The purchase of The Baltimore Sun is further proof that conservative billionaires understand the power of media control. Why don’t their liberal counterparts get it?
Because there is no such thing as a liberal Billionaire.
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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I think part of the problem is the framing here. Americans literally equate 'liberal' with 'leftist' the vast majority of the time in political discourse. Most Americans seem to have no clue whatsoever that there's a difference. But liberals are agents of the status quo. Conservatives may be more overt and sweeping in their protection of privilege, but liberals are also set on protecting parts of that privilege. They may be more comfortable with granting some rights to people who don't look like them, but they're probably not going to risk their own power for it. Ultimately their priorities tend to still be selfish, upholding the system to continue to benefit from it, even if they're sympathetic to suffering and injustice. They probably support gay rights, maybe even trans rights, but they're probably not up for UBI or dismantling the prison industrial complex.
The liberal billionaires that we do see aren't any different. They're still people who are ultimately focused on upholding the system and the immense benefit it provides them. Whatever lovely platitudes they might share with us, they choose to use their power to amass wealth rather than to correct injustice. They're doubly agents of the status quo, as liberals and as billionaires.
I don't know how you'd get a leftist billionaire. I suppose it'd have to happen pretty suddenly for them to actually have that much at once. The problem is, if a leftist puts their literal money where their mouth is, they really shouldn't have excessive amounts of it.
Like, there's a point where the utility you gain from having an amount of money becomes substantially less than the utility literally anyone else would gain from having the same amount. Jeff Bezos could lose 1 million dollars in the blink of an eye and wouldn't even notice, but to pretty much everyone in my life that would completely transform their experience and that of many of those around them.
There's a moral and ethical cost to that difference. Leftists are ostensibly in support of compassion, equality, the sharing of resources, and the elimination of suffering. I think a billionaire could call themselves a leftist, but I feel pretty confident that it would nearly always be a lie.
But, like, I'm also not sure how they'd get there in the first place. It seems to me that you have to make a lot of decisions favoring profit over compassion and human decency in order to make a billion dollars.
Yeah. I know everyone hates on Jordan Peterson, but he had a pretty interesting take on it: Basically, that in order to make yourself a billionaire you have to have something really wrong with you i.e. prioritize some things that don't lead to a satisfying life, and then work at them to a really pathological degree. So it's not that weird if billionaires fall into this consistent pattern of behaving a certain unusual way.
I mean, Jordan Peterson kind of is hate condensed into a profitable avatar, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
I'd argue that Bill Gates and George Soros are good examples of people trying to push vaccinations, push democracy, push general worthy causes as opposed to just "more money and power for me and my friends." The problem is, billionaires motivated by power for its own sake are going to (a) outnumber the other kind by quite a lot (b) put much more effort into grabbing the reins of the media and steering it to manipulate public opinion, than are those who're just do-gooders in a general sense.
While Gates has certainly been involved in good causes, it has nothing to do with how he became a billionaire. He employed the same awful practices as every other billionaire, including employing other equally awful now-billionaires (Ballmer/Allen).
Gates' behavior changed rather suddenly a long time ago. I don't know what caused it, but he went from cutthroat exploitation to charity work, with little overlap between. I fully agree that he is an outlier, and in more ways than one.
I have only a few data points, but Bill Gates and Daniel Ellsberg both had women in their lives who seemed pretty involved in turning them from "gimme that check" to "hey maybe the world shouldn't be all shitty all the time." Ellsberg actually pretty explicitly lays out how his lady was involved in turning him anti-Pentagon in "Secrets".
I don't think you can become a billionaire in an ethical way, without exploiting hundreds or thousands of people below you.
To me, the "good" billionaires participate in and create the system that keeps everyone else poor and without resources just as much; it's just that they throw a few coins back to charity - what looks like a lot to us, but isn't much to them - to a) make themselves look good and charitable or b) assuage any guilt they feel for their continually exploitation of workers and hoarding of wealth. Like a king gathering so many taxes all the peasants are destitute, then tossing some gold coins into a crowd and getting called generous for it even though it's a pittance compared to what they took. There is no more powerful PR for a billionaire, no better way to steer public and media opinion, than strategically giving their money to charity.
They maybe aren't intentionally evil, but if a bit of charity makes people praise them, and makes them feel like they're using their wealth for the greater good, such that they can feel like they're good people and sleep at night, I think they conveniently fail to think through whether the "good" they do by handing out their wealth outweighs the harm they caused by taking such an outsized share - one much larger than they ever give back - in the first place, because anyone would be extremely motivated to come to the conclusion that it's ethical to keep being an mega-powerful billionaire.
If they didn't exploit workers and hoard so much wealth in the first place, their "charity" wouldn't be needed because all that wealth would be much better distributed to begin with, and it would be distributed more equitably rather than on the basis of whoever most appeals to an individual billionaire's whims at a given moment. As it is, they're like middlemen between workers and the causes that need funds, and in being so they are able to wield ridiculously outsized political power (via donations, being treated as important enough to talk to politicians, market manipulation, etc), and they will always oppose any measure that truly threatens their continued power and wealth.
Also they rely on our current capitalist system that requires the line to go up forever, with companies expected to make more and more money year after year (often by taking more and more from their workers), with no answer to where or when the line can stop going up, which is an incredibly stupid strategy on a planet with finite resources and a global warming problem.
This article was written 10 years too late to be in present tense.
Sad but true
How different would things be out there in America if, 15 or 20 years ago, some rich liberal or consortium of liberals had had the wisdom to make a massive investment in local news? There were efforts along these lines, and sometimes they came to something. But they were small. What if, instead of right-wing Sinclair, some liberal company backed by a group of billionaires had bought up local TV stations or radio stations or newspapers all across the country?
Again, we can’t know, but we know this much: Support for Democrats has shriveled in rural America to near nonexistence, such that it is now next to impossible to imagine Democrats being elected to public office at nearly any level in about two-thirds of the country. It’s a tragedy. And it happened for one main reason: Right-wing media took over in these places and convinced people who live in them that liberals are all God-hating superwoke snowflakes who are nevertheless also capable of destroying civilization, and our side didn’t fight it. At all. If someone had formed a liberal Sinclair 20 years ago to gain reach into rural and small-town America, that story would be very different today.
There has in recent years been an impressive growth of nonprofit media outlets, led nationally by ProPublica and laying down roots everywhere, from the aforementioned Baltimore, where the Baltimore Banner has sometimes been scooping the Sun, to my home state of West Virginia, where Pulitzer Prize–winner Ken Ward’s Mountain State Spotlight is doing terrific reporting. These outlets are welcome indeed. They do sharp and necessary reporting. But they’re nonprofits, which, under IRS rules, cannot be partisan. They have to be apolitical.
I think one of the hard issues about making left-wing spin-machines is that a large chunk of the left would reject them. Following the old adage, "Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line," I fear that you can get the right to follow any ridiculous story because they are unified in wanting their 'side' to win, but a good number of Democrats would become disenchanted by fake news and may even become turncoats if asked to believe muckraking spin as Truth. Surely there's a good number of low-interest left-leaners who would be happy to believe and follow half-truths and lies, but I doubt Democrats would get the same consensus of accepting such as good politics the way Republicans do.
Absolutely. I'm not American but very left-wing and I would not support any fake news spin campaigns.
We have to be better than the right-wingers. If we use the same tactics a win is meaningless. We still have principles and ideals. "Kicking the other guy down" is not a win.
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…no, the lack of real education and critical thinking is destroying America. Right-wing media is just a symptom of that.
Por qué no los dos
JFC more of this? I really wish the FCC had the teeth to prevent this shit.
Cool, another old media news source that I will not take seriously. I believe in sentiment, but not rotten sentiment.