While the Murdochs were busy celebrating the 60th anniversary of The Australian, there was bad news over in their corporate US home: Democrat billionaire Reid Hoffman was buying into defamation plaintiff Smartmatic, ensuring the election tech company has the money to sustain its multibillion-dollar writ against Fox News.
It’s another front in the under-reported business side of the US culture wars: the battle to set the political agenda through control over corporate media.
But in the lead-up to this year’s US presidential election, most of the 1,000-odd billionaires in America are — like the Republican Party itself — coalescing around Donald Trump. The big side effect? Media owners are far more aligned with Trump than during his past runs for office.
Ownership and control
Part of the shifting tide has to do with ownership and control of major media companies. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X) in 2022 has decisively tilted the platform to the populist right: even in its much-reduced form, it remains a leading force for distributing right-wing talking points. Musk responded to the weekend’s shooting by publicly endorsing Trump (and has reportedly said he plans to donate approximately US$45 million per month to a new pro-Trump super PAC). Following the assassination attempt, X quickly became the go-to space for people attempting to use the moral force of the moment to shut down criticisms of the Republican candidate.
This month, CEO of Skydance Media David Ellison looks set to take control of Paramount Global, owner of CBS (and the Ten Network here in Australia). Ellison’s billionaire father, Larry Ellison, has long been a vocal Trump supporter.
At The Washington Post, privately owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, a management reshuffle has brought in a more right-wing team, alumni of England’s Telegraph (aka the Torygraph) and the Murdoch papers in the UK and New York. Last month, The Guardian reported that new CEO Will Lewis allegedly advised former UK prime minister Boris Johnson to “clean up” his phone during the partygate scandal, which ultimately brought Johnson down in 2022. (Lewis has denied the report.)
Traditional pro-Trump media
More coordinated right-wing “news” programming is also emerging. For example, the Sinclair television network, one of the largest owners of US television stations, is leveraging its domination of local markets by having its anchors across the country read identical anti-migrant and anti-Biden scripts.
News Corp and Fox, now run by Lachlan Murdoch, have become more integrated parts of the right-wing noise machine. Take the company’s US tabloid, the New York Post, where for the past fortnight front pages have been dedicated to the stop-Biden frenzy: “Off His Clocker”, “Vague”, “Days and Confused”. “Time To Go, Joe”.
In the 1980s, Trump’s public persona was largely fanned by the Post’s celebrity gossip, and in his first successful run for president, back in 2016, the Post was largely neutral. Now, it’s all in. While Australians and Britons alike have been desensitised by the hysteria of the News Corp tabloids, in the US, the increasing alignment of the Post with the Trump agenda since 2020 has been shocking.
Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal, which has kept its news siloed, is undergoing its own “reboot”, which, like the early 20th-century Australian newspaper, is increasingly blurring the lines between news and opinion.
As an increasingly right-wing aligned media sets the agenda, the pundit class in traditional centrist media find it hard to resist, with The New York Times and CNN picking up and accelerating the “senile Biden” narrative that Trump supporters have been promoting for years.
More players in the right-wing space is bad news for the Murdochs, fragmenting the audience and forcing them into a more extreme position to compete.
Biden backers and Murdochs
LinkedIn founder Hoffman is one uberwealthy figure pushing against the trend, saying recently that his fellow billionaires are worried about Trump “retaliating” if they speak out. Maybe. Or maybe they’re attracted by the Trump offering of tax cuts for large corporations and rich individuals.
Hoffman is one of the few big Democrat donors still standing behind Biden, saying the push to have the president stand down is misguided. He was also a key funder in the defamation case taken by E. Jean Carroll against Trump, which resulted in a civil finding of rape.
Now, his money is tilting against the Murdochs, with Hoffman telling The Washington Post: “After Donald Trump lost in 2020 … Smartmatic became a target of the defamatory campaign to overturn his defeat.”
Defamation actions are harder to stand up in the US than in Australia, but the results can be far more costly for politically aligned media.
Alex Jones and InfoWars have been bankrupted after a court ordered a payout of US$1.5 billion to the parents of the children murdered in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, which Jones falsely claimed was staged by so-called crisis actors. Fox’s right-wing competitor Newsmax is also faced with bankruptcy over defamation cases raised by Smartmatic and fellow election tech company Dominion Voting Systems.
Fox has already settled with the hedge fund-backed Dominion for US$787.5 million over its amplification of Trump’s “stolen election” narrative in 2020.
The Smartmatic investment may have come just in time, with the case against Fox due to start in September. When Rupert ran the show, the company was famous for settling on the steps of the court. Maybe that’s one family tradition Lachlan will carry on.
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