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Comment by spondylosaurus | Hacker News Reader

> "We'll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others."

You can share your opinion... as long as it's the correct opinion :)

FWIW I do think papers can/should exercise discretion with the opinions they're willing to publish—not hard to imagine why someone might not want to platform hardcore extremists, hate speech, or just generally unwell people—but this is ridiculous. Especially since it's a clear move to favor the interests of said paper's billionaire owner.

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> You can share your opinion... as long as it's the correct opinion :)

That's obviously true of every newspaper in existence. No employee is allowed to publish any opinion that goes against their employers' wishes.

From: https://nypost.com/2024/05/30/media/ex-new-york-times-report...

Two people were fired at the NYT after publishing a perfectly reasonable op-ed.

And from: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10170541/Bari-Weiss...

"In the book, Bowles tells the stories she wasn’t allowed to tell at the [New York] Times: She writes, for example, about Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, which transformed into a police-free “autonomous zone,” or CHAZ, Antifa protests, and the experience of attending an anti-racism training called “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness.”"

Unless I'm misunderstanding, opinion columns aren't exclusively written by employees, though. Sometimes they have guests.

I'm also a little skeptical of the NY Post and Daily Mail as sources, considering both are tabloids... do you have any others on hand?

> Unless I'm misunderstanding, opinion columns aren't exclusively written by employees, though. Sometimes they have guests

It's important not to mix up "writing" and "publishing"

Something might be written by a guest writer but it is absolutely published by the employees of the magazine

I am sure that Bezos doesn't really care what anyone writes as long as the things he doesn't want published don't get published.

Opinion pieces are often syndicated. The Washington Post has its own writers group, which has a large stable of writers with a variety of viewpoints. They also run guests and people syndicated from other groups.

Oh, that's interesting. I assume some of the syndication gets fanned out to smaller local papers?

Yep. Most of it. You'll see the same people in newspapers across the country.

And not just smaller papers. Even the big papers will run articles syndicated by the other papers. You'll see George Will's name pop up everywhere -- he's part of the Washington Post Writer's Group.

> I'm also a little skeptical of the NY Post and Daily Mail as sources, considering both are tabloids

And yet both have good content regularly that other publications won’t carry due to their bias. The format of printing doesn’t matter.

The format of the printing isn't what is being described by the word 'tabloid' and it hasn't been for decades. Anyone who is not in the business of printing a newspaper would normally interpret 'tabloid' to indicate a low-quality sensationalist newspaper. In the UK the industry switched to calling the format itself 'compact' because of this.

My second link was incorrect, sorry. I thought I had fixed it during editing. I pulled the quote from here: https://www.deseret.com/entertainment/2024/05/19/nellie-bowl...

> In the book, Bowles tells the stories she wasn’t allowed to tell at the [New York] Times: She writes, for example, about Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, which transformed into a police-free “autonomous zone

She has a book to sell, and she’s using the well-trodden path of outrage on right wing news sites to sell it.

Meanwhile her story is actually published in the New York Times. Although I was at CHAZ and i don’t know if this is a good-faith retelling of the situation. For example, not mentioning the violence experienced in Chaz was not due to lack of police but rather right wing counter protesters roaming and causing trouble.

https://archive.is/2020.08.07-113728/https://www.nytimes.com...

> not due to lack of police but rather vigilantes roaming and causing trouble.

I wonder why the vigilantes thought they could get away with it

The first part of your quoted sentence, for those wanting to know what those pillars are:

"We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets".

I'm not familiar enough with US ideology, but those 2 topics seem, perhaps too narrow? In my country, something about protecting consumers and also about equality and egalitarianism would be considered essential.

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