As Jimmy Dore and Glenn Greenwald were saying the other day, this is one of the reasons why everyone distrusts and hates “journalists” these days.
“Billionaires have had a pretty good pandemic. There are more of them than there were a year ago, even as the crisis has exacerbated inequality. But scrutiny has followed these ballooning fortunes. Policymakers are debating new taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals. Even their philanthropy has come under increasing criticism as an exercise of power as much as generosity.
One arena in which the billionaires can still win plaudits as civic-minded saviors is buying the metropolitan daily newspaper.
The local business leader might not have seemed like such a salvation a quarter century ago, before Craigslist, Google and Facebook began divvying up newspapers’ fat ad revenues. Generally, the neighborhood billionaires are considered worth a careful look by the paper’s investigative unit. But a lot of papers don’t even have an investigative unit anymore, and the priority is survival.
This media landscape nudged newspaper ownership from the vanity column toward the philanthropy side of the ledger. Paying for a few more reporters and to fix the coffee machine can earn you acclaim for a lot less effort than, say, spending two decades building the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
If there was a signal year in this development, it came in 2013. That is when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post and the Red Sox’ owner, John Henry, bought The Boston Globe. …
“These buyers range across the political spectrum, and on the surface have little in common except their wealth,” said Mr. Friedlich. “Each seems to feel that American democracy is sailing through choppy waters, and they’ve decided to buy a newspaper instead of a yacht.” …”
These people are a bunch of servile bootlickers now!
Note: I’m screenshotting this before it goes down the memory hole. The oligarchs own all of these corporate media “journalists.”
@ controlling the narrative, no new news, there.
You would have thought the Tribe would have learned that newspapers are a terrible investment after that jewish dwarf, Sam Zell, got torched with his purchase of the Chicago Tribune.
End of the Megamachine – How Capitalism & Its Crises Have Turned Us Into a Failing Civilisation:
https://toranja-mecanica.blogspot.com/2021/04/o-fim-da-megamaquina-como-o-capitalismo.html