Employees outraged at ‘chicken-shit’ move that breaks 30-year precedent, alleging Jeff Bezos quashed Harris support
There was uproar and outrage among the Washington Post’s current and former staffers and other notable figures in the world of American media after the newspaper’s leaders on Friday chose to not endorse any candidate in the US presidential election.
The newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, announced on Friday that for the first time in over 30 years, the paper’s editorial board would not be endorsing a candidate in this year’s presidential election, nor in future presidential elections.
After the news broke, reactions came flooding in, with people criticizing the decision, which, according to some staffers and reporters, was allegedly made by the Post’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos.
Karen Attiah, a columnist for the Washington Post who writes a weekly newsletter, called the decision an “absolute stab in the back”.
There’s unbiased as in, “if two groups disagree, we won’t do anything to favour either side”.
And then there unbiased as in, “we will report the facts as best as we can tell them, regardless of which sides, if any, those facts favour”.
Reuters, as I understand it, is more the latter than the former. But too many major media organizations are the former.
Whichever one of those definitions of “unbiased” you subscribe to, the other will seem biased, unless both sides are doing the same thing (eg both lying or both being honest and accurate).