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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.
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.
This right here. There’s simply no mirror image of Fox News or Breitbart on the left, nor would I want one.
The problem is that we have a wildly uneven playing field where one side refuses to play by the rules. There’s no good faith engagement with right-wing media because they will say and do whatever it takes, destroy whatever and whomever it takes, lie, cheat, spin, etc. to achieve their goals. The right wing is working in a fully scorched earth mentality. It doesn’t matter if what they’re doing hurts themselves, their followers, whomever: they are 100% fueled by hatred and a desire for dominance, and if it means burning the whole country down to get what they want, that’s just fine to them. A while back I saw someone say “Republicans would let Trump take a shit in their mouths as long as a Liberal had to smell it” and it never fails to be true.
There’s simply nothing like that on the left, and I totally agree that it wouldn’t be effective even if there were. Truth means nothing to the Right. But using spin and rage-baiting is not something that’s part of a leftist ideal. For people who believe in truth, equality, equity, basic human decency, and a desire to actually build a society that cares about the people in it, using tactics like that are antithetical.
I don’t know what the answer is though. As someone up the thread pointed out, there’s no such thing as a liberal billionaire, and even if there were, trying to buy back all of the media in the country wouldn’t help. It would just feed the right’s narratives even further. But what the fuck do we do when we have media that presents “Let’s have a more caring and compassionate society” and “We think entire groups of people shouldn’t exist” as equal ideas that should be given equal weight and discourse?
Yeah. The mirror image of MSNBC or John Stewart, is something like the Wall Street Journal.
The mirror image of Fox News is like hexbear or lemmygrad, except put on TV for a majority of the country to watch for a majority of their picture of the world and accept uncritically. I think this article actually explains very well why it should be treated as a lot more cause for alarm than it is.
Ah good point. Tankies are indeed a bit like this on the left-wing side. I forgot about them.
The interesting thing with Tankies is that many of them are blatantly pro-autocrat, believing wholeheartedly that the single-party state needs a singular leader with essentially unlimited power vested in them in order to prevent counter-revolutionary movements, when in actuality that power is just used to quash the whole DotP and ‘stateless’ aspiration parts, and they just end up supporting right-wing outcomes like Putin and Xi, and being unwilling to admit that’s what they are.
I disagree about there being no mirror image. There are a ton of “news” sources that you probably dismissed for the same reasons as Fox. It’s not just how far left or right, but of what quality “journalism” is being used. It also plays directly into the far-right’s game of “both sides are the same”.
The mirror of Fox isn’t MSNBC; it’s the Huffington Post.
It’s not though. Huffington Post has no equivalent of Tucker Carlson or Jeanine Pirro, just asking questions about how Trump has already set up concentration camps for Democrats and has 100,000s of them imprisoned in secret already, or Alina Habba is secretly a man, or anyone who’s a Republican is literal demon spawn who’s drinking the semen of Alex Jones that they get through mail order so they can form a secret demonic pact to resurrect Ronald Reagan. Huffington Post has a left-wing bent and reports bad stories about Trump when they’re newsworthy. That’s it. Fox’s deliberate and explicit total fictions, carefully crafted for maximum emotional impact to produce a particular political result, have no equivalent anywhere in journalism.
Yeah, i have no particular love for Huffington Post. They’re often overly sensational, and also built their company on the backs of unpaid writers and journalists. But they’re not fabricating stories from whole cloth to whip up a hate mob.
As someone up the thread pointed out, there’s no such thing as a liberal billionaire
I don’t know about that. Bill Gates is pretty decent these days. In fact he probably always was a decent human being, but his poor business practices overshadowed that in the past. Tim Cook seems a pretty decent person too and just him coming out did a lot for the LGBT community. I think most Silicon Valley CEOs are pretty progressive in fact (Musk excluded obviously)
They’re pretty right-wing economically due to being CEOs (and billionaires) but fairly left-wing socially.
Unfortunately that’s not really true. Silicon Valley has deep roots in Libertarianism. Some of them might talk the “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” talk, but that’s becoming more and more rare. People like Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel, Musk, Bezos, Zuck, et al are deeply terrifying, and are openly espousing racist and eugencist beliefs.
Bill Gates is pretty decent these days. In fact he probably always was a decent human being, but his poor business practices overshadowed that in the past
Actually he’s a deeply terrible person. Even outside of swallowing up and destroying competition and pushing monopolistic business practices, he was a tyrant to work for, treated everyone around him like shit, sexually harassed multiple women, and has ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Actually he’s a deeply terrible person. Even outside of swallowing up and destroying competition and pushing monopolistic business practices, he was a tyrant to work for, treated everyone around him like shit, sexually harassed multiple women, and has ties to Jeffrey Epstein…
Wow. I had no idea. I’m sure you’re right, I don’t really follow US media very well. I just remember seeing him give a cool gift during secret santa on reddit and thinking “Huh this guy actually turned out okay”.
Some of them might talk the “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” talk, but that’s becoming more and more rare. People like Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel, Musk, Bezos, Zuck, et al are deeply terrifying, and are openly espousing racist and eugencist beliefs.
Hmm ok, I thought it was more liberal there. Especially because I’ve heard it’s a good and inclusive workplace etc. But like I said, I’m not very aware of the US so I stand corrected. Thank you.
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.
…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.
