Media Meltdown and also Media Bias 101

[oblong]

1 hour ago, gehringer_2 said:

Bezos is making the same mistake at the Post that he is making at Blue Origin, which is trying to run them like Amazon. At Amazon - the bulk of the workforce are commodity. Amazon doesn't need them for who they are, it really does only need their bodies. While that management system - as bad as it is, may work there,  isn't going to work for journalism or high tech manufacturing, because those are places where you do need people exactly for who they are - which means that while you can can get away with pitting workers against each other in a warehouse, you cannot in a fundamentally collegial place like a newsroom or a necessarily deeply cooperative one like cutting edge engineering (he has a forced attrition program in place at Blue Origin). Your develop process is going to grind to a halt when every engineer is trying to steal every other guys glory and no-one trusts or will share anything with anyone. Jacques Nasser pretty well proved this at FoMoCo years ago, but the guys like Bezos just don't want to believe it because their ego doesn't let them admit they don't have the only brain that matters.

Rocket Mortgage is the same concept as Amazon. Just milk the employees.

[CMRivdogs]

Was trying to find a new masthead for the WP...

 

[CMRivdogs]

3 minutes ago, CMRivdogs said:

Was trying to find a new masthead for the WP...

 

And remember Bezos also funded the Melania Movie. How many jobs did that cost? 

[romad1]

33 minutes ago, CMRivdogs said:

And remember Bezos also funded the Melania Movie. How many jobs did that cost? 

and yet...if I need something gotten to my house by Friday I'm going to be in most cases forced to use his monopoly. 

I think we need to rein these asshats in. 

[TJ Rollercoaster]

 

[TJ Rollercoaster]

I had posted this in the 'Media Meltdown and bias' thread, rather than the Trump thread to illustrate that with all the media hits and pieces about how the current administration is making things 'safer', it doesn't seem to match the opinion of a large portion of the American population

 

[LaceyLou]

5 hours ago, romad1 said:

Said it after the 2024 elections.  We need a whole new media.   The robber barons are going to control all channels and narratives.  

He also, just before the election, stopped the paper from publishing an endorsement. Then of course he donated to the inauguration.

[LaceyLou]

3 hours ago, romad1 said:

He's the Semaj Morgan of newspaper owners.  Until you prove to me he's not purposefully sabotaging things, i'm only left with the evidence at hand that he is trying to destroy something through his actions.  

I've always assumed he was deliberately destroying it. 

[chasfh]

4 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

Bezos is making the same mistake at the Post that he is making at Blue Origin, which is trying to run them like Amazon. At Amazon - the bulk of the workforce are commodity. Amazon doesn't need them for who they are, it really does only need their bodies. While that management system - as bad as it is, may work there,  isn't going to work for journalism or high tech manufacturing, because those are places where you do need people exactly for who they are - which means that while you can can get away with pitting workers against each other in a warehouse, you cannot in a fundamentally collegial place like a newsroom or a necessarily deeply cooperative one like cutting edge engineering (he has a forced attrition program in place at Blue Origin). Your develop process is going to grind to a halt when every engineer is trying to steal every other guys glory and no-one trusts or will share anything with anyone. Jacques Nasser pretty well proved this at FoMoCo years ago, but the guys like Bezos just don't want to believe it because their ego doesn't let them admit they don't have the only brain that matters.

lol Bezos "making mistakes" at the Post. So adorable.

[chasfh]

2 hours ago, romad1 said:

and yet...if I need something gotten to my house by Friday I'm going to be in most cases forced to use his monopoly. 

I think we need to rein these asshats in. 

Jeff Bezos is not an asshat. An asshat is a guy who spills his coffee on you while wildly gesticulating during a conversation.

Please use stronger language than that to describe Jeff Bezos.

[chasfh]

  

2 hours ago, CMRivdogs said:

And remember Bezos also funded the Melania Movie. How many jobs did that cost? 

This many: 

 

[romad1]

**** you Jeff

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/05/amazon-amzn-q4-earnings-report-2025.html

Quote

Amazon stock falls 10% on $200 billion spending forecast, earnings miss

 

[Tigeraholic1]

16 minutes ago, romad1 said:

**** you Jeff

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/05/amazon-amzn-q4-earnings-report-2025.html

 

LOL you think Amazon is going to fail? I missed the episode of Andor. 

[gehringer_2]

Right now the AI race is a spending black hole across the M7. Maybe one or two of them will eventually make money at it, the rest will likely never recoup their losses. Which is fine, they can afford them, but a lot of investors will likely be hurt.

Edited Thursday at 10:24 PM by gehringer_2

[Screwball]

2 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

Right now the AI race is a spending black hole across the M7. Maybe one or two of them will eventually make money at it, the rest will likely never recoup their losses. Which is fine, they can afford them, but a lot of investors will likely be hurt.

Pardon me if I laugh at a bunch of people who lose a ****load on money on stupid investments, or at least not know when to get in and out. Maybe we need more of that. That's kind of how a "market" is suppose to work. Pain is a lesson.

We are just gnats on an elephants ass and don't have much skin in the game compared to the people in the big club who lose millions.

But it will **** up our 401k just the same. 

[Edman85]

I've liked this guy's (Geoffrey Fowler) columns of late... Helpful, practical tech and privacy advice. For example, one recent one talked about comparison shopping uber and lyft and some studies he did on that to get a good deal.

He was among the Laid Off. Here's one of his columns from October. I'm guessing this was not a coincidence.

[pfife]

Lolic rn

 

[romad1]

All corporations and sports leagues.  GET OFF X!  That's the first thing they tell you do in risk management.  Get off the proverbial X.  We blame you for participating in Musk's racist propaganda machine. 

[gehringer_2]

One the day they carry an editorial criticizing VA redistricting without ever mentioning Tx, WaPo is now sans its most recent Bezos appointed CEO, Will Lewis, who rides off into the Sunset -- probably to a new gig working for Rupert Murdoch. The paper will be run by its CFO for the time being - another blow for solid journalistic continuity.

[romad1]

Reading somewhere that Bezos was mad at Will Lewis because Lewis was at the Superbowl week enjoying the parties while his staff was liquidated.  I think Bezos was mad that people don't like him and are using his product only as much as is necessary for a monopoly.  

[gehringer_2]

27 minutes ago, romad1 said:

Reading somewhere that Bezos was mad at Will Lewis because Lewis was at the Superbowl week enjoying the parties while his staff was liquidated.  I think Bezos was mad that people don't like him and are using his product only as much as is necessary for a monopoly.  

Lewis was supposed to stop the red ink but despite have done Bezos' bidding to make the paper more Trump sycophantic, nothing he did generated any financial turnaround (you don't think those two things could have been related? Nah.). The cost of the Post is chump change to Bezos and he could have endowed the Post with enough to make it independent forever for less than he spent on his wedding, but guys like that don't think that way. His ego demands that his idea of what he wants the paper to be has to profitable, or else the guy that runs it (and a third of everyone else) gets fired.Sure,  Lewis had already checked outo and gone AWOL, he had to already have known the score. Lachan will provide him a nice landing place.

The only question left is whether someone will step up to buy WaPo before Bezos finishes turning it into the STAR.

Edited 2 hours ago by gehringer_2

[romad1]

15 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

Lewis was supposed to stop the red ink but despite have done Bezos' bidding to make the paper more Trump sycophantic, nothing he did generated any financial turnaround (you don't think those two things could have been related? Nah.). The cost of the Post is chump change to Bezos and he could have endowed the Post with enough to make it independent forever for less than he spent on his wedding, but guys like that don't think that way. His ego demands that his idea of what he wants the paper to be has to profitable, or else the guy that runs it (and a third of everyone else) gets fired.Sure,  Lewis had already checked outo and gone AWOL, he had to already have known the score. Lachan will provide him a nice landing place.

The only question left is whether someone will step up to buy WaPo before Bezos finishes turning it into the STAR.

AWS and Blue Origins contracts with the federal government were the most important things that needed to survive the Trump presidency.  If destroying the WaPo is the cost of that, well Bezos did what he needed to do.  

We need a new media and we need serious reform of media ownership.  

[romad1]

Bezos so busy firing Lewis that he forgot he needed to pay to repatriate his reporters who have been putting their asses on the line on behalf of journalism. 

 

[chasfh]

1 hour ago, romad1 said:

AWS and Blue Origins contracts with the federal government were the most important things that needed to survive the Trump presidency.  If destroying the WaPo is the cost of that, well Bezos did what he needed to do.  

We need a new media and we need serious reform of media ownership.  

I don't know that Trump wants the Post to shut down, necessarily. I think he just wants to make sure that the local paper is on board with him. He can't have a major journalistic institution taking potshots at him from his own backyard.

As for serious reform of media ownership, the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine was the "Big Bang" of media deregulation ("television is just another appliance—it’s a toaster with pictures"), which led to The Telecommunications Act of 1996, the most significant ownership loosening in history. We had those rules for a reason. Now we can clearly see what those reasons were.