New Orleans If any of us ever believed that when billionaires and their like buy media properties, no matter how prominent and well-regarded, and claim that they are doing so as a public and community service, and will absolutely and faithfully allow them to maintain their editorial independence, it’s past time for me to tell you there is no Santa Claus, Virginia. In recent months, any last semblance of such assurances has been revealed as a fiction and a fraud. The cynics among us, and I count myself one, always believed that the super rich acquired these properties to assure their own voice, politics, and policies, so are hardly surprised. For anyone still fooled, the masks are off now for once and for all.
I’m not just talking about Elon Musk, although he’s both the best example and the worst case. To his small credit, he never put much energy into pretending that Twitter would be anything but his platform. He may have claimed it was the world’s open public square and that it was all about free speech, but that was just marketing. He wanted a soapbox, and he’s made it his own personal platform. Of course, his claim that he was reducing controls in the name of free speech, as opposed to penny-pinching was false, as he demonstrates by punishing other X-people who disagree with his opinions and calling them trolls. Indeed, he is one, so he certainly knows one. As the world’s richest person, he could afford to gut the company at his will and whim, so he could post up to 30 times or more a day to his almost 150 million presumed followers, in the same way that he bought a seat for a quarter billion next to President-elect Trump and can use Twitter-X to interfere on mattes from the US government shutdown to German elections. From a distance, I would say in a business accounting on his playing the long game, it has all been worth every penny to him. For the rest of us, it is beyond me to understand how anyone can pretend that they should use and support X-Twitter. These days this all goes way past, “love the car, hate the man.” He’s a public danger!
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, certainly swore that the venerable Washington Post would maintain total editorial independence when he bought it, but so much for that pig in a poke. He had no qualms about blocking the editorial page endorsement for Biden before the election. He also blocked an editorial cartoon the other day that pictured him and other tech billionaires prostrating themselves before the idol of Trump. The Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist resigned then, just like some of the editorial page staff earlier. What does Bezos care? More than 100,000 cancelled their subscriptions, but that’s water off a duck’s back. It’s his marbles on his playground, and he’ll play with them the way he wants to. Same for the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times. He pulled their Biden endorsement as well, and now that he has broken that promise, he’s continued to rein in others at the paper who might have thought differently.
Rupert Murdoch was always a bit cagier about the Wall Street Journal. He could afford to be. The editorial and op-ed pages were already just a shade more to the left of troglodytes, if that, so no interference was necessary. They were already pretty much in sync. Same for Fox News and his other outlets. Where Murdoch busted a new move for the billionaire class has been in his willingness to assure that these outlets will still be his voice even from the grave. Unfortunately for him, but giving hope to the rest of us, the courts in Nevada would not let him break his family trust to allow him to restrict the media politics to only his favored right-wing son.
They bought it, so they can break it. That doesn’t mean that the rest of us should be pawns in their game. The truth is out now. We should act on it.