Bryan Zepp Jamieson
October 26th, 2024
In the past week, billionaire owners of two of America’s leading newspapers, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, forbade their respective editorial staffs from endorsing a candidate for President. Both publications have a long history of doing just that. If either owner hoped to avoid controversy, they were in for a rude shock.
Patrick Soon-Shiong, the South African-born billionaire owner of the Times, tried to explain his decision to Spectrum News, saying, “I think my fear is, if we chose either one, that it would just add to the division.” According to the Guardian, this “prompted the public resignations of multiple editorial writers, including a recent Pulitzer prize winner, Robert Greene, and the section’s widely respected editor, Mariel Garza, who said: ‘I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent.’
It also prompted the beginnings of a revolt among the paper’s subscribers, with nearly 2,000 of them cancelling their subscriptions for ‘editorial content’ reasons on Tuesday and Wednesday alone.”
And then two days later, Jeff Bezos did very nearly exactly the same thing with the Washington Post. While Bezos had maintained a general “hands-off” approach to the editorial stance of his newspaper, this move was widely seen as an indication that Bezos, whose other endeavors such as Blue Origin and Amazon, are heavily dependent on a good working relationship with the government, was acting out of fear of a possible Trump return. If, indeed, he did think that this move might curry favor with the erratic and vindictive Trump, he showed appallingly bad judgment. Former managing editor Martin Baron wrote of the decision, “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,[…] Trump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others).”
I suggested the Washington Post change its Bezos-generated motto from “Democracy Dies in the Darkness” to “I For One Welcome Our New Galactic Overlords.” [Kent Brockman, news anchor in “The Simpsons” during an invasion of galactic overlords]
They aren’t alone, of course. Australian fascist Rupert Murdoch has been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into poisoning the well of American political discourse for five decades now. Canada recognized the danger of this vast right wing conspiracy machine and kicked him out, with the result that Canada isn’t in the terrible mess the US is today. And yes, much of our current trouble can be laid directly at the feet of Fox News.
Elon Musk bought up Twitter with the sole objective of having a platform for his crack-brained, erratic and irresponsible “philosophy” which is a poisonous blend of Ayn Rand, QAnon, MAGA, and Vladimir Putin.
It came to light this week, he had been having nice friendly secret phone conversations with Vladimir Putin, just as it’s come to light Donald Trump was. I can’t say I’m surprised. As with Trump, Elon, through SpaceX and Starlink, has a large number of defense and national-security contracts, and, as with Trump, I doubt Putin was calling just to discuss the differences between Russian and American heroic literature.
Indeed, we may have a new Axis power we have to fight. If it was Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo in the 1940s, it’s Putin, Trump and Musk now.
Imagine it’s 1938, and you’ve just learned that William Randolph Hearst and Henry Ford had been calling Hitler regularly for ‘friendly chats.’ See a possible problem there?
Billionaires, many far less visible than Bezos or Soon-Shiong, have been buying up media big and small for a couple of decades now, with devastating results. Many parts of America are in “news deserts” where local papers have vanished or been converted to local advertising sheets. Much of the radio is in the hands of repressive and even fascistic outfits like Clear Channel or Sinclair. All the major networks are mere appendages of massive international corporations who consider the news branch as mere items for generating profits and or creating a favorable political atmosphere for expansion of said profits.
We need to bring back the laws limiting the reach and scope of individuals over our media. Anti-trust laws need to break up the vast corporate conglomerates that control 95% of everything we hear, see, and believe.
And we need not-for-profit publicly owned corporations like the BBC and the CBC to provide us with news that isn’t designed to fit the preferences of billionaires. Because no matter how nice and democratic any given plutocrat might be as an individual, there inevitable comes a time when the needs of the plutocrat are no longer aligned with the needs of the rest of us, and that’s when we learn that plutocrats are not our friends.
America was founded on the notion that the people should be self-governing and free of the excesses of the churches and the aristocracy. It was a great idea. Time to return to that.
