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Well, that’s an interesting response to last week’s comment on Bezos and the Washington Post. To my mind, the difference in perspective comes from regarding journalism either as a commercial venture or as a public service. In many ways, it is both. The former perspective gives rise to arguments about the need to sell newspapers and give readers what they want, the latter gives rise to concerns about the rich and powerful interfering in the independence and viability of the paper.
The quotation in your newsletter doesn’t say what it is that readers want. I’m not a reader of the Washington Post, but I want journalists reporting with integrity. Academia and journalism have in common that they can, and in my view should, speak truth to power. When Bezos ruled that the paper’s opinion pages would promote free markets and individual liberties and nothing else (an intervention so notorious that it now appears on the Wikipedia page for the Washington Post), this was not about speaking truth to power, and probably had more to do with what Jeff Bezos wants than with what readers want. Firing Lizzie Johnson while she is reporting from Ukraine, as you and The Guardian both report, also seems unlikely to be something that readers want.
I think I lean more towards the journalism-as-public-service perspective. I’m not convinced that the foremost aim of journalism should be to provide what readers want. But I am convinced that the foremost aim of journalism should not be to reflect what owners want.
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