• Optional@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    It was surely all over the Washington Post, i mean the amazon guy owns it, right?

    Why wouldn’t it be, yknow, bang, right on the ol front page there?

    • jeffw@lemmy.worldOP
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      7 months ago

      eh, I don’t really buy that. I think WaPo has maintained editorial independence pretty well. Yes, you can find memes that show WaPo pro-Amazon opinion columns, but if you actually look on your own and not just trust the memes, you can find similar opposing views in their editorials that criticize Bezos

      edit: if you don’t believe me, the coverage is evenly split: https://www.washingtonpost.com/search/?query=amazon

      • Krono@lemmy.today
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        7 months ago

        Can I ask, what evidence would you need to see to conclude there is a bias at WaPo?

        If AMZN wanted to buy a propaganda operation, they wouldn’t kill every anti-Amazon story. That would ruin WaPo’s credibility and thus waste their investment. Instead they would kill only the handful of most damaging stories, while also frequently posting tepid criticism of AMZN, which would give us the “evenly split” result you use as evidence.

        • jeffw@lemmy.worldOP
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          7 months ago

          I would need to see skew not present in other mainstream publications. WaPo and NyTimes coverage, for example, or even NPR, none of it significantly varies.

          Look up criticism of all the newsrooms I mentioned and there’s plenty from internal or ex-reporters. “Bezos pressures us” is not one from WaPo journalists. So, I would need to see a shred of evidence, basically. Word of mouth, reporting discrepancies… something besides memes

          • PrinceWith999Enemies@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            I think that’s a pretty reasonable ask.

            What makes sense to me is a sentiment classifier that could measure how negative or positive a given story is, and look for the centroids of the positive and negative clusters.