The new gatekeepers use \u2018trust\u2019 to discredit the press and talk about removing bias with AI – distracting us from their own shift to the right<\/p>\n
If we want to know what news organisations will look like under the second Trump administration in America, well, we are beginning to get an idea. At the Dealbook conference in New York last week, Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post and multi-billionaire founder of Amazon, gave a very favourable assessment<\/a> of Donald Trump\u2019s upcoming second term. \u201cI am very hopeful \u2026 he seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation,\u201d beamed Bezos. It was surprising, then, that the Washington Post did not endorse Trump in its pre-election editorial. Instead the writers crafted an endorsement of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris which Bezos killed, in his first act of blatant editorial interference since he bought the title in 2013. In a Post article <\/a>Bezos rationalised his decision as being an attempt to restore trust in the press with what he called \u201cindependence\u201d \u2013 a type of independence which clearly does not extend to damping down public flattery. The headline, run with Bezos\u2019s approval, was \u2018The Hard Truth: Why Americans Don\u2019t Trust the News Media\u2019. Bezos invoked the past of the American press, its historic non-endorsement of candidates and a return to some past notion of \u201cobjectivity\u201d as being a fix for his news organisation\u2019s woes.<\/p>\n Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, had already emulated Bezos by stopping <\/a>the LA Times editorial board from running a presidential endorsement. Soon-Shiong, appearing on the Republican commentator Scott Jennings\u2019 radio show, said that he had been working on an AI-powered \u201cbias meter\u201d which will appear on LA Times articles from January. The motivation was that the medical tech billionaire said he had begun to see his own news title as \u201can echo chamber and not a trusted source\u201d.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The new gatekeepers use \u2018trust\u2019 to discredit the press and talk about removing bias with AI – distracting us from their own shift to the right If we want to know what news organisations will look like under the second Trump administration in America, well, we are beginning to get an idea. At the Dealbook … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28358\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}