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Look, when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post a decade ago, people worried that a billionaire owner might interfere with the paper’s editorial independence. For years, those fears seemed overblown — Bezos appeared content to let journalists do journalism while he focused on more pressing matters (like building rockets and not paying taxes). But it turns out the worriers were right, just early.
In the last few months, Bezos has made it increasingly clear that the Washington Post now exists primarily as a vehicle for expressing Bezos’ opinions, not anyone else’s. (To be clear, he has every right to do this — it’s his paper! — though it’s a bit rich to claim this somehow builds “trust” in journalism.)
The first indication of this editorial interference was Bezos’ decision to block the WaPo from endorsing Kamala Harris before the election. Bezos later claimed that this was necessary to bring back “trust” in journalism, totally missing that the real way to destroy trust in journalism is… to have billionaires stepping in and interfering with the journalism.
But that was just the appetizer. The main course of billionaire meddling arrived in an email Bezos sent to all employees:
I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.
We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.
There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.
I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity.
I offered David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t “hell yes,” then it had to be “no.” After careful consideration, David decided to step away. This is a significant shift, it won’t be easy, and it will require 100% commitment — I respect his decision. We’ll be searching for a new Opinion Editor to own this new direction.
I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void.
Jeff
Let’s enjoy the rich irony of this ridiculous email together, shall we?
We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.
First off, this sounds like the late night bong-fueled thoughts of a college kid who just discovered Ayn Rand, not a 61 year old ultra billionaire who should recognize that the world contains more nuance and complexities than “personal liberties and free markets, good; everything else, bad.”
Look, I’m sympathetic to the broad strokes here. Techdirt’s whole ethos is built around personal liberties and free markets. But there’s an important difference: we recognize these concepts as complex systems that require careful calibration, not simple catchphrases to be wielded like rhetorical clubs. And — much more importantly — we’ve spent years documenting how the loudest champions of “personal liberty and free markets” often use those very words while systematically dismantling actual liberties and enabling good old-fashioned crony capitalism.
The billionaire freedom paradox works something like this: Elon Musk, who has clearly appointed himself America’s shadow president, has spent the last almost three years falsely claiming that he is all about bringing back the “personal liberty” of free speech… while actually doing a tremendous amount of work to suppress and stifle the speech of those who challenge him.
And it’s not just an Elon thing. Consider Rupert Murdoch, who for decades positioned himself as the world’s most prominent champion of free market capitalism. Right up until his own businesses started losing in that free market. Then, suddenly, the invisible hand didn’t seem so wise anymore, and he demanded corporate welfare in the form of special taxes on the companies beating him at his own game. (Funny how that works.)
We see this pattern so often it might as well be a law of nature: the volume of someone’s “personal liberty” rhetoric is inversely proportional to their actual respect for others’ liberties. Call it the Billionaire’s First Law of Freedom. Hell, if Bezos was all about “personal liberties,” why is he blocking the opinion team from having the “personal liberty” to write about things Bezos disagrees with?
There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.
This argument might sound familiar to media watchers. It’s essentially the same logic the NY Times used when killing its public editor role: “Why have internal accountability when the internet exists?” (A question that answers itself, really.) In both cases, these newspapers fundamentally misunderstand both their own role and how the internet actually works.
Here’s the thing: The Washington Post’s Opinion pages don’t derive their value from being yet another place to read opinions (we have plenty of those, thanks). They matter because of decades of hard-won institutional credibility and editorial infrastructure. When something appears in the Washington Post, it carries weight precisely because it’s gone through that process, because there’s at least a general sense of an institutional commitment to certain standards.
Now, has this system sometimes failed? Absolutely. The WaPo Opinion section has published its share of terrible takes over the years. (Boy, have they ever.) But Bezos’ announcement doesn’t even pretend to address quality control or editorial standards. Instead, it just declares which opinions are allowed: specifically, the ones Jeff likes. It’s less “building trust in journalism” and more “building an extremely expensive personal blog.”
And, in doing so, it simultaneously undermines the long-held institutional credibility that provided so much value to the Washington Post in the first place.
I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity.
Paraphrasing: “And therefore, I am taking away that freedom from my staff, and the opinion writers they bring in to make sure that the Washington Post no longer has creativity, invention, or prosperity.”
I mean, seriously. Read that again. It’s like declaring yourself Champion of Democracy by abolishing elections (I dread how long until this analogy comes true).
As for David Shipley’s resignation (after being stripped of his own “personal liberties,” naturally), the message couldn’t be clearer: The next Opinion editor’s job description might as well read “Must be willing to serve as Jeff Bezos’ ideological ventriloquist dummy.”
Again, he is absolutely allowed to do this, as it is his property. But it’s a major shift in the way people think of the Washington Post and what they will expect from it. And, whether or not they trust it.
I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void.
Ah yes, the famously underserved “free markets and personal liberties” opinion market. A genre about as neglected as superhero movies in Hollywood, or AI companies in venture capital portfolios.
What Bezos really means is that he’s upset that the WaPo Opinion pages has, on occasion, called out the nonsense and excesses of the billionaire class, and the institutional failures to curb crony capitalism. And he’s sort of right — most serious publications tend to engage with these ideas as complex policy matters rather than using them as rhetorical sledgehammers to promote whatever simplistic goal the billionaire class wants this week.
Let’s codify what we might call The Ultra Billionaire’s Guide to Freedom™:
(Note: This guide is subject to change without notice, especially if the free market starts producing outcomes the billionaire doesn’t like.)
The Washington Post Opinion section has effectively been transformed from a forum for diverse viewpoints into Jeff’s Personal Newsletter About Freedom. Multiple WaPo journalists have already recognized this and called it out. While the opinion side and news side traditionally maintain separate territories, several news-side reporters have made it clear that any similar encroachment on their turf will trigger a mass exodus. (A personal liberty they still retain, at least for now.)
When Bezos first dipped his toe into editorial interference by blocking the Harris endorsement, over 300,000 WaPo subscribers voted with their wallets and cancelled their subscriptions. (The free market at work, you might say.) If you’re one of those ex-subscribers looking for a publication that still believes in actual journalistic independence — and not just as a marketing slogan to whitewash billionaire guilt — feel free to check out the many ways you can support Techdirt.
And, Jeff, you’re free to donate as well, but we won’t change our editorial policies for anyone.
Filed Under: editorial, editorial freedom, editorial interference, free markets, jeff bezos, opinion sections, personal liberties
Companies: washington post
Last October, Trump sued CBS claiming (falsely) that a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris had been “deceitfully edited” to her benefit (they simply shortened some of her answers for brevity, as news outlets often do). As Mike explored, the lawsuit was utterly baseless, and tramples the First Amendment, editorial discretion, and common sense.
CBS/Paramount is looking for regulatory approval for its $8 billion merger with Skydance (run by Larry Ellison’s kid David). Trump and his FCC boss Brendan Carr quickly zeroed on on this, and began using merger approval as leverage to bully CBS into even more feckless coverage of the administration.
Carr’s assault hasn’t been what you’d call subtle. Last week that even included changing the FCC website to try and redirect visitors to whine about CBS’ supposed editorial bias:
At first, there were signs that CBS, like ABC, was going to let Trump bully the company and settle the complaint. But there’s some indication that Carr and Trump’s behavior has finally pissed off CBS and Paramount enough for them to develop something vaguely resembling a backbone. Maybe.
Last week CBS/Paramount lawyers began indicating they may fight the FCC, with CBS lawyers throwing all kinds of things at the wall, including claims those suing violated fine print arbitration requirements and that the Trump administration is engaged in pretty obvious judge shopping:
“Its multipronged legal strategy revolves around arguments that Trump is judge-shopping, choosing to file the lawsuit at a court where a sympathetic judge is likely to oversee the case, and the possibility that those suing the company agreed to arbitration clauses when they used services hosted by the entertainment conglomerate.”
Earlier in February, Trump revised the complaint to add Republican U.S. Rep. Ronny Jackson, his former doctor who lives in Texas, to keep the case in Trump-friendly federal court in the Northern District of Texas. CBS wants the case transferred to its hometown of New York for what should be obvious reasons:
“U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who’s overseeing the litigation and is the only judge in the Amarillo division of the court, was nominated to his position by Trump in 2017 and has been a member of the Federalist Society since 2012. In his five years on the bench, he’s issued rulings against several initiatives implemented by former President Joe Biden, some of which were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Republicans have been seeding their friendly news outlets (like the NY Post) with the bullshit narrative that CBS is in legal trouble because it has a “left wing bias.” In reality, Trump’s FCC boss is a power-abusing extremist, who wants to bully all media companies into kissing Trump’s ring.
The great irony in all of this is that like so many media giants, CBS had already responded to authoritarianism by making its journalism gentler to Republican ideology years earlier, in response to the all-pervasive lie that the corporatist, center-right U.S. press has a “liberal bias.”
It’s worth noting that CBS’ attempt to appease extremist right wingers has only resulted in more harassment by said right wing, providing useful lessons to other media companies considering throwing their journalistic standards and the First Amendment in the trash in order to kiss the ring.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, brendan carr, donald trump, editorial, fcc, free speech, journalism, lawsuit, media, mergers
Companies: cbs, paramount
Billionaire media owners are getting bolder in their attempts to suppress opinions they dislike. The latest example comes from LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who reportedly plans to personally review all opinion headlines to ensure they don’t offend Elon Musk or others that Soon-Shiong is trying to impress.
Considering the billionaire class keeps pretending that they’re concerned about free speech, then doing shit like this suggests it’s really speech criticizing themselves and the levels of corruption and obscene wealth that they actually dislike.
In October, we covered the decisions by the billionaire owners of the LA Times and the Washington Post to block both papers from running editorials endorsing Kamala Harris. WaPo owner Jeff Bezos tried to defend this decision by claiming that it was in response to Americans losing trust in the media. However, as we pointed out, it seemed a lot more likely that billionaires aggressively trying to control our lives through the media is a better explanation for that loss of trust.
We had noted that LA Times owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, had tried to get a cabinet position in the first Trump administration, which might have explained his reasoning. And now it appears he’s taken things to a new level. According to Oliver Darcy (who is very plugged in to the media world), Soon-Shiong got so upset about an opinion piece that criticized Elon Musk that he has declared that all headlines for opinion pieces must be run through him personally before the pieces can be run. This has alarmed the newsroom.
As Darcy notes, this all seems part of a pattern of Soon-Shiong trying to ingratiate himself into Trump/Musk circles:
Soon-Shiong, who once fashioned himself as a Black Lives Matter-supporting vaccine proponent, has morphed into a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Jennings fanboy. Since Trump’s victory in November, Soon-Shiong has turned to X to criticize the news media, praise Trump’s cabinet picks, and appeal to a MAGA audience. The change in behavior has confounded his journalists, who wonder what happened to the Soon-Shiong whose newspaper enforced strict Covid restrictions and emphasized its support for social justice causes.
But Soon-Shiong’s efforts to reduce the appearance of bias go beyond just reviewing headlines. Darcy notes that Soon-Shiong’s supposed “solution” to complaints of “biased news” is that all stories published by the LA Times will have an AI-powered “bias meter” on them.
This seems like a deeply misguided idea, designed mainly to placate critics who see any coverage they dislike as biased, rather than to do anything useful. Especially in an age where it has been shown repeatedly, and scientifically, that the Republican world is buried in layers upon layers of bullshit. That means, as Stephen Colbert once noted, “reality has a liberal bias.” In such a world, reporting accurately may be deemed as “biased” towards liberal beliefs.
When one political party is increasingly untethered from facts, attempting to artificially “balance” coverage is not actually going to improve trust or accuracy. It’s just going to cause people to dig in further on their beliefs across the board, based on AI systems whose entire purpose is to make shit up.
This kind of meddling by billionaire owners will only further erode public trust in media. It sends the message that news outlets serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful rather than the public. And in an era of rampant misinformation, it will drive more people to retreat into confirmation bias bubbles, explaining away any news they dislike as “biased.”
We like to think that a big part of the media’s role in society is to hold the powerful accountable. But now the powerful are transforming the media to make sure they can’t be held accountable at all.
Yes, of course, as the owner of the newspaper, Soon-Shiong has every right to do whatever stupid shit he wants to do with it. He has the right to do all of this. Just as I have the right to call out how stupid and trust-destroying it is.
And, as Darcy notes, it’s demoralizing the reporters in his newsroom:
The meddling has alarmed staffers, some of whom now harbor concerns that the billionaire presents an active danger to the paper they once believed he might help rescue.
“The man who was supposed to be our savior has turned into what now feels like the biggest internal threat to the paper,” one staffer confided in me Wednesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity, like others, because they were not authorized to talk to the press.
This story is based on nearly a dozen conversations over the last week with current and former staffers at the newspaper. The staffers described a publication depleted of its spirit in which employees are “offended,” “confused,” and “frustrated.” After a year of turbulence in which the Times underwent painful layoffs and lost top editor Kevin Merida, along with several other high-ranking editorial leaders, staffers are now coming to terms with their rule-by-tweet owner using the newspaper as an apparent vehicle to appeal to Donald Trump. Several veteran staffers told me that morale has never been lower, with some people even wondering whether the newspaper will be disfigured beyond recognition under this new era of Soon-Shiong’s reign.
It’s difficult to see how any of this is useful as journalism. It seems entirely based around massaging the egos of certain billionaires.
Filed Under: ai, bias meter, editorial, elon musk, journalism, patrick soon-shiong, trust
Companies: la times
We’ve been covering the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), which is a blatant handout by Congress in the form of a link tax that would require internet companies pay news orgs (mainly the vulture capitalist orgs that have been buying up local newspapers around the country, firing most of the journalists and living off of the legacy revenue streams) for… daring to send them traffic. We’ve gone over all the ways the bill is bad. We’ve gone over the fact that people in both the House and the Senate are (at this very moment) looking for ways to sneak it into law when no one’s looking. Indeed, there are reports that there will be an announcement tonight that it’s included as a part of the National Defense Appropriations Act (NDAA).
The whole thing stinks of corruption. Politicians often rely on local newspapers for endorsements to win re-election campaigns, so they want to keep local papers happy. And it’s the perfect kind of corrupt handout for Congress. It’s not even using “taxpayer” funds. It’s forcing other companies — the hated internet companies — to foot the bill.
And, here’s the thing: the newspapers themselves are now stumping for the bill.
Newspapers nationwide are running editorials today in favor of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which passed a Senate committee with bipartisan support in September and has been waiting ever since for a floor vote.
Which… seems pretty sketchy when you think about it. The newspapers don’t seem likely to be running any editorials, or even op-eds, highlighting the problems and cronyism of the JCPA. Because, why would they? If it passes, it’s literally free cash for the companies.
What newspaper will run articles explaining how the JCPA won’t help journalists, but rather their private equity owners? What newspaper will run articles explaining how the JCPA fundamentally breaks the concept of the open internet where you can link anywhere you want for free? What newspaper will run op-eds explaining how the JCPA messes with copyright law in dangerous ways by implying a new right to demand a license for links or fair use snippets?
If “newspapers nationwide” are stumping for the JCPA in their editorial pages, then it looks like we have to assume that they’re not open to anything highlighting the problems and dangers of the bill.
And that, alone, should cause people to worry. It’s showing how these news orgs are willing to forget about basic fairness in their coverage in order to stump for a corrupt handout for their owners. Shameful.
Filed Under: congress, corruption, editorial, jcpa, journalism, links
Former New York Times reporter Ben Smith and friends have launched a new media company named Semafor on the back of $25 million in donations. You might recall that one of the organization’s launch events didn’t go particularly well: a “trust in news” event that somehow didn’t see the problem with platforming and amplifying millionaire propagandist Tucker Carlson as a respectable voice in media.
From the start, Semafor has tried to portray itself as a truly unique take on news, and their introductory post by Smith once again takes this tack. Smith goes through what he believes are the major pitfalls in modern news (too many reporters with opinions! too many outlets telling people what they want to hear! too much focus on the U.S.! not enough outward bound linking to other reporters’ work!).
Many of these problems are true. And both Semafor and Smith claim to have a new formula that will fix all of them in one fell swoop. But when you read the paragraph about what Semafor is specifically doing differently to restore trust in news, it’s filled with fairly routine observations and ideas — presented as if nobody on Earth had ever had them before:
Our approach is more literal, and it’s built from the core principles of journalism. We take people seriously when they say they know that reporters are human beings — and experts in their beats — who have views of their own. But they’d also like us to separate the facts from our views. They’d like us to be humble about the possibility of disagreement. And they’d like us to distill differing views, and gather global perspective.
That’s all fine and good, but again, nothing here is particularly unique. A focus on more international stories is particularly welcome in an understandably U.S.-obsessed press (especially tech), but again, outlets like RestofWorld have already made this observation and are doing a good job serving that underserved market (and in a not particularly dissimilar font).
Fairly routine concepts are portrayed as foundationally revolutionary:
Some of them think we can pull this off. Others think we’re a little nuts. Our approach “flies completely in the face of what most people are currently doing,” Morgan said.
Granted the work will speak for itself, and many of the reporters they’ve collected (including Smith himself) are incredible scoop machines. But the specific claim you’re going to single-handedly restore trust in news — without actually presenting any original thoughts on that front — is bizarre hubris.
The outlet claims one of the key ways they’ll differentiate themselves is by separating out a reporter’s view from the established facts using what they claim is a revolutionary new design for articles that breaks out journalist opinion and analysis into its own section:
Introducing Semaform. We’re redesigning the atomic unit of written news, the article. pic.twitter.com/J5ySwc0BuX
— Semafor (@semafor) October 18, 2022
But when you actually read some of the pieces in question, the changes in question aren’t particularly revolutionary, and many of the reporters (so far) aren’t being given a long enough leash to truly explore this supposedly newfound freedom:
After reading a few @Semafor launch pieces, I kinda wish the "[Reporter]'s View" sections actually included…the reporter's view?
Instead it seems to be a section for some very standard-issue context/analysis, e.g.https://t.co/ETwkiYfdNO
— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) October 18, 2022
As Techdirt has pointed out on constant occasions, one of the biggest problems with U.S. news is the “he said, she said,” “view from nowhere” style of reporting that’s prevalent at outlets like Politico, Reuters, Axios, and many others. Reporting that takes a pseudo-objective approach to news, framing everything with a bizarre false-symmetry that buries factual reality in a pile of perfectly balanced quotes.
This kind of reporting spent decades burying the truth on subjects like racism, climate change, and corruption. It’s also been just mercilessly exploited by fascist propagandists and white supremacists the world over who are eager to “flood the zone with shit,” degrade trust in established institutions and the press, and befuddle the public before introducing their easy solution (hate anyone who isn’t like them).
Calling a spade a spade (in this case a massive, effective right wing conspiracy and propaganda apparatus built over 45 years across old and new media) will cost you readership, so it’s arguable that Semafor literally can’t fix (much less honestly identify) a major source of the trust in news erosion they claim to have a solution for. David Roberts offered up this thread that gets at a lot of what’s frustrating me:
… to wit: any journalistic outlet that hews to basic journalistic values (above all, accuracy) is going to be labeled left-wing by the current right.
You're either fair & accurate or you appeal to cons. This is not a circle that can be squared.
— David Roberts (@drvolts) October 19, 2022
The real money is in sacrificing truth to placate everybody — most especially the U.S. right wing — lest you lose Conservative viewers. You can see outlets like CNN and CBS embracing this pivot. It results in a sort of mushy Axios/Politico “both sides” journalism that again normalizes fascism because it’s financially disadvantageous to honestly and candidly call out conspiratorial authoritarianism as what it is.
You’re simply going to make more money placating authoritarians and hoovering up the ad-engagement bucks created by the controversial, divisive bile they’re pumping into the discourse.
It’s all underpinned by a myopic institutionalism that thinks reporters should be fired for expressing human opinions on Twitter (or for having done some activism in college), but is happy to pander to Amazon during Prime Day, or remain blithely obtuse to how the inherent bias of white, affluent, male, editorial leadership helped normalize everything from climate disaster to creeping U.S. authoritarianism.
Again, there’s very little indication from Smith’s post that Semafor and its editorial leadership understand any of this. And again, the outlet’s very first event, specifically focused on “restoring trust in news,” platformed a key far right propagandist as a legitimate journalist without, at any time, calling a duck a duck or holding his feet to the fire for a decade of dangerous and ignorant propaganda.
That doesn’t portend great things editorially, and while hopefully the outlet’s quality reporting truly does restore some faith in the press at a very dangerous time in U.S. politics, there’s also a very real possibility this is just Axios in a new font, run by trust fund DC access brunchlords with an overpowering allergy to upsetting powerful advertisers, event sponsors, and sources when it truly matters.
Filed Under: ben smith, corruption, editorial, fascism, he said she said, journalism, media, media criticism, reporting, semafor, trust in news, tucker carlson
Companies: semafor
As the Senate does its little song and dance today over surveillance reform, kudos to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board for producing what has to be one of the most ridiculous opinion pieces on this debate to date. It’s called The Anti-Surveillance Rush, and its main argument is that the Senate shouldn’t be “rushing” through this debate, and that it should instead simply do a clean extension of section 215 of the PATRIOT Act to allow for further debate. This is wrong and it’s clueless. The WSJ editorial board can be nutty at times, but the level of cluelenssness displayed here really takes it to another level. Let’s dig in.
The Senate is supposed to be the cooling saucer for political passions, but surveillance opponents want it to be a slip ?n slide instead: They want the Senate to accept wholesale revisions to counterterrorism programs with little if any debate before Congress skips town for vacation at the end of the week. We hope Senators show more respect for their institutional dignity.
Little if any debate? Are they serious? This round of debate started almost exactly two years ago when Ed Snowden revealed the extent of the phone metadata collection program under Section 215. There have been numerous hearings, tons of public debate, articles, books, movies and more discussing this very topic. To pretend that this is a last minute debate is simply ridiculous. As for the claim that these are “wholesale revisions,” most everyone admits that the changes are really not that major, but rather a small step towards actually respecting the 4th Amendment, but without any real changes to overall capabilities.
The House jammed the Senate last week with a bill that passed 338-88 and remakes intelligence collection of metadata phone records. House leaders of both parties know that floor time is limited and that the legal authorities for metadata, roving wiretaps for people who move across the U.S. border, and several other programs lapse in June. So their ultimatum is either to wave through their bill or undermine national security.
Almost none of that is true. After all, there was a similar debate last year on a nearly identical bill, and there has been widespread discussion about this for months. The fact that Section 215 sunsets next week has been known since the last renewal, and all of Congress has had years to work on a new solution.
In fact, let’s compare this to another piece from the WSJ editorial board two years ago, in which it celebrated Congress’s decision to renew the FISA Amendments Act (which houses a similar surveillance program) with little to no debate at all. There, the WSJ was excited:
With scarcely any notice, much less controversy, they did at least preserve one of the country’s most important post-9/11 antiterror tools.
[….]
In September the House passed the “clean” five-year extension that the White House desired, 301 to 118. The Senate reserved all of a single day of debate on the floor to coincide with the post-Christmas fiscal cliff chaos, and a broad bipartisan majority defeated multiple amendments from the civil liberties absolutists on the left and right such as Kentucky’s Rand Paul.
The bill was then whistled through 73-23 and Mr. Obama signed it Sunday night with no public comment other than a one-sentence statement from the White House press secretary indicating that the bill had been signed. Meanwhile, the press corps was wigging out about Facebook’s privacy settings.
So, as long as it’s granting more power to spy on us, the WSJ is against public debate. When it’s about limiting such spying, the WSJ whines about how there’s not enough debate. Fascinating.
Back in 2012, the editorial board was so positive that the spying was overblown that it mocked those who had worried about these programs (this was just months before the Snowden revelations:
That would be wiretapping, which you may recall liberals portrayed during the George W. Bush era as an illegal and unconstitutional license for co-President Dick Cheney and his spymasters to bug the bedrooms of all U.S. citizens. But now Washington has renewed the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that were due to expire at the end of 2012, with no substantive changes and none of the pseudo-apoplexy that prevailed during the Bush Presidency.
Funny how it’s tough to have “apoplexy” when all the details are kept secret. Of course, now we know how much spying was being done, Congress actually wants to fix it, and the WSJ can’t have that.
Back to the present article. The House did not “jam” this to the Senate. This issue has been known about and discussed for months. And, basically no one — not even within the intelligence community — is arguing that this “undermines national security.”
The better outcome would be a clean, temporary extension that allows the Senate sufficient time to consider the details and understand what it is doing.
Bullshit. This has been debated for two years. Everyone — especially the Senate — has known about the June 1st sunset since it was put in place during the last renewal. And they still waited until the last minute to do this song and dance. A temporary extension will mean that they’ll wait until the last minute of that extension for a similar song and dance and the WSJ can publish another clueless editorial saying we need more time for debate again.
Who do they think they’re fooling?
The USA Freedom Act, which the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees negotiated with the White House, is a panicky political response to the Edward Snowden-inspired frenzy over surveillance
The Snowden leak on this program happened almost exactly two years ago. The USA Freedom Act has been discussed and debated for well over a year in various formats. How is this a “panicky political response”?
Supposedly government spooks are bugging your bedroom and reading your emails?though they aren?t?and politicians want to be able to say they did something about it.
Strawman alert. No one is actually claiming that. They’re claiming — truthfully — that the NSA is engaged in bulk collection of phone records, a program that two separate review boards by the President found illegal and unconstitutional and the important Second Circuit appeals court found illegal last week as well. Does the WSJ editorial board believe its readers are too stupid to know this?
Yet bulk call log searches are an important analytic tool that aid terror investigations and prevent attacks.
This is simply not true. As has been pointed out multiple times, the intelligence community could not provide a single example where that was the case. The only example presented was how it was used to track down a cab driver in American who sent some money to a questionable group in Somalia. That’s it. There is no evidence that it was important in any terror investigations or in preventing a single attack.
From there, the WSJ whines that since the USA Freedom Act leaves data collection to the telcos, all hell is going to break loose:
In the best scenario, this untested leap to replace a framework that has been useful in the 14 years since 9/11 will make intelligence more time-consuming and less efficient. Speed and agility matter in uncovering plots or safe houses. And how multiple databases that are likely to be less secure than the NSA?s will protect privacy is anyone?s guess.
The “less secure” line is a bullshit red herring — because the telcos already keep this data, so nothing changes there. It’s just that the data is not also being held by the NSA. Second, the idea that this new process is somehow more time-consuming and less efficient doesn’t have any actual support. Telcos have already shown to be all too willing to work closely with intelligence agencies to give them near real-time access when necessary. That’s not suddenly going to go away.
But the House bill also declines to define how long telecoms must retain metadata. A year, a month? Who knows? If Washington?s relationship with Silicon Valley grows more adversarial, service providers may conclude it is in their commercial interests to erase these records more or less in real time. In that case the NSA won?t be able to look for a needle because there won?t be a haystack.
First, this seems to confuse “telcos” with “Silicon Valley” when they’re very different things. Second, this conflates a bunch of different issues and suggests near total ignorance on the part of whoever wrote this editorial. Many of the records that the NSA wants are the kinds of business records that these companies need to hold onto for some period of time, so the fear of “no logs” is kind of meaningless. But, even if it was true that companies started to flush their logs, so what? There is no requirement that all of our activities be tracked. Law enforcement made due in the past when not everyone was automatically tracked all the time. They can do so again.
Among the GOP presidential field, Marco Rubio has come out in favor of metadata, while Chris Christie gave a thoughtful speech Monday on intelligence and foreign affairs in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Thoughtful? The one where he says all civil liberties fears were “baloney” coming from “extremists”? Yeah, that wasn’t thoughtful. That was bombastic bullshit from a surveillance state apologist. Remember, this program was just declared illegal (with a strong hint of not being Constitutional) by the 2nd Circuit appeals court. And the WSJ is defending it.
A rush to the exits is no way to conduct U.S. intelligence, or the affairs of Congress. If a majority of Senators really do want to disarm in the terror war, then they should defend their positions, listen to the other side, and be accountable for the results. Cramming such a major policy into law before a holiday weekend is a failure to treat national security with the seriousness it deserves.
No one is disarming anyone. They’re just making sure that the NSA can’t unconstitutionally scoop up every bit of metadata under what is an illegal general warrant. And there is no rush. Again, this debate has been two years in the making (or longer if people had actually listened to Senator Wyden). And if this debate deserves seriousness, it should at least start with the WSJ not totally misrepresenting the whole thing.
Filed Under: editorial, patriot act, section 215, senate, surveillance, usa freedom act, wsj
Companies: wall street journal
Nearly a year ago, we wrote about an absolutely ridiculous situation in which Google AdSense threatened to cut off all of our ads (which they had just spent months begging us to use) because the ads showed up on this page, which has a story about a publicity rights dispute concerning a music video that includes someone dancing suggestively around a pole. The morality police at AdSense argued that this news story — which was about a legal dispute concerning the video — somehow violated AdSense’s terms against putting the ads on content including “strategically covered nudity” and “lewd or provocative poses.” Apparently, the AdSense team has no “newsworthy” exception to these idiotic policies.
After that story was posted, we heard from people inside Google who insisted that they were pushing the AdSense team to deal with similar situations in a much smarter way: such as simply turning off the ads on those individual pages rather than killing entire accounts. But, frankly, even that is pretty pointless. Why not fix AdSense’s terms so that having ads appear on a news story about such content doesn’t trigger the threat to shut down AdSense altogether?
It appears that the AdSense morality police still haven’t figured this out. Last week a similar kerfuffle arose when the AdSense team threatened antiwar.com because it had an article (from a while back) that posted the infamous photos of US soldiers mistreating prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Those photos are famous for their newsworthiness, and yet Google AdSense said they were a terms of service violation for being “violent or disturbing content, including sites with gory text or images.”
After that story started to get some press attention, Google backed down… but only for a few hours, before coming back and complaining about another article on Antiwar’s site, showing images of people killed in Ukraine.
As with the threat to kill our own AdSense account, this is simply idiotic. Yes, Google can set whatever terms and conditions it wants for sites to use AdSense, but acting as morality police — especially over newsworthy content on news websites — is profoundly stupid and shortsighted. We had hoped that our experience with a similarly ridiculous policy decision by Google last year would convince the company to fix its policies. Unfortunately, it appears that Google is still playing morality police and trying to dictate editorial choices.
Filed Under: abu ghraib, adsense, editorial, journalism, morality, news, violence
Companies: antiwar, google
We’ve tried debunking the ridiculous concept of “search neutrality” a few times now. It’s an invention by a few telcos who were upset that Google was supporting net neutrality rules (something I don’t support). So they came up with this concept of “search neutrality” to get back at Google. But, of course, the situations are entirely different. The reason why people believe in net neutrality is because your ISP controls what you can do online. You don’t have a choice. When it comes to search, not only do you have the ability to make an instant choice, but the whole point of a search engine is to “rank” results based on what it thinks is best. You can’t be “neutral” because a “neutral” search is just a unranked list of links that may or may not have anything to do with what you’re searching for.
But, it appears the editorial folks over at the NY Times have gotten confused by all of this, and are saying that the government should step in and ensure that Google’s algorithm is “fair”:
Still, the potential impact of Google’s algorithm on the Internet economy is such that it is worth exploring ways to ensure that the editorial policy guiding Google’s tweaks is solely intended to improve the quality of the results and not to help Google’s other businesses.
Some early suggestions for how to accomplish this include having Google explain with some specified level of detail the editorial policy that guides its tweaks. Another would be to give some government commission the power to look at those tweaks.
It’s difficult to think of anything more ridiculous than a news publication calling for the government to step in and review the editorial guidelines of another company. So, just as the the telcos did with Google, why not flip this around, and make the same point about the NY Times. Here’s my attempt:
The potential impact of the NY Times’ coverage on the world/economy/war/etc. is such that it is worth exploring ways to ensure that the editorial policy guiding the NY Times’ coverage choices is solely intended to improve the quality of the world, and not to help the NY Times’ or other businesses.
Some early suggestions for how to accomplish this include having the NY Times explain with some specified level of detail the editorial policy that guides its front page choices. Another would be to give some government commission the power to look at those guidelines.
How would the NY Times (or pretty much any journalist) react to that? My guess is not too kindly.
Danny Sullivan, it appears, had a similar idea and rewrote the entire NY Times article as if it were talking about the NY Times (rather than just the two paragraphs I did here). He then goes into detail on why the whole thing is bunk.
Search engines are very similar to newspapers. They have unpaid “organic” listings, where usually (though not always), a computer algorithm decides which pages should rank tops. The exact method isn’t important. What’s important is that those unpaid listed are the search engines’ editorial content, content it has solely decided should appear based on its editorial judgment.
Search engine also have paid listings, advertisements, which aren’t supposed to influence what happens on the editorial side of the house. We even have FTC guidelines ensuring proper labeling of ads and intended to protect against “advertorials” in search results.
It’s a church-and-state divide with good search engines, just as it is with good newspapers.
What the New York Times has suggested is that the government should oversee the editorial judgment of a search engine. Suffice to say, the editorial staff of the New York Times would scream bloody murder if anyone suggested government oversight of its own editorial process. First it would yell that it has no bias, so oversight is unnecessary. Next it would yell even more loudly that the First Amendment of the US Constitution protects it from such US government interference.
He also points out why Google is significantly more transparent than the NY Times about its own editorial policy:
Still, shouldn’t Google share more about how it creates its algorithm? Compared to the New York Times, Google’s a model of transparency. Consider:
- Google will list EVERY site that applies for “coverage” unlike the New York Times, which regularly ignores potential stories
- If Google blocks a site for violating its guidelines, it alerts many of them. The New York Times alerts no one
- Google provides an entire Google Webmaster Central area with tools and tips to encourage people to show up better in Google; the New York Times offers nothing even remotely similar
- Google constantly speaks at search marketing and other events to answer questions about how they list sites and how to improve coverage; I’m pretty sure the New York Times devotes far less effort in this area
- Google is constantly giving interviews about its algorithm, such as this one in February, along with providing regular videos about its process (here’s one from April) or blogging about important changes, such as when site speed was introduced as a factor earlier this year.
There’s a lot more in Sullivan’s piece that basically debunks pretty much every myth that people (beyond just the NY Times) are making out to be an issue about Google’s “neutrality” in search. Hopefully this silly concept goes away, but I fear there are too many lobbying dollars invested in it, that folks like Sullivan are going to have plenty of opportunities to re-debunk this concept in the future.
Filed Under: editorial, journalism neutrality, neutrality, oversight, search neutrality
Companies: google, ny times
A bunch of folks have been sending in the news that Italian regulators have begun an investigation into Google, at the request of some Italian newspapers. The complaint is a typical one from newspapers who seem slightly clueless about how Google works. They say that Google News is unfair — even though they can opt-out, but don’t. The newspapers falsely claim that if they opt-out of Google News, they also have to opt-out of Google Search. That’s simply untrue. But even if it were true, I’m not sure what the point would be. Getting traffic is a good thing. It’s unclear why Italian newspapers (or any newspapers) don’t like it.
In fact, the whole idea that Google News is unfair for sending traffic is undermined by the other complaint from the newspapers: that Google doesn’t reveal how it ranks stories:
Because Google does not disclose the criteria for ranking news articles or search results, he said, newspapers are unable to hone their content to try to earn more revenue from online advertising.
Of course, that’s silly. First, plenty of people have figured out how to optimize for Google — there’s a whole industry called SEO that does that. That doesn’t mean that Google needs to reveal the secret sauce. But the best response to the demand for Google to reveal how it ranks stories comes from Danny Sullivan, who turns the story around, and wonders how newspaper would feel in the other direction:
No newspaper editor of any quality would allow an external interest to walk into their newsroom and demand to know exactly how to guarantee a front page article about whatever they want. But that’s what the Italian papers seem to desire. Google has an editorial process for producing rankings, one that’s done using automation — but the papers seem to want to bypass those editorial decisions.
Exactly. The newspapers are basically demanding that their stories get ranked higher, but how would newspaper editors feel about the subjects of stories in the paper demanding that their stories be on the front page. After all, being on the front page would get the subject of a story more attention, and the newspaper isn’t paying those subjects — so the newspaper is “getting all the value.” — at least according to newspaper logic.
Sullivan also does a good job highlighting how useless it would be if the newspapers did get the details on how Google ranks stuff, because then everyone would just start writing stories to get to the top of the list, and any “advantage” would be lost. Separate from that, shouldn’t we be just a bit troubled to find out that the newspapers are interested in figuring out how to write stories that top Google, rather than writing stories to better inform the populace?
Filed Under: antitrust, editorial, google news, italy, journalism, news, ranking, seo
Companies: google
Earlier this year, I wrote about how too many newspapers thought that adding “community” just meant putting comments on stories. That’s not really engaging the community, though. While we’ve seen a few examples of newspapers doing a better job of really engaging communities, this new story out of Belgium may be one of the best examples so far. A reporter for a newspaper there, De Tijd, had been experimenting with some live blogging solutions, and decided to basically liveblog an editorial meeting where the paper decided how to cover a developing chapter in the financial crisis. While some others in the editorial meeting were nervous about “opening up” their editorial process, it actually was quite useful.
The wider community contributed plenty of useful feedback both on what they hoped the newspaper would cover (which was different than what the editors originally planned to cover), but also in providing more details about what was really important. It gave the journalists there much more insight into the real story, rather than the usual shallow coverage that often comes out of newspaper reporting on a sudden crisis (for example, recognizing that interbank lending — or the lack thereof — was a much bigger story than a collapsing stock market). It became truly interactive, with various journalists bouncing ideas off of the community and getting a lot of real time feedback to create a much better product.
Even more interesting was that after the reporter shut down the live chat, many in the group simply organized themselves into an IRC chat room and continued the conversation themselves. It’s a fascinating story of how a newspaper embraced an actual community, rather than simply thinking that community was something you add on as a module at the end of the “real journalism.”
Filed Under: belgium, community, editorial, financial crisis, newspaper
Companies: de tijd
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