Maybe it’s just a coincidence that Jeff Bezos, whose company gave $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration and paid $40 million to license the First Lady’s story, had dinner with the president the night before he dropped his bombshell on the Washington Post staff. Just months after overruling his editorial team's decision to endorse Kamala Harris, the Washington’s Post’s billionaire owner has announced that his newspaper will only publish opinion pieces that reflect his personal ideology of “personal liberties and free markets.” Maybe it’s also a coincidence that Bezos’ various companies have billions of dollars at stake in government contracts.
The last time Bezos was forced to explain his interference with his newspaper’s editorial independence, he acknowledged the complications posed by his myriad business interests, writing in an op-ed ”that you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other.” We now know those principles will tip the balance of the Washington Post’s opinion pages towards the personal views of a man who is very rich and very afraid of upsetting a volatile and vindictive president.
The Post’s woes mirror those of the LA Times, whose billionaire owner Patrick Soon Shiong has gone to great lengths to reshape his paper’s coverage to be more MAGA-friendly, driving away scores of staff and subscribers in the process.
It is a shame to see a venerable news institution reduced to a billionaire’s plaything. Bezos and Soon Shiong own these newspapers and can do with them as they see fit. But to own a media outlet is to own more than its printing presses, web servers, or TV cameras. Media ownership carries a public obligation to certain principles which, at this exact moment, are under direct attack by the president of the United States. If you’re not willing to be in the business of defending press freedom, you shouldn’t be in the news business at all.
It’s not just the billionaires though. Many of the corporate owners of media organizations, conglomerates with diverse business interests, are failing to stand up for the values of a free, diverse, and robust press. Too often they seem to be letting their other (more profitable) business interests override the public interest of their media holdings.
To no one’s surprise, Donald Trump has launched multiple legal attacks against major media outlets, both personally and via weaponized government agencies. He forecasted this plan throughout the campaign. More surprising is how many media organizations are bowing to the pressure, even when legal experts agree they shouldn’t have to. ABC parent company Disney agreed to pay Trump over $15 million to settle a case it almost certainly would have won at trial. Disney has taken more than its fair share of lumps from the MAGA movement and perhaps concluded it wouldn’t be worth fighting it out.
CBS parent company Paramount is reportedly considering a similar settlement with Trump over his baseless claim that “60 Minutes” improperly edited an interview with Kamala Harris. Worse still, the president has enlisted his chief censor, FCC Chair Brendan Carr, to launch an official inquiry into the matter. The case is a headache that CEO Shari Redstone does not need as she pursues a high-stakes sale of the company, a deal the FCC itself could squelch.
Some media organizations are standing up for themselves and for the broader principles at stake. The Associated Press is suing to overturn its ban from White House events. Gannett and the Des Moines Register are rebuffing Trump’s absurd lawsuit claiming a poll he didn’t like was “consumer fraud.” But these are media organizations first and foremost, not major conglomerates with ample resources to throw at their legal defense. If massive companies like Disney and Paramount can be so easily bullied, won’t their viewers wonder if their newsrooms might be instructed to start pulling punches to avoid further legal aggravation? And what message does it send to future targets of MAGA hostility, particularly the small, independent, and local outlets without limitless means to defend themselves?
Maybe none of that really matters if readers can just go online to find any viewpoint their heart desires. That’s one of Bezos’s rationales for axing diversity of thought in the opinion section. But for a man who owns a significant chunk of the internet already, he really should understand the inherent problem here all too well–Big Tech oligarchs are actively imposing their ideology to control the flow of information.
Most people get their news online from social media, as the White House noted when it invited “independent journalists, podcasters, social media influencers, and content creators” to occupy the front row of the press briefing room. But social media is a terrible place to get reliable information, not least of all because it lacks any transparency whatsoever. Even the engineers who work on social media algorithms can’t tell you exactly why a particular piece of content makes it to the top of your feed. And that’s before their owners put their thumbs on the scale.
X’s algorithm punishes journalism by promoting its antithesis in fake news and rumor mongering. Elon Musk himself uses the platform to denigrate journalism and censor journalists who criticize him. He also turned the website into an even greater cesspool of misinformation and hate speech by gutting content moderation. Meta is no better. Mark Zuckerberg only recently announced he’d be following Musk’s lead to jettison fact-checking on Facebook, but his company’s antagonism towards journalism goes way back. Having already robbed the news industry of billions in revenue, his social media sites long ago made the decision to deplatform news, from deliberately burying it on Threads to completely banning it on Facebook in Canada.
The internet, as currently constructed, is not an adequate substitute for robust and pluralistic news media. Tech companies have a financial incentive to promote low quality information over journalism and are using their chokehold over online spaces to control the flow of information. We should be reining in their power, not turning to them for all our news.
So that brings us back to obligations of media ownership in our present moment. Press freedom is often treated as a subset of broader freedom of expression, but it is distinct from basic free speech. Yes, press freedom is the right to publish unfettered by undue government intrusion. It also entails ethical obligations on the part of the news media itself–objectivity, fairness, and transparency, to name a few. Journalists know this because it’s what they signed up for. Their corporate overlords should learn it too. And not for nothing, but if they don’t defend the conditions of media freedom that have historically enabled their businesses–and American democracy–to grow, what will remain for them if Trump destroys the free media ecosystem?
Everywhere you look right now, the space for journalism is being constricted. The World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders each year shows press freedom in global decline. Outlets are laying off reporters or closing down. Governments are jailing journalists and raiding newsrooms. Big Tech companies are putting their boots on the necks of the media. The people with the greatest means to invest in journalism’s future — the ones who literally own its present — shouldn’t be piling on.
