Staff members must be sensitive that perfectly proper political activity by their spouses, family or companions may nevertheless create conflicts of interest or the appearance of conflict. When such a possibility arises, the staff member should advise his or her department head and the standards editor or the deputy editorial page editor. Depending on circumstances, the staff member may have to recuse himself or herself from certain coverage or even move to a job unrelated to the activities in question. - NY Times ethics handbook, https://www.nytimes.com/editorial-standards/ethical-journali...

Search for 'appearance', and you will find many other examples where journalists have to avoid not only conflicts of interest and bias, but even the appearance of them. Because an outside observer cannot distinguish between the two.

Is there really no-one as qualified (or more) they could have chosen, that does not have such a blatant appearance of bias, if they really wanted unbiased journalism?

That was a direct quote. "The group will be led by Tara McGowan, a former Democratic strategist who previously ran a progressive non-profit called ACRONYM."

This is a partisan organisation until it firmly proves itself otherwise. Maybe this is a radical change where billionaires start promoting objective truth instead of their own interests, but extreme scepticism (moving well into cynicism) is the sensible default.

I recognized her name and she's pretty dyed in the wool political operative. She worked at the largest democratic super PAC.

She ran the company shadow which was the cause of the Iowa election issues in 2020 and started ACRONYM to be an incubator for startups that can help the Democratic party.[0]

There's also a really good freakanomics interview with her where she goes into her motivations pretty deeply. It describes her like this.

"Venkatesh interviews the progressive political operative Tara McGowan about her digital successes with the Obama campaign, her noisy failure with the Iowa caucus app, and why the best way for Democrats to win more elections was to copy the Republicans."

And has quotes like this that I found pretty chilling when I heard it.

"MCGOWAN: I’ve always focused on not just the other side, but what tactics have been successful in building power, whether they are something I would morally agree with or not. And I still feel that Republicans and Democrats approach building power in very different ways. I have always had a very high threshold for risk. And I really felt more — not aligned with how Republicans did it — but basically understanding that if we were ever going to really compete and win, we needed to play the game as they were playing it and not just hope that we could win playing it the way we always had."

She also talks about how she started ACRONYM, which is a dark money org, bc she took inspiration from the Koch brothers and wanted to build a progressive equivalent.

Not really who is go with for a fact checking org.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym_(organization)

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/bonus-sudhir-mcgowan/

Hoffman and Soros backed. Two ultra progressive people. There is no chance in hell this will be anything other than extremely one sided.

“Backed and launched by progressives” seems like a show of partisanship by itself - if they’re conscious of the concern, why couldn’t they find a token conservative to join in?

How can you trust that people who have been activists till now will suddenly stop being activists ?

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice.

Anyway I am all for innocent until proven guilty for normal people. Organizations, corporations and people in power? Those I assume guilt for, since it is almost certainly correct.

Of the proposition that any doubt should never be applied to you and what you say, unless and until it has been definitively disproven: I, for one, am skeptical of its falsity.