Can journalism survive billionaires?

Public service is often an outdated notion for media oligarchs.

One of my first journalism jobs was at a daily newspaper in the South. The publisher, who had married into a well-off local family that owned the paper, liked to hang out in a railroad car that was refurbished as his man cave near the printing plant. Every night, he got a copy of the paper as soon as it came off the press.

One time, he called the newsroom and demanded we stop the presses because a story had the word “Israel” divided over two lines, as “Is-” and “rael.” There was no style rule against hyphenating the word “Israel,” but he insisted there was and we weren’t about to argue with him. So we stopped the presses and fixed it, delaying the press run and probably costing the paper some overtime cash. But, hey, it was his paper.

That incident taught me journalism is often at the mercy of rich people. And we’re seeing that now, big time.

The billionaire owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times vetoed their editorial writers’ plans to endorse Kamala Harris for president. These weren’t frivolous decisions – they were greedy and fearful ones. Post owner Jeff Bezos has other properties such as Amazon that could be punished or rewarded by Trump. Same for Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, a physician who has widespread health care investments and angled for a top job in the first Trump administration.

Now, Soon-Shiong has announced plans to add right-wingers to the Times editorial board, including CNN’s ridiculous Scott Jennings. And in an interview with media reporter Oliver Darcy, Soon-Shiong showed he has surgically extracted his ability to face facts. Soon-Shiong would not acknowledge to Darcy that Trump lies more than most politicians. He said "a lot of politicians lie a lot" and it was just Darcy's "opinion" that Trump lied more than most.

Soon-Shiong is a native of South Africa, as is another person threatening the viability of American journalism, Elon Musk.

Musk’s Twitter/X produces some original interviews, but its main power is its control over who sees other outlets’ news reports. That’s because X boosts some posts and throttles others. Musk ordered his staff to write special code putting his own posts in more people’s feeds, and those posts often include reckless lies, fake photos, and personal threats against people he considers his enemies.

Also troubling is X’s policy of throttling posts that include links. It’s easy to understand why platforms like X wouldn’t like links: They pull visitors off the platform. But they also make their posts more credible – by supplying the sources for the claims being made. And it’s a way to share engagement with the people who are actually doing the work of journalism. But Elon Musk doesn’t care about that.

Now Musk is fashioning himself as Trump’s co-president, helping shape policies while retaining his role controlling news coverage of those policies. That’s an authoritarian’s dream.

Another social media mogul who is bad for both journalism and democracy is Mark Zuckerberg, whose company Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp.

Local news outlets have been devastated by the migration of advertising revenue to places like Facebook. That’s not Zuckerberg’s fault entirely. It’s a long-term industry trend. But Zuckerberg has fought tooth-and-nail against sharing revenue with the people whose content is helping him make money.

While not a fascist enthusiast like Musk, Zuckerberg seems desperate to avoid any conflict with Trump that could interrupt his cash flow.

During the 2020 election, Zuckerberg made donations to help local officials conduct the voting, and because of that got targeted in the Republicans’ suite of lies alleging vote fraud. Trump said Zuckerberg would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he engaged in a similar “plot” in 2024. And Zuckerberg knuckled under, saying he wouldn’t fund further election operations because “my goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another.” As if helping people vote was taking sides.

Zuckerberg also removed restrictions on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, played to Trump’s ego by calling him a “badass” after the first assassination attempt, and made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago last week.

While making money off of journalism, Zuckerberg’s platforms downplay some of the most important journalism: political news. At a time when public engagement in politics is essential to the survival of democracy, Zuckerberg thinks distracted-boyfriend memes are safer content.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with media outlets trying to make money. But increasingly, news industry owners seem interested only in making money, not in performing a public service at the same time.

The paper where I was metro editor, the Chicago Tribune, is now owned by Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund with a reputation for dramatically reducing its staff and increasing its subscription prices. That’s a good formula for short-term profits but not for long-term service to communities. Hedge funds and private equity firms are so dominant in local journalism today that they own more than half of the daily newspaper circulation in this country.

For three years, I was website editor at Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative, a project examining ways to make local journalism more sustainable. I wrote about email newsletters, subscriber retention, digital startups, reader events, news apps, and more. But the whole time I knew the real answer to the industry’s problems could be described in two simple words: better owners.

The trend lines are not good. Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch’s Fox News continues to be No. 1 in the cable news ratings while systematically lying about important facts to boost Republicans. MSNBC, the left-center cable channel, has been spun off from NBC Universal, creating uncertainty about its future. Elon Musk has even speculated about buying it, which would reflect a tactic in one of Trump’s favorite strongman states, Hungary, where oligarchs have bought up media that challenged leader Viktor Orbán.

Former Hungarian lawmaker Gábor Scheiring wrote an important essay last week in Politico Magazine with advice for how Americans could prevent Trump from following Orban’s playbook. “Liberal-minded billionaires should not sit idly by as they did in Hungary, watching the right take over the media,” he wrote.

There are indeed “liberal-minded billionaires” in the United States, and they need to make more of an impact in the media. Such as, for example, buying MSNBC and making it a stronger voice for truth and decency. We can’t count on corporate networks like CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS to stand up to Trump, who has already lobbed threats at TV news outlets.

Right now, the picture is dark, but there are flickers of light.

ProPublica is a nonprofit investigative outfit making a difference by revealing vital facts about abortion bans, Supreme Court corruption, and much more. There are plenty of other independent news outlets, big and small, that could use your support. (Media writer Jennifer Schulze listed many of them in a recent column.)

And the social media picture has shown new vibrancy with the growth of Bluesky, which is taking audience from Musk’s X and Zuckerberg’s Threads. Bluesky doesn’t throttle links, and CEO Jay Graber says the platform is “billionaire proof” because it’s designed “so if someone bought [it] or if the Bluesky company went down, everything is open source.” (I’m at @markjacob.bsky.social on Bluesky.)

Journalism needs to promote the sharing of power, not the consolidation of it. It needs to be independent and brave. Otherwise, democracy is impossible.