i understand the logic here but in both cases i think it's pretty easy to trust the product considering how obvious it was that the editorial sides didn't participate in this? - ThreadSky

edzitron.com • 164 days ago

i understand the logic here but in both cases i think it's pretty easy to trust the product considering how obvious it was that the editorial sides didn't participate in this?

Reposted from ben schwartz

cancelling a "washington post" or "la times" subscription isn't about hurting their billionaire owners financially, it's about not paying for a product you no longer trust. the billionaire isn't the center of the story here, the reader is. if you can't trust the news organization, it's worthless.

Comments

worldofcrap.bsky.social•164 days ago

Maybe you missed the statements from his underlings that run the paper defending the decision. It’s not JUST Bezos, it’s that the whole C suite is now boot lickers.

edzitron.com•164 days ago

yeah i mean i don't consider them editorial

davidw1457.bsky.social•164 days ago

Sure but we can't see the influence that they are putting on editorial because we aren't in the room. We CAN see what they did w/r/t endorsements. You can believe that this is the limit of their corrupt influence, but I don't think it's wrong to doubt that is the case. A trust was broken

kbenjaminstone.bsky.social•164 days ago

My thought is, they can go work for somebody else.

buchman.bsky.social•164 days ago

But the fact that the owner might just do this kinda thing is part of the product.

If I went to a restaurant and the owner came in and put a turd on a plate I wouldn't blame the waiters or the usual chef. But I still wouldn't eat there.

insidejoke.bsky.social•164 days ago

A shame that Lewis and Bezos have both failed, if not actively worked to occlude, that point.

insidejoke.bsky.social•164 days ago

I think a crux of the issue here is that it was treated as a "corporate decision" where you just send an email to the workers telling them what is and will be, when it should have been treated as a PR decision, where the need was to prepare, explain, and justify the decision to the public.

imadifferentbird.bsky.social•164 days ago

Even so, this is proof that the billionaire owner can and will overrule the editorial side any time he damn well pleases. Why would anybody trust that outlet ever again?

jordanw2382.bsky.social•164 days ago

I'll say more. In his business Jeff Bezos has been garbage, and this decision did indeed stink of fear, but as far as owners go journalists would crawl over broken glass to have him over a VC vulture firm a la the Tribune and Hearst butchers. It hasn't been WaPo getting dunked by Sweeney all summer

edzitron.com•164 days ago

that being said: if you don't like the content don't subscribe, that's fine. But this doesn't seem to be a situation where that's the reasoning

cormacaroni.bsky.social•164 days ago

There will nevertheless be Bezos jokes attached to every single WaPo story with a slant the viewer doesn’t like for now til eternity. The well has been poisoned.

mihailim.bsky.social•164 days ago

Subscribers aren't a homogeneous mass. It seems entirely plausible to me that cancellations would cluster with subscribers who valued the institution and the principles, such as they still were.

godhammer6.bsky.social•164 days ago

Like, if you want to punish Bezo's the more direct route would be to cancel your Prime membership and delete your Amazon account.

maocat.bsky.social•164 days ago

There’s people who have already done this in the past though, we exist! There’s not much you can add on top of it as a consumer, unless you happen to personally use AWS for some reason.

godhammer6.bsky.social•164 days ago

Then your job is done! You no longer feed the beast.

maocat.bsky.social•164 days ago

It’s easier for non-US people I think. Even though I do read English sources, there’s no direct connection between that source’s location and mine. It’s still something I’d recommend though — diversifying your online order and reading sources whenever feasible.

thurberteam.bsky.social•164 days ago

I don't care whether people cancel or not. WaPo was my local paper. Over time, it had less local content & aimed for a national audience. That meant few reasons to choose *that paper* over another. It recruited "savvy" political reporters who were focused on the race, not what policy meant.

andkenbrbr.bsky.social•163 days ago

My experience with the very ownercentric media of Brazil is that even when there are signed articles they are likely to suffer editorial interference to fit into the owner agenda. You can't be a half virgin, infortunatley.

whetstone.bsky.social•164 days ago

better reasoning would be that it might help scare the owner into getting his mitts off editorial, and switching sub dollars to smaller/scrappier news orgs would be good for journalism overall

(i do not sub to wapo so no dog in this fight, but much like the nyt they do some really quality work)

edzitron.com•164 days ago

if that's the logic it's also sound, though i don't think such a thing would work.

whetstone.bsky.social•164 days ago

bezos seems unchill about the number of cancelled subscriptions, but also the whole endeavor costs him like the equivalent of our penny, so aside from the embarrassment it's true that it won't hurt him at all if wapo goes tits up

alecf.bsky.social•164 days ago

Yeah, I find protest votes like this, expecting it to somehow hurt Bezos doesn't make much sense to me. I get the notion of trust, but I'm not about to think that the entire WaPo staff, including editorial, are somehow suddenly untrustworthy. Journalists write the lines, not Bezos.

tumescentnumpty.bsky.social•164 days ago

I'm guessing for the people who decided to pull the trigger it was the straw that broke the camel's back rather than the precipitating reason.

ktbobaytee.bsky.social•164 days ago

Except this isn't the first time. Lewis pushed Buzbee out because she wouldn't squash negative stories about him and he replaced her with one of his cronies.

optimant.net•164 days ago

My perspective for my adult life has been that subscribing to the NYT or WaPo or even the LAT is about consuming the “paper of record” for a community or the nation. And canceling in response to bad owner action is a signal that the stock of the title is dropping, which bad owners might understand.

cpo10za.bsky.social•164 days ago

Those billionaires showed that we can’t trust them to not inject their biased or self-serving interests into content decisions. They killed the papers’ credibility, & won’t even acknowledge their bad decision in the face of backlash from readers, employees & media experts. How can we trust them?

readyamesfire.bsky.social•164 days ago

Wouldn’t ppl cancelling their Prime subscriptions en masse hurt Bezos more? Or not even since he’s no longer CEO.

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