Media Ownership By A Wealthy Few Is Terrible For Democracy
When just a few billionaires and right-wing corporations control our most visible media, national journalism serves not the public, but narrow business and ideological interests.
“[The press] may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.”
-Bernard Cohen, Political Scientist, 1963
It’s the question on the minds of everyone not in thrall to his cult of personality.
How is it that Trump—rapist, bloody coup attempter, abortion rights destroyer, banner of Muslims, pathological liar, #1 Covid disinformer—might be elected tomorrow when his fascist ways are an obvious attack on the American project of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? The polls show Trump and Harris in a relative tie. How can Trump have so much support?
Research shows that roughly a third of any population will be attracted to authoritarianism. So, 33% of Americans are inclined to find Trump’s rhetoric about cracking down on “illegals” and “out of control” crime appealing. But how does an unfit Trump earn support beyond that?
The conditions that lift Trump 15 more percentage points to a virtual tie with Harris are created by an information ecosystem that under-informs the public at the same time that it normalizes fascism. Those conditions are created by the people who own and control our media.
Yes, millions of racists are all aboard the Trump train. And there are plenty of wealthy Americans who would sell civil rights, labor protections, and the environment down the river just to save a relative pittance in tax dollars.
Yes, Trump has made serious inroads amongst young men by appearing on the Joe Rogan network of podcasts where the hosts do their best to normalize him. And, yes, there’s this guy:
But the largest factor keeping this race tight is how poorly informed we are.
As an example, current reporting shows Harris is better for the economy…
…but that news has to compete with the thousands of reports voters have seen over the last three years that frame the Biden/Harris pandemic recovery like this:
Those negative reports rarely included the context that the US is recovering better from a global pandemic than every other nation on Earth, information that might make voters look more favorably upon Harris’ economic plan:
And so we end up with voters who incorrectly think Trump will be better for them:
The electorate does not understand that Harris’ economic plan will be better for them.
While it’s true that inflation was bad, why would newsrooms full of journalists, whose job is to inform, largely leave the context of global inflation out of their reporting? Because it is not in the interest of corporate newsroom owners to inform the public.
The Structure of Media Ownership Creates our National Failure of Understanding
At its best, journalism allows us to participate in democracy by holding the powerful to account, exposing corruption, warning us of threats to our safety, exploring solutions to social problems, and connecting us to our communities. There are thousands of great journalists doing this work all over the country, mostly at independent or non-profit outlets dedicated to reporting in the public interest.
Unfortunately, those are not the news sources Americans engage with the most. Billionaire and conglomerate media owners control most of what we see and hear. The media ecosystem they create for us has failed to protect the public from misinformation and disinformation. What most of us consider “the news,” is a boardroom’s idea of what journalism should be, feeding us clickbait outrage, drama, and polls so our attention can be sold to advertisers.
Corporate media owners often own other companies whose products and business practices deserve public scrutiny. However, they are able to use their newsrooms to avoid such scrutiny and advance their business agendas on a mass scale. This inherent conflict of interest compromises the integrity of the information the public receives. For instance, a billionaire’s newsrooms won’t conduct investigative journalism into the polluting of a local river by one of his factories. Media owners have enormous power to advance their ideological goals, as well. Facts about the world are withheld from the public because owners want to influence public opinion according to their personal and business needs.
When media ownership is concentrated in the hands of a very few, the information we receive about politicians and their policies, the problems we face as a nation, and what experts say about solutions to those problems, arrives at our screens after it’s filtered through the motivations of just a handful of people with the power to keep the electorate in the dark about issues that they’d rather suppress.
This ownership structure renders national news outlets incapable of providing enough accurate information to inoculate us against disinformation and to ensure that we understand the stakes of elections.
Owners are using their media companies to downplay the threat of Trump and censor criticism of him.
Meet The Greedy Boys Who Control What We Think About
A quick tour through the different types of media we consume reveals systemic forms of censorship and propaganda that aid and abet the rise of someone as unfit as Donald Trump.
National Newspapers
Trump has made it clear that if elected, he will target media outlets that are critical of him. For instance, he’s threatened the broadcast licenses of ABC and CBS because of coverage he didn’t like. His threats have had a chilling effect.
Last week, the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and LA Times prevented already drafted endorsements of Kamala Harris from being published.
LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong owns companies that “regularly seek FDA approval for new drugs, vaccines and therapies and federal funding for research.” He said he killed the Harris endorsement because it “would just add to the division” in America. But it is highly unlikely that a newspaper perceived to be liberal, in a deep blue state, would increase polarization by endorsing a Democratic candidate. Soon-Shiong interfered with the information coming out of his newsroom because it threatens the success of his business dealings.
Billionaire Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. From Free Press:
Bezos also owns a private space-exploration company called Blue Origin, which is building a lunar lander for NASA. Trump reportedly met with executives at Blue Origin—a competitor of Elon Musk’s SpaceX—the same day that the Post killed its editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. Longtime Post columnist and editor Robert Kagan, who quit after the endorsement fiasco, calls the meeting a “quid pro quo.”
These billionaires altered the reporting of the media they control to curry favor with a potential future president. They censored their newsrooms just to protect their other businesses from Trump’s wrath.
Local News
Watch this propaganda video. It is a compilation of local news anchors reading from a script provided to them by their parent company, Sinclair Broadcast Group.
Sinclair operates 193 broadcast television stations, reaching 40% of the US population. It is owned by the ultra right wing Smith family. Every one of their newsrooms had to read this to their viewers.
In January, Sinclair’s lead national anchor Eugene Ramirez stepped down because his “broadcast was mandated to read at least three stories from Sinclair’s Rapid Response Team…one Sinclair employee [described] the team as the “right-wing propaganda arm of the national digital operation.”
From 2017 to 2019, Trump assistant Boris Epshteyn was Sinclair’s senior political analyst. During this time Epshteyn’s political commentary was a “must run,” as in every time he recorded a pro-Trump segment (sometimes 9 segments in a week), it was aired during the nightly newscasts of every Sinclair station. Here is Epshteyn this week on the campaign trail with Trump:
Studies show that Americans place more trust in their local newsrooms than national outlets, making Sinclair’s outright propaganda effort, legitimized via trusted local news anchors, a national nightmare. Is your favorite local station owned by Sinclair? Read more on this here.
Cable News
The billionaire owner of Fox, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and 29 broadcast television stations, Rupert Murdoch, is America’s number one disinformer with a long history of aiding the Republican party. Fox is the de facto propaganda arm of the extreme, MAGA agenda. A court of law found that Fox News lied to Americans about the results of the 2020 election. Those lies protected Murdoch’s profits and enabled Trump’s coup attempt.
Murdoch’s media holdings regularly push the kind of disinformation about climate, COVID-19, the Democratic Party, elections, and immigration that we then see reflected as pro-MAGA public opinion in surveys of American beliefs. The conspiracies Murdoch pumps into the American information stream become fodder for uninformative “debate” across all forms of media, including at legacy newspapers.
For example, there is no such thing as widespread voter fraud that has ever affected the outcome of a national election, yet mainstream media has run thousands of stories on “election security” because Rupert Murdoch’s network of media holdings creates its standing as an “issue.”
Extra: Billionaire John Malone is a major shareholder in the parent company of CNN, a Fox News competitor. He’s said publicly that CNN should be more like Fox News. Ahead of the only debate between Joe Biden and Trump, CNN announced its official policy would be not to fact check the candidates, a major boost to known liar Trump.
Social Media
Elon Musk is the world’s most dangerous dipshit. He bought Twitter, with the help of authoritarian nations, to change global political outcomes by destroying its unique democratic function as a worldwide public square. Twitter is now a dystopian hellscape of disinformation, Nazi hate, and authoritarian censorship in service to the Trump campaign, to which Musk has donated hundreds of millions of dollars.
To aid MAGA’s extremist goals, Musk is sowing distrust of the US election process on a massive scale. He uses his account to force election lies upon hundreds of millions of users. 55% of all of Elon Musk’s tweets about election security are disinformation.
Musk has been in regular contact with war criminal, Vladimir Putin, for the entire time he has owned Twitter. His site is awash with bots boosting Russian interests like Trump’s re-election. Musk is entirely comfortable using his information company to censor speech at the behest of other authoritarians.
National Network News
In 2016, then CBS CEO Les Moonves said this:
At the same speaking engagement, Moonves went on to say, “Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now?…The money’s rolling in and this is fun…I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going…Donald’s place in this election is a good thing.”
Corporate media owners hire executives to increase profit, not defend democracy against a fascist. This leads to normalization of Trump because it’s more lucrative for media companies to have him running. Accurately portraying Trump’s utter lack of fitness is bad for business. This is another way the structure of American media ownership creates lower quality information that leads to worse outcomes.
Taking Ownership
Our country’s most consumed newspapers, local TV news outlets, cable news channels, social media platforms, and national networks are corrupted by their owners’ pursuit of profit, power, and propaganda.
This piece started by asking the question, “How is it that Donald Trump might be elected tomorrow?” Because the corporations and billionaires who control our media favor Donald Trump. They tailor the narratives coming from their newsrooms to make Trump seem normal and to distract from information about his opponent that might lead voters to make a different choice.
We must solve the media ownership problem in this country if we are going to ensure better outcomes for the American people.
It is a difficult problem to solve that requires applying pressure everywhere we can. By changing our habits around how we get information and by becoming more civically engaged, we can start to shift power away from the wealthy information brokers who do not have our best interests at heart and towards we, the people.
Here are just some of the ways we will start to reform media:
Vote for the party that will more likely create a functioning FCC in the public interest. A functioning FCC has tremendous power to limit media monopoly.
Vote for the party that will regulate social media, potentially via a robust FTC working in the public interest.
Support legislation to use public funds for local journalism.
The above recommendations are not partisan positions. They are clear eyed strategy recommendations for the reform of media. Public Enlightenment seeks to advance media reform policy in the public interest and gladly recommends voting for whichever party or politicians are advocating that goal.
It is up to all of us to take these steps towards healthier information together.
Subscribe to Public Enlightenment and come on the journey with me as I research and recommend more actions.
For more on this subject, read Who Owns Media? by Free Press.
And for more examples of how ownership affects news coverage, read this thread by Mark Jacob.
"These decisions proffer powerful examples of the importance of ownership – to empower or silence; to control or expand dialogue; to be fearless and independent, or to capitulate to corporate interests. We are witnessing how democracy dies – in the dark pockets of greedy owners.”
-WURD Radio, Philadelphia
The examples provided in this piece help drive home the issue of media ownership and the role it plays in shaping the 'news' we consume. While the degraded state of journalism has taken decades to develop, we probably don't have decades to correct the corrosive effects of corporate and oligarch control of information in our society.
Good work on this piece. I'm sure many can benefit from your efforts.
Thank for sending. Appreciate astute observations!