Linked List: October 28, 2024

Monday, 28 October 2024

Jeff Bezos: ‘The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media’ ★

Jeff Bezos, in an op-ed in his Washington Post:

Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first. Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. [...]

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.

Bezos has always been a good writer, and this piece is no exception. But deciding to change the Post’s policy on election endorsements 12 days before any election, let alone this election, is not “inadequate planning”. Changing the policy, say, this summer, before the Republican National Convention, would be “inadequate planning”. Now though? No.

And how does any of this square with the fact that The Washington Post has an entire editorial and opinion section, that runs bylined opinion columns and commentary from the editorial board every day? You know, the section where this very column by Bezos ran?

As regards trust: declining to endorse a candidate won’t “tip the scales” an iota for Trump supporters who view The Washington Post as “fake news”. All it has done is wipe out large amounts of trust among readers who do — or at least until last week did — put their faith in the publication.

Update: Dr. Drang:

If I’m following Bezos’s logic, he must not just run the Post without letting his other business interests interfere, he must appear to run the Post without letting his other business interests interfere. The easy way to do that would be to keep his hands off the editorial board. I wonder why that didn’t occur to him? (No, I don’t really wonder.)

I wish I’d thought to make that point — Bezos’s own analogy shows how calamitous a decision this was to block an endorsement less than two weeks away from the election.

The Washington Post Has Lost Over 200,000 Subscribers (and Counting) After Trump Bootlicker Jeff Bezos Blocked Endorsement of Kamala Harris ★

David Folkenflik, reporting for NPR:

The Washington Post has been rocked by a tidal wave of cancellations from digital subscribers and a series of resignations from columnists, as the paper grapples with the fallout of owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.

Those former subscribers who, like me, were subscribed through the App Store should already be included in that number. Apple sends developers a server notification upon cancellation, and developers can query the status of the auto-renew toggle at any time.

“It’s a colossal number,” former Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli told NPR. “The problem is, people don’t know why the decision was made. We basically know the decision was made but we don’t know what led to it.”

I misread this statement at first, thinking that Brauchli was saying that we don’t know why so many Post subscribers were cancelling their subscriptions. But I realized after a second read that he’s saying we don’t know why owner Jeff Bezos and publisher/CEO Will Lewis blocked the endorsement, less than two weeks out from Election Day. But we sort of do know. It’s because they’re worried Trump will win and punish, in whatever ways he can, Amazon (which has government contracts for AWS cloud services), Blue Origin (which has contracts with NASA), and Bezos personally. There’s no other explanation for this decision coming when it did, on the cusp of the election.^*

Chief Executive and Publisher Will Lewis explained the decision not to endorse in this year’s presidential race or in future elections as a return to the Post’s roots: It has for years styled itself an “independent paper.” Few people inside the paper credit that rationale given the timing, however, just days before a neck-and-neck race between Harris and former President Donald Trump.

Former Executive Editor Marty Baron voiced that skepticism in an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday.

“If this decision had been made three years ago, two years ago, maybe even a year ago, that would’ve been fine,” Baron said. “It’s a certainly reasonable decision. But this was made within a couple of weeks of the election, and there was no substantive serious deliberation with the editorial board of the paper. It was clearly made for other reasons, not for reasons of high principle.”

It just doesn’t hold water to make a policy change like this 12 fucking days before any election, let alone this election. Part of what is so damaging about this to the entirety of the Post’s institutional credibility — not just its editorial page — is that Lewis’s announcement of the no-endorsement is so laughably false. Lying hurts any person or institution’s credibility. But it’s absolute poison to a news organization. And the publisher/CEO of the Post tried to sell an obvious post hoc justification. It sounds ridiculous but Bezos and Lewis would have been better off just flat out admitting they were blocking the endorsement because they fear backlash from Trump if he wins. At least that would ring true. If you’re going to serve us a pile of dog shit on a plate, tell us it’s a turd. Don’t try to tell us it’s a sandwich.

Credibility is the only true asset a news publication has.

* OK, there’s one other plausible explanation, which is that Jeff Bezos wants to see Trump win. I don’t buy that. Not because I know Bezos’s politics (although Bezos’s statements and charitable contributions on climate change certainly don’t suggest support for Donald “It’s a Hoax” Trump, a man so profoundly ignorant that he’s repeatedly espoused the belief that even if sea levels are rising, it’d be good for the world, because the result, somehow, will be more oceanfront real estate). I just don’t think Bezos would block a Post endorsement of Harris even if he personally were voting and rooting for Trump. Nothing about his stewardship of the Post since purchasing it for $250 million in 2013 suggests he’d do so. He didn’t block the Post from endorsing Hillary Clinton in 2016, nor Joe Biden in 2020. What’s different in 2024 isn’t that Harris offers a different vision than Clinton or Biden, but that Trump has laid clear his agenda of vengeance and retribution against his domestic political enemies, real and imagined, if he returns to the White House.

Apple Introduces M4 iMacs, With Updated Colors, a Nano-Texture Display Option, and USB-C Input Peripherals ★

Apple Newsroom, in the first of what I expect to be a few days’ worth of M4 Mac updates:

The new iMac is available in an array of beautiful new colors, and the 24-inch 4.5K Retina display offers a new nano-texture glass option. iMac features a new 12MP Center Stage camera with Desk View, up to four Thunderbolt 4 ports, and color-matched accessories that include USB-C.

The new colors don’t seem all that different from the old ones, except for green, which seems much more just-plain-green green. The old iMac green was more like teal? It also seems like maybe the new colors are a bit less saturated on the back. The previous pink iMacs looked downright red from the back; the new ones look pink all around.

As a don’t-know-how-I-lived-without-it fan of the nano-texture Studio Display, I’m glad to see a nano-texture option available for the M4 iMacs. (It’s a $200 upgrade.) Fingers crossed that they offer a nano-texture option for the M4 MacBook Pros.

Apple Intelligence Is Available Today, With the Release of iOS 18.1 and MacOS 15.1 ★

Nice rundown of the first wave of Apple Intelligence features from Apple Newsroom. As I wrote last week, my favorite thus far is the notification summaries. The key is not to think of them as a replacement for actually reading the messages — they just serve the same purpose as a well-written Subject line in an email. They just answer — usually quite well — “What’s this stack of notifications about?”

Update: It’s not obvious, especially given Apple’s own hype over Apple Intelligence launching to the public with today’s releases, but you still need to sign up for the Apple Intelligence waitlist to get “early access”. When I signed up during the iOS 18.1 beta cycle, it only took an hour or so before I got in. No idea if that will hold true now that it’s a public release.

(The image generation features (Image Playground, Genmoji, Image Wand) in the next round of Apple Intelligence, in the beta releases of iOS 18.2 and MacOS 15.2 that dropped last week, require a separate waiting list. I signed up for that a few hours after the betas were released last Wednesday, October 23, and I’m still waiting as I type this. The only people I know who have access to the image generation features are those who signed up for it within the first hour — maybe less — of the betas appearing.)