Editorial Independence Debate

"held to a different standard"Not just that, the newspaper edutorial staff might strongly disagree with the content on those pages. They published it as someone's opinion, not necessarily their opinion.That seems to be a lost art. When Tom Cotton wrote an opinion piece for the NYT, the editor who ran it was gone in a few days. Yikes.

This is nonsense. Of course they're already picking sides with every editorial action they take.It's not like suddenly they're going to switch from being a bulletin board to a publisher. They're already a publisher. They're the first and only worldwide newspaper-tv-town-crier. They pick sides everyday. The only thing left to decide is how honest and open to be about it. The more honest and open they are, the more the jig is up and everybody says "What the hell? W

If someone can prevent publishing they are de facto editors, even if they might not do grammatical editing. E.g. Bezos is probably an editor at his paper.

No. One writer wrote an opinion article. No sane daily (or 24/7) editorial board will dictate the minutiae of an article like that.• Is it factual? Check.• Is the grammar correct (often enough according to a sleep-deprived junior or production editor)? Check.• Confirmed the article reads like a relatively sane person writing something relatively thoughtful and hopefully isn't cleverly disguised Nazi nonsense or the like? Check.• Fits the general tone of the paper? Check.

So much for editor independence.

An endorsement from the editorial desk of a paper is entirely orthogonal to neutral news coverage from the reporting desk.One of the major reasons for concern here is that the non-endorsement was the result of executive meddling by Bezos. If he's stepping in to override the paper's editorial positions, who's to say he wouldn't also interfere if the paper were to report on something he found inconvenient?

You're publishing your editorial content to a large number of strangers here, it is not that different from the situation of reporters. While it is true that no such requirement exists, the reasons to choose the alternate wording are still the same.

1. Publishing an editorial endorsing a candidate is extremely common, both for US papers generally and for this paper specifically. The reasons for that are various but they have nothing to do with what we're discussing here.2. Moreover, that whole question is irrelevant when the editors aren't even making the decision. If Bezos is willing to override them, then effectively he is the paper's editorial board - so there's no "diversity of views" to talk abou

Bezos has no say in editorial.Unless they are all lying and some of the best journalists (who tend to be maybe too ethical e.g. 'equal coverage') are complicit.I could see an argument about access to the opinion section but he doesn't need to own a paper for that.

It is not like a comment on HN. The Guardian editorial staff wouldn't agree to publish it (and pay the author) if they didn't agree with it on some level.