hitting the unsubscribe button is totally fine, actually
Goddamnit, i have managed to avoid venting my spleen about US politics on LiveJournal for a long time because, honestly, nothing has changed since this time 8 years ago, when almost half of country's voters got whipped up into an anti-immigrant frenzy and cast their ballot for a celebrity conman who has spent his entire, privileged, elite life
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I grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, and all the newspapers in my world -- local and national -- endorsed candidates - local and national - the week before the election. It was as if the newspaper was taking a stand because no columnist signed these endorsements. (TV stations did not endorse)
I always wondered whether newspapers needed to do this. Should newspapers as an entity be partisan? Can they speak for all who work there? My responsibility is to read the facts and form my opinions, not base my opinion on the paper's endorsement. Don't they trust the reader to think critically through the data presented? I believe all our news sources are now way too partisan. Fox is Right. MSNBC is Left. And so on. And endorsements make them more so.
However, within a newspaper (or news outlet), I appreciate columnists stating their opinions and explaining why they feel like they do. They take responsibility for their views when they sign the column or editorial. They aren't necessarily speaking for the newspaper, just themselves, but, IMO, the newspaper should be a receptacle for all views. I especially appreciate editorials in the same newspaper with conflicting views. Yeah. Dream on.
What happened at the WAPO was really screwed up. IMO, it had to do with timing. To suddenly refuse to endorse this close to the election looks suspicious. Knowing they would probably endorse Harris, did Trump twist Bezo's arm to keep them from endorsing Harris? Did he cave to this (potential) authoritarian leader's request? That's how it looks to me.
The decision to stop Newspaper endorsements should be made when no upcoming elections are on the horizon. However, individual columnists should never be silenced, and news reports and opinions should be clearly marked as such.
With so many news outlets, Bezos's action was really stupid. People know there are many other (mostly partisan) places to get their news, and they are fleeing WAPO in great numbers.
How the media should work is complex, and this comment is inadequate. Even basic "factual" news reports are biased because they use or emphasize only certain facts, and conveniently forget others. In doing so, it twists the news. I wonder if any reporter is capable of totally unbiased reporting? Biases permeate everything one does, but, IMO, I now think the media is making less effort to be impartial.
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I think you are missing my point a little bit. The talking point that newspapers shouldn't endorse a candidate anyway is a distraction from the main problem - the undermining of editorial independence.
From my perspective, it is unrealistic to pretend that newspaper editorial boards have no opinion on anything. They're made up of human beings, and specifically human beings whose job it is to be well-informed on the major issues facing their readership. Of course they have opinions! How or if they choose to communicate those opinions are up to them - that's what freedom of the press means.
Most newspapers make the decision to separate out news and commentary (opinion/editorial) sections, which in the old days meant physically separate, so readers could freely throw the entire opinion section in the trash the moment they bought the paper. (I used to do that with the sports section.) Some publications make the decision to communicate primarily through commentary, usually magazines with long-form writing or essays. A few publications attempt to solely report facts and avoid any opinions leaking out at all, but unless you are going direct to Census.gov and downloading the spreadsheets there is still an editor somewhere, and their opinions on which topics are more important than other ones are visible in the final product.
TLDR, it's a red herring to complain about objectivity in the media, and almost always this argument is either made by conservatives preemptively trying to discredit anything that challenges the status quo or by extremists whose goal is to undermine the public's trust in institutions altogether.
When a newspaper's editorial board addresses the readership and makes clear their point of view, then that is actually the newspaper being open and honest about their editorial priorities. It's a service to the reader, and it is an opportunity for people to understand the context in which the publication exists and how they are approaching their reporting. Showing transparency in this way increases trust, because the guiding principles of the publication are laid out in the open.
What happened at WaPo and LA Times is exactly the opposite - it was censorship. The editorial board wanted to address the readership on a topic that they felt was important, but that was overruled by the ownership, who are not journalists, who have no experience reporting on the issues of the day and who have not done the work to build trust with the readership. It's even more shameful when these owners make Orwellian statements that their explicit muzzling of journalists was in fact about increasing trust in the press. Are you kidding me? It would be funny if so many people weren't nodding sagely and stroking their chins and saying "well golly gee, those billionaries sure have a point, the media is biased and only they can fix it".
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Your comment mentioning Fox being right and MSNBC being left also made me think about television news and how this framing of either of those outlets as serious news sources is not helpful, imo.
The issue with America media right now was already well-defined by Stephen Colbert in a joke he made at the White House Correspondents' Dinner almost 20 years ago: "reality has a well-known liberal bias!"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2X93u3anTco
The sad thing is that reality actually doesn't have a liberal bias, but the American media ecosystem has become so deeply centered around sensationalist reporting of absurd nontroversies that whenever someone tries to discuss a serious issue without cherry-picking a few facts to construct a BS narrative it's dismissed as elitist, simply because it's not low-brow trash. The Daily Show pointed it out yet again just the other day in a skit where Ronny Chieng was trying to get Jordan Klepper to report on policy proposals but instead he kept derailing the topic into "LOL, Biden made a gaffe".
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wdBDpSUEoV0
Or John Oliver, whose team recently did the legwork to explore exactly how JD Vance was the source of the entire dumb weeks-long news cycle about Haitian migrants in Springfield.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_hIOdiYYSnc
And who benefits from all the sensationalist reporting on Fox, CNN, MSNBC, Facebook, X, Reddit etc? Investors, advertisers and/or billionaire owners, which is to say not we, the people. The goal is not to inform or even to entertain. It's to keep people engaged and outraged, because that's what makes money.
As usual I recommend watching PBS Newshour if you really must watch television news.
And if you're wondering why I am including social media alongside cable news, it's because social media is the same but worse: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-instagram-meta-deceptive-political-ads-election Who stands to gain? Those following Trump's example: scammers and grifters.
In my current job working to identify and take down abusive use of computer systems it has become painfully clear just how widespread fake/bot accounts are on social media. The scale of the problem is massive, and it's backed not just by con artists and organized crime but also state actors seeking to sow discord and undermine democracy altogether. These are the kinds of people benefiting from trash media organizations that are not transparent about their editorial policies (conveniently misrepresented as "the algorithm" in social media so as to absolve the owners of taking responsibility).
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