To be honest, the Amazon Prime thing makes me pause for a moment. What happens when Amazon is involved in a scandal, what will WaPo do?
I can't help but feel like Bezos loves them. I can see him open up the paper he owns, see an attack piece on him, and feel absolutely giddy that he's not going to do anything about it. Because he so desperately wants to be the most self-actualized entrepreneur that ever lived.
(I do not believe in the slightest that the Washington Post is so compromised.)
The Wall Street Journal
They were claiming since the CIA uses AWS to the tune of ~$900 million a year, the CIA has a direct line to WaPo.
Any rational person (including the Post editor who commented on it) would agree this is a non-issue, but it does pose an interesting, all be it slight, conflict.
Guess I'm irrational then. $900M/yr is an insanely substantial chunk of change for even the largest companies in the world.
Nope.
1: http://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-cloud-business-hits-o...
At that level, editorial independence is practically a commandment, and Marty Baron wouldn't allow conflicts like that to happen. Think about it, since any of that would have to go through him, the guy who went after the Catholics in Boston. You're telling me he gets to the Washington Post, of all places, and hangs up his integrity? Come on.
It's amazing how often those fake news theories fly in the face of simple logic, and amazing how effective they are at swaying people who do not utilize it or do not understand how a newsroom works. That's probably the failure we're seeing unfold, that journalism has emphasized content over form and failed to educate the public on exactly how it works, and is asking readers to overlook their increasing distrust in institutions. Journalism looking something like "I spoke to blah, she said blah," with recordings next to the text, rather than the way it's currently written in the third person, is probably a necessary evolution now.
Conspiracy theorists will always find because they want to. I don’t think anyone needs to worry about what they will or won’t latch on to, because worrying about it implies that if something wasn’t the case, they wouldn’t latch on to something else. But they always will.
AWS grosses ~$4Bn yearly, so if the CIA truly spends $0.9Bn (~23%) favours can happen and doors can get opened.
There's nothing "direct" about that, to be sure, but "give me WaPo EOC's cell number" is viable.
Besides the fact that it is not in the interests of the company to report in a way that could negatively affect the stock price, it is also in its interests not to report negatively on topics which could impact its lucrative customer contracts. And on top of it all, if Bezos - the richest man in the world - just gets something in his craw, that could also affect what gets reported, as it has been with every media baron in history.