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The decline of the journalism and its ability to support itself is a long term trend, so it's hard to judge the value of a more centrist WaPo. Especially if combined with a shift of a lot of educated voters to the Democrats.
But having another Democrat-aligned outlet with a slightly more prestigious name also has dubious benefits for Bezos. It's arguably a more certain road to irrelevance.
The people who want that (and are cancelling as a result) are operating on a cargo cult mentality about what makes an institution prestigious and valuable themselves. They seem to imagine that these outlets simply saying things while being who they are makes those things consensus. This is just a justification for entryists to seize these orgs and draw down any credibility they have for what are often silly causes.
Maybe this would be fine if it guaranteed victory at the cost of the business. But it clearly does not in certain cases. Whatever the power of elite journalist consensus to hobble Trump, we've long hit diminishing returns (and they've only been so destructive because Trump can't help himself). You're paying a premium for an influence operation that's just doing what everyone else is doing to no avail if you're Bezos.
It might even harm the party's chances by putting their elites in a bubble. This might not matter to the freeloaders who believe the organization is there to serve their interests but I imagine it matters to the person funding the enterprise.
So I can see why Bezos just ducked beneath the endorsement issue and is pushing back.
It’s news. The value to the average news consumer is that the news is accurate. If I’m reading about the election, the best source is the one that’s accurate and thus allows me to guess at the future. One thing that will help with respectability is that the news source in question is at least pretending to be fair to all sides. Of course as a mainstream news outlet it’s not going to actually endorse Trump because that’s too jarring a change from Narrative. Everyone knows that real news endorses democrats.
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I had a similar thought reading a thread from a few weeks ago about how "the Democrats own the language". We had users on this very forum arguing that "the consensus" is whatever the media says it is and the only thing i could think to say was something to the effect of "thats not what that word means."
I think there is a sort of mind that gets so wrapped up in the world of symbols and symbol manipulation that they have trouble imagining that "The Truth" could be a lie, or that Dan Rather and Brian Stelter might be less than Reliable Sources
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I mean, WaPo as a centrist paper still has to cut costs, so resignations from highly paid editors are probably a nice bonus.
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