The Washington Post, like all major publications, reports on Uber quite a bit. In fact, it’s done so about a dozen times in the past week alone. But unlike every other publication, its corporate interest in the mobile phone-based car service company is more than journalistic in nature.
The Post‘s sole owner, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, is a major shareholder in Uber. In 2011, Bezos and two other investors, Menlo Ventures and Goldman Sachs, collectively invested $32 million in the then-fledging startup. Because Uber is a private company, it’s impossible to know the exact current value of Bezos’ investment, but assuming the three investors contributed evenly, the last valuation of the company would put his stake in Uber at roughly $1.5 billion. To put that in perspective, it’s approximately six times what Bezos paid for the Post in 2013.
While the Post occasionally mentions this glaring conflict when covering Uber, a large majority of its Uber-related articles make no mention of the boss’s stake. It’s unclear what criteria the Post uses to either disclose or not disclose the conflict of interest. (An email to the Post requesting an explanation went unanswered.)
Obama aide turned Uber spokesperson David Plouffe, depicted in the Washington Post.
One recent piece is of particular note because it’s effectively a press release from Uber:
In New Push, Uber Tries to Position Itself as the Cure for America’s Economic Ills
Wage stagnation? Transportation deserts? Labor force participation? There’s an app for that, says Uber-booster David Plouffe.
Writer Lydia dePillis pushes back around the margins, but mostly lets Uber’s PR flack–and former Obama speechwriter–David Plouffe get Uber’s major talking points across. Now disclosures are typically the purview of editors, so this isn’t to speak ill of dePillis, who was simply doing the job of a typical business beat reporter. But the problem remains: Readers have a right to know that the person who writes her checks has billion dollars or so worth of stock in the company she’s reporting on.
A Washington Post piece on Uber’s new offices was illustrated with a symbol of the company’s global ambitions. (Photo: Lori Aratani/Washington Post)
Another piece from Friday was far worse, with transportation reporter Lori Aratani giving an entirely uncritical tour of Uber’s new Washington, DC, office, laced with pro-Uber propaganda:
A Look at Uber’s New DC Digs
…“DC is growing as a place to attract new tech talent,” said Rachel Holt, Uber’s regional general manager for the East Coast. And the hope is that the company will become what Holt terms a “foundational company” in DC’s evolution into a tech hub. The 55,000-square-foot offices are a sign of the company’s commitment to the city, she added.
This is followed by some pictures of Uber’s new digs, complete with breathless job-y, growth-y prose. The two pieces give a good overview of the Post‘s Uber coverage: Not that the Post doesn’t run the occasional piece critical of Uber, but most of its coverage falls into one of two categories: straight neutral-tone reporting or fawning tech/business pieces.
Regardless of the nature of content, though, conflicts this basic–as in, our boss stands to make a substantial fortune from the success of this company–typically require disclosure, if only to fend off the appearance of impropriety.
What makes these frequent lack of disclosures even more troubling is that Uber isn’t really a “tech company” in a traditional sense–it’s a highly scalable union- and regulation-busting operation that has tremendous political consequences. Thus its propaganda isn’t just promotional in nature, it’s ideological–and it’s an ideology that, not coincidentally, aligns perfectly with Bezos’ libertarian politics.
Indeed, according to one back-of-the-napkin estimate, Uber burns through $10 million in legal fees a month, litigating and lobbying government regulators from across the globe to deregulate in their favor. This would make a disclosure even more urgent since repeating Uber’s talking points isn’t just a run-of-the-mill tech puff journalism, but a distinctly political exercise designed to influence public opinion on key policy issues.
The Washington Post, to its credit, consistently discloses Bezos’ position as CEO when reporting on Amazon. The conflict with Amazon isn’t that Bezos is CEO (for which is he is paid a mere $81,840 a year), it’s that he has a tremendous stake in the company’s financial success. The same is true for Uber. While it’s true that in relative terms, Bezos’ $44.5 billion share of Amazon is much larger than his investment in Uber, the same is true when you compare his Uber holdings with the money he spent to buy the newspaper. Do Post journalists really want to argue that an amount of money that could buy and sell them several times over is trivial to their boss?
As ad revenue dries up for the journalism industry as a whole, new and old media alike are turning to conglomerates and billionaires to make ends meet. With this new dynamic comes an increased obligation to consistently inform readers of any and all major conflicts of interest that these big-money investors bring to the table. This should, no doubt, include billion-dollar investments in companies routinely covered by the publication in question.
Adam Johnson is an associate editor at AlterNet and writes frequently for FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter at @adamjohnsonnyc.
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This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.