These are the sorts of headlines we can expect from a newspaper owned and controlled by one of the world’s richest individuals. In 2013, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos (whose net worth far exceeds $200 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time billionaire list) bought the Washington Post and turned it into a vehicle for promoting his own interests.
In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, management acknowledged that Post reporters are pushed to produce almost four times as many stories as their peers at The New York Times. Furthermore, the Post writes and rewrites the same story but from slightly different angles and with different headlines in order to generate more clicks and thus, more revenue. Thanks to new technology, reporters’ every keystroke is monitored, and they are under constant pressure from management not to fall behind.
But Bezos is far from alone. Rupert Murdoch, for example, has amassed a media empire spanning the globe, including The Wall Street Journal and Fox News in the U.S., The Sun and the Times of London in the U.K., and dozens of titles in his native Australia.
This power allows him to set the political agenda across much of the world. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed that Murdoch was an “unofficial member” of his cabinet and one of the four most powerful men in the United Kingdom. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, described him as the world’s “most dangerous” individual.
In a sense, Biden is correct. Murdoch has used his media empire to push his deeply conservative agenda, which has included spreading racist and xenophobic conspiracies, as well as relentlessly supporting Israel and its attack on Gaza. On his instructions, all 175 of his newspapers supported the illegal invasion of Iraq.
Michael Bloomberg, meanwhile, ran for president while continuing to own his own media network, employing 2700 staff. At the time, he was the world’s ninth-richest individual.
A free media, we are told, is the bedrock of democracy. But freedom from what? Certainly, government interference in media exists. But plutocratic elites also exert massive pressure on media, especially corporate-owned outlets.
For an excellent list of more reliable independent news sources, go to Project Censored.
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.
