but he couldn't refrain.

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.

adventured• 9 months ago

Bezos is calculating his years remaining with regards to Blue Origin and that a given President can cause severe disruption to the pathway Bezos has in mind for his organization. I'm sure his ideal would be to finely balance WaPo's reputation and his need to placate the current President, and I'm also certain with Trump it's not doable (so he'll sacrifice some of WaPo's reputation to keep progress going on Blue Origin during the Trump years).

rtpg5• 9 months ago

I do enjoy the theory that everyone was cynically posturing for 4 years during Biden and are now _also_ cynically posturing for Trump, because it aligns with a belief that a lot of powerful people seem to have extremely malleable beliefs.

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!

dangus• 9 months ago

I’m not convinced the layperson is aware.

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.

jquery3• 9 months ago

I didn't know who owned WaPo until Bezos started putting his thumb on the scale.

antegamisou• 9 months ago

Any billionaire-regulated (N"P"R my ass) major news media company accusing other billionaire-owned major news media companies of bias is being hypocritical.

morshu90016• 9 months ago

Article start mentions WaPo not endorsing Harris, as if they're supposed to. I was glad hearing it, but turns out it's only because they have a new master due to Bezos-Trump ties.

Wonder about LA Times too, they used to also endorse Dems.

scottlamb2• 9 months ago

Article start mentions WaPo not endorsing Harris, as if they're supposed to. I was glad hearing it, but turns out it's only because they have a new master due to Bezos-Trump ties.

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.

morshu90016• 9 months ago

I agree she would've been the better choice, but a supposedly unbiased newspaper can't also make such an endorsement, they had to pick one.

11101010001100• 9 months ago

This is the sort of stuff that happens when someone who had one good idea long ago has run out of good ideas.

axpy9062• 9 months ago

I am both bemused and disappointed that the top comments are all political. Kind of plays into what Billionaires like Bezos would want - the commoners bickering and not united.

WalterBright2• 9 months ago

Every media company is subject to the bias of the person or entity that owns it.

yubblegum• 9 months ago

Rather incredible that this needs to be pointed out, specially given the history of press ownership in this nation. Rosebud! /g

WalterBright2• 9 months ago

Yeah, I'm bemused at all the "I'm shocked, shocked to hear that the owner influences the content!"

HEmanZ• 9 months ago

Only tangentially related, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what media format for consumption would inherently produce the least biased, most informed public.

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?

xp84• 9 months ago

The decision to cancel the Harris editorial led to more than 300,000 cancellations by digital subscribers.

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.

Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

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