Does Bezos’ Money Present an Objectivity Problem for Business Insider?

I am left wondering if there will be any perceived objectivity issues as a result of the $5M investment by Jeff Bezos in Business Insider. Like Jeff, I am a big fan of Business Insider… Henry Blodget and his team do great work.

I also can’t help but wonder how the coverage on the site may potentially change. Will we see as many stories critical of Amazon? Will competitors of the ecommerce leader get their fair share of positive coverage? The last time I checked, Amazon has competitors everywhere. These companies include almost every retailer with a website. There is Google in shipping. eBay and Overstock in online retail. IBM, Google, HP and Rackspace in the cloud and lets not even talk about tablets and e-readers.

Of course media companies in general have to deal with issues of objectivity everyday as they have paid advertisers for the most part. Then again, even without paid sponsors, human beings have their own inherent bias so there seems to be way to eliminate slanted coverage in the media.

So I’ll be on the lookout to see if we ever see any articles such as this one titled ‘I love Amazon and I hate Amazon, they’re a necessary evil’ on BI in the near future.

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