The issue is not whether or not the White House needs a new room, it's that the private funding model is an incredibly obvious avenue for bribery. Every single "donor" has immediate business with the federal government, and they've seen how easily Trump will sell pardons or diplomatic favors or merger approvals to anyone who pays him enough. There is no other plausible explanation for the list of funders. If this were an important and practical addition to the building, then the government could pay for it without any corruption necessary.
An honest editorial might say something like "this addition is a good idea, but why are these specific people (including my employer) paying for it"?
It's absolutely bribery, but does it really even bear mentioning compared to the other flagrant forms of bribery going on perfectly legally? Even before Trump turned the corruption levels up to 11, paying retired politicians millions for speeches and massive super PAC donations seem much worse than a project like this where the public actually gets some benefit from it.
Such an article would just be repeating what everyone else already said. The editorial actually said something new (new to me, anyway) that added to the discussion, which seems valuable.
Imagine reading a thoughtful and substantive HN comment about the benefits of a new product, and then later realizing that the commenter failed to mention they are a major investor in the product. You would feel mildly annoyed or misled, right? Now you have to reevaluate the comment and figure out if it was primarily driven by "engineer evaluating a new tool" or "guy who wants to make money", and you'll probably want to find more unbiased reviews before paying for the product.
Now scale your annoyance based on how important you think the White House and presidential power are relative to some random Launch HN post. In this case, knowing the financial motivations of the publisher, was the editorial actually valuable? They say: "this project would not have gotten done, certainly not during his term, if the president had gone through the traditional review process. The blueprints would have faced death by a thousand papercuts." Is this a misleading premise, was there actually a lot of process and red tape preventing a president from doing this renovation the "traditional" way? I have no idea, and since I can't trust this source I have to go find out some other way.
Did they leave out any other important information? They say: "Privately, many alumni of the Biden and Obama White Houses acknowledge the long-overdue need for an event space like what Trump is creating. It is absurd that tents need to be erected on the South Lawn for state dinners, and VIPs are forced to use porta-potties." Is this true? Again I don't know and I can't trust the authors.
Like the HN investor example, we can't tell if this editorial was primarily driven by "observer knowledgeable about the needs of the presidential office" or "guy who wants the president to eliminate the NLRB". It doesn't mean the editorial is wrong, but it does mean it isn't really valuable because you'll have to find other sources to verify its claims.
> later realizing that the commenter failed to mention they are a major investor in the product. You would feel mildly annoyed or misled, right?
I wouldn't really care if the claims they made were correct. An opinion is an opinion (and we are talking about the opinion rather than news section here) and I find that peoples personal emotional and ideological biases are actually a lot stronger than commercial interests in most cases. So really every single editorial should have a disclaimer "this entire article is biased as hell" at the end, but if it applies everywhere do we really need it at all?
A standard conflict-of-interest disclaimer wouldn't be enough to answer the questions I really have:
- How much is the editorial board influenced by Bezos? Is he actually involved in writing each article?
- What are the discussions like? How do they write these articles?
Without knowing that, which would require insider journalism, not just a disclaimer, I don't really know the authors' point of view. It's basically anonymous. I assume Bezos has a hand in it somehow, if only by choosing the editorial staff. A disclaimer doesn't change that.
Opinions written by strangers are always suspect, but they can still be interesting.
An honest editorial might say something like "this addition is a good idea, but why are these specific people (including my employer) paying for it"?