The ideal solution is to stop reading newspapers/sites owned by Bezos. I give the WP zero credibility for anything that is not factual. Even then they will distort the facts with opinions that are aligned to Bezos.
The same week that WaPo announced their new editorial policy, I added a uBlock Origin rule to delete the opinion sidebar. It's basically ads run by Jeff Bezos now. There's no reason to expose oneself to it.
Their news reporting is, for now, still decent (and retains its familiar slant).
The editorial section is really embarrassing. It wasn't really great before but now so many "Editorial Board" pieces are some of the most fact-free power-praising pieces.
I rolled my eyes at the "democracy dies in darkness" stuff but that was at least something.
It's fun to jump into the comments, they added voting to the comments and Wapo editorials are really not coming off well.
We have a similar, Murdoch-owned newspaper, The Australian. The news is actually OK, but the editorials and the choice of front-page headlines are some of the most tendentious conservative bullshit you can imagine.
The news part of Fox News was essentially fine for a long time. When Trump got angry about their election coverage of Arizona (they correctly called it for Biden), the response was to reorganize the department, and that ceased being true.
Trump was annoyed enough that he started threatening to start a Trump TV network and poach their stars.
WSJ is not owned by Jeff Bezos, but by another billionaire Rupert Murdoch.
By all means skip the Wall Street Journal's sneering editorials, but don't ignore the reporting. For example, the Theranos scandal was blown open by the WSJ's John Carreyrou. They've done good reporting on Tesla, Epstein, Amazon, and others.
How do you see the WSJ as not biased, when it's owned by Murdoch, who openly interferes in and biases Fox News, as has been demonstrated numerous times including in massive losses in court.
Do you think Murdoch wouldn't do that at the WSJ?
With that signal and the editorial page, I think it's wishful thinking to think the rest isn't biased - people just don't want to lose that institution. Much can be done without the reader knowing - omissions, slant, etc. In the end, you must trust them to a degree.
The core idea with this stuff is you can know about the bias and read with that in mind.
You can treat even the facts with doubts, and understanding that the descriptions used can be influenced by what the writers believe. You can come away and consciously say "I know nothing more about the world than I did before reading this article, except for what Murdoch thinks about this".
And sometimes you'll see something that is "merely" true and you can absorb that information. Or mentally correct based on the biases.
Information collection works even when the person presenting the information has an agenda! It's often possible to mentally unbias reporting when you have a good understanding of the paper's tendancies, and then pull out useful information!
Those are very good points and I agree to a degree ... but ...
You overestimate your and my ability to not get fooled, even when reading and thinking critically. In studies, more educated people are more easily fooled because they think they can detect it.
> "I know nothing more about the world than I did before reading this article, except for what Murdoch thinks about this".
Right, but how is that worth your time? It's not worth my time. There are still plenty much more trustworthy sources out there.
If I'm stuck reading a WSJ article, I do the same as you. But why not find something better?
Adding to my prior comment: The more important the subject is, the more likely they will try to manipulate you.
> Right, but how is that worth your time? It's not worth my time. There are still plenty much more trustworthy sources out there.
Very good point, you don't _need_ to read this stuff, and you can go towards things that are "better".
I find that Wapo has decently comprehensive coverage on some issues. The journalists draw "wrong" conclusions, and I just no-op that, but I've found it helpful, and there's often more detail than provided in other places. But I generally do some subsequent research after reading most of their articles. But maybe there's something else I could be reading instead.
The Washington Post has its own ownership problems, as you probably know. The NY Times is an obvious option (that I assume you've considered). If you want a signal of trust, look at their opinion section which is spread across most of the spectrum, unlike WSJ and Wapo; they do have their own biases IME - anti-Trump, anti-progressive, pro-Israel.
The Financial Times is good but insanely expensive. The Economist has a clear bias they are open about and is excellent but not really journalism - they don't give both sides a voice, dig up facts; the provide (succinct, sophisticated, lively) analysis. The Guardian obviously has a leftward bias but seem intellectually honest to me.
The Associated Press and Reuters, but they output too much. Curated news feeds can be very good, especially at finding a range of sources.
These newspapers manipulate not just with opinion, but also with the selection of what to focus on. They want you to care about certain things and not to know or even hear about others. It is a game of molding perceptions daily.
Yes, this is part of the exercise. Gotta think creatively about universes where what's written is what's written and where you could find other information. Primary sourcing is way easier than the past!
It's better when you have newspapers you can trust to do this in a way you like for you, but absent that... time to read a couple different articles
