Here’s What Happens When Billionaires Buy Up Mainstream Media

Guest Post by Rebecca Strong

Billionaires who buy legacy newspapers are often presented as benevolent saviors of a dying industry, but can we depend on the media to challenge the powerful when they’re the ones paying writers’ salaries?

Author’s note: In a recent Twitter survey I conducted, nearly 90% of people rated their trust in mainstream media as either “very low” or “low.” And is it any surprise?

Ever-mounting media consolidation has narrowed the perspectives the public is privy to, ownership and funding of these corporations are riddled with conflicts of interest, crucial stories keep suspiciously getting buried and big tech companies are outright censoring and demonetizing independent outlets trying to break through the noise.

The media is supposed to function as a power check — and a means of arming us with vital information for shaping the society we want to live in. It’s never been a more important industry.

And it’s never been more at risk.

In this series, which I kicked off with a piece about the problematic history of media consolidation, I tackle each factor threatening the media’s ability to serve our democracy — with input from journalists, media critics and professors and other experts.

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” — A. J. Liebling, 1960

When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post for $250 million in 2013, he made a written promise to employees: “We will continue to follow the truth wherever it leads, and we’ll work hard not to make mistakes. When we do, we will own up to them quickly and completely.”

It was an admirable commitment, but as they say, actions speak louder than words. Here are a few editorial decisions that were made in the years following that acquisition:

• The Post ordered “no pardon” for whistleblower Edward Snowden — after not only using him as a source for its groundbreaking NSA stories but then accepting a Pulitzer for that series.
• One month after the editorial board demanded that Snowden’s leaks on U.S. spying come to a halt, Bezos became a financial beneficiary of U.S. spying. The Post refused to provide disclosure of this when covering the CIA.
• WaPo stories about Uber routinely failed to disclose that its owner, Bezos, had billions of dollars worth of stock in the car-sharing company.
• Closely following the 2016 presidential election, the Post promoted research by the ultra-shady anonymous group PropOrNot, which unjustifiably blacklisted hundreds of independent news sites, denouncing them as Russian agents or assets. (Ironically, PropOrNot’s “fake news” detection system later lost credibility and was deemed to be fake news itself. The WaPo quickly distanced itself from the operation.)
• At the end of 2016, The Washington Post falsely reported that Russian hackers penetrated a U.S. electricity grid. In actuality, Burlington Electric had searched its computers and found malware on a laptop that was not connected to the grid, but the Post never bothered to contact the Vermont utility provider before publishing the piece. After Burlington Electric provided a statement clarifying what happened, the Post updated the headline — but the revised headline still claimed Russian hackers were responsible.

That’s not at all to say that these occasional missteps were Bezos’ fault, nor that there weren’t any positive outcomes from that acquisition as well. At the time that Bezos purchased The Washington Post, it had been facing years of declining revenues.

His capital allowed the company to drastically increase staff, and within three years, become profitable again while doubling its Web traffic. That’s no small feat in today’s journalistic apocalypse.

But while billionaires who buy legacy newspapers are often presented as benevolent saviors of a dying industry, might it be naive to assume these are really just acts of civic charity with no invisible strings attached?

What’s stopping these moguls from using publications as a mouthpiece to promote their own personal interests, amplifying or burying stories accordingly?

This isn’t just an unfounded fear — owners can, and sometimes do, meddle.

In 2019, former New York City mayor and Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Michael Bloomberg announced he’d be running in the presidential race — and sent a memo to 2,700 Bloomberg journalists prohibiting them from doing any investigative stories on him or his campaign.

Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who quietly snapped up The Las Vegas Review-Journal for $140 million in 2015, is also often cited as a cautionary tale of what can happen when a rich and powerful man owns a prominent newspaper.

When Adelson requested that Review-Journal reporters start monitoring the judge handling a lawsuit threatening his casinos, it became pretty clear that he planned to use the newspaper to further his own agenda.

“At a minimum, the outlet should be completely transparent and reveal these conflicts of interest — in Adelson’s case, his casino and real estate developments, local public subsidies in support of these projects, lawsuits in which he was embroiled — where there’s a danger of news being distorted in ways that could benefit the owner at the public’s expense,” Rodney Benson — a sociologist and NYU professor of media, culture and communication — told me in an interview.

“And the fact that an increasing number of owners, whether individuals or corporations, now come not from news media but from Silicon Valley and other industries means that the threat of conflicts of interest is only going to grow.”

Speaking of conflicts of interest — in 2013, Amazon inked a $600 million contract to host secret data for the CIA. Then, in 2020, the CIA awarded another secret cloud computing contract to Amazon, this one worth up to $10 billion.

The Washington Post’s slogan is “democracy dies in darkness,” yet the WaPo failed to disclose these deals in any subsequent coverage of the CIA, as adhering to the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics would require.

At the time, a RootsAction petition urging the Post to disclose this relationship in their reporting garnered more than 36,000 signatures.

When journalist Norman Solomon emailed the WaPo’s then-executive editor Marty Baron about the petition, Baron told him that acknowledging those CIA ties would be “far outside the norm of disclosures about potential conflicts of interest at media organizations.”

At the time, numerous media critics — including professor, author and activist Robert McChesney — expressed concerns about the implications of the deal, as well as the Post’s negligence about the disclosures.

“What emerges now is what, in intelligence parlance, is called an ‘agent of influence’ owning the Post — with a huge financial interest in playing nice with the CIA,” former CIA analyst Ray McGovern explained to Solomon.

“In other words, two main players nourishing the national security state in undisguised collaboration.”

John Hanrahan, a former reporter for the WaPo and executive director of The Fund for Investigative Journalism, also told Solomon that particularly since The Washington Post reports frequently on the CIA, readers are entitled to know (and be regularly reminded) that Bezos “stands to benefit substantially” from this contract.

“Even with such disclosure, the public should not feel assured they are getting tough-minded reporting on the CIA,” Hanrahan added in the interview.

“Post reporters and editors are aware that Bezos, as majority owner of Amazon, has a financial stake in maintaining good relations with the CIA — and this sends a clear message to even the hardest-nosed journalist that making the CIA look bad might not be a good career move.”

A key concern with billionaires gobbling up news outlets is that they may use them to suppress any news that could hurt their image or financial interests. Benson says this kind of censorship is rare, and editors will inevitably defend their choices. Still, he added:

“It doesn’t have to happen a lot to make a difference. It just needs to happen at the right moment when news coverage and editorials, or the lack thereof, will most benefit the owner.”

Of course, Bezos isn’t the only billionaire who’s gotten in the news game.

Over the past 15 years, a small handful of other tycoons bought the majority stake in some of the U.S.’ most influential national publications, including The New York Times (Carlos Slim), The Boston Globe (John and Linda Henry), Time Magazine (Marc and Lynne Benioff), The LA Times (Patrick Soon-Shiong) and The Atlantic (Laurene Powell Jobs).

When ownership affects coverage

The question is, do the benefits of being bought by a billionaire outweigh the potential conflicts of interest?

“For people that have control or power or connections to capital, controlling the media is just too irresistible,” Project Censored Director Mickey Huff told me in an interview.

The upside? Compared to, say, stock-market-traded owners, individual owners tend to have a stronger commitment to quality news, said Benson, because they aren’t driven by the same pressures to maximize profits and appease shareholders.

“Individual owners can choose to invest in quality journalism with an eye toward a long-term return, instead of just harvesting cash in the short term,” he explained.

“Again, you still have the potential for conflicts of interest when the individual owner has outside economic interests, which is often the case. They are good in some ways — generally in their support for quality journalism — and potentially problematic in other ways, such as using their media outlet to promote their interests or their political views. Such abuses of power may or may not happen, but the public should remain vigilant.”

When news broke in 2013 that Glenn Greenwald was leaving The Guardian to launch his own media organization with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, expectations were high — not only because of the sheer talent involved but also because tech billionaire and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar had made a $250 million investment in it.

That venture, The Intercept, wasn’t Omidyar’s first foray into journalism: in 2020, he launched the progressive investigative news site Honolulu Civil Beat, and before Bezos snatched up The Washington Post, Omidyar seriously considered buying it.

Seeing as The Intercept was in part created to provide a platform for reporting on Snowden’s NSA leaks, it was clear from the get-go that one of the founding principles was transparency at any cost.

Its self-proclaimed mission was to “hold the most powerful governmental and corporate factions accountable.”

That’s what made Greenwald’s resignation in 2020 — which he attributed to censorship from his colleagues — so shocking.

In his resignation letter, Greenwald claimed that editors not only refused to publish his latest piece unless he removed “all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden,” but also that they forbade him from publishing it anywhere else.

The article in question, which has since been published on his Substack, examined how both big tech and the mainstream press suppressed stories on the emails found via Hunter Biden’s laptop, especially those relating to Biden’s alleged business dealings in Ukraine.

“In many cases, these companies editorially decide how to not talk about certain subjects,” Huff told me.

“Look at The New York Times — they just admitted they lied about the Hunter Biden laptop story. And this is why Greenwald has to go to Tucker Carlson. The establishment press won’t have these intellectuals on their programs, because they pop their propaganda bubbles. It’s easier to attack these people than to take them seriously. Even though history has shown repeatedly that they’re right over, and over, and over again.”

Huff said he was not surprised The Intercept refused to publish Greenwald’s story given Omidyar’s well-known ties to the Democratic party.

“That’s a no-no,” he explained. “It’s especially a no-no because it is a story. It’s a story of power of corruption that goes back to the 2014 coup in Ukraine. It shows how the Bidens were instrumental, and his family personally profited from the regime change when his son was put on the board at Burisma Energy. It’s clear as day.”

Omidyar’s net worth is about $11.3 billion and his average annual income is $866 million — making him one of America’s top earners, right after the co-founders of Google. And his generous political donations over the years clearly demonstrate where his loyalty lies.

In 2020, he wrote some big checks to liberal “dark money” groups backing Biden: $45 million went to the Civic Action Fund, a sponsored project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund, and his foundation Democracy Fund Voice provided $1.6 million to Defending Democracy Together. (He also contributed 1 million to the Republican Voters Against Trump super PAC.)

In 2020, President Biden appointed Joelle Gamble, a former principal at the Omidyar Network, as one of his top economic advisors.

In response to Greenwald’s letter, editor-in-chief Betsy Reed published a statement calling his accusations “preposterous” and “teeming with inaccuracies.”

Reed insisted that the intention in editing his work was purely to “ensure that it would be accurate and fair,” and she cited other coverage on The Intercept that’s been critical of Biden as proof that they were pulling no punches.

Anyone who’s been following The Intercept for a while knows that Greenwald isn’t the first reputable writer to leave — and with no love lost. Matt Taibbi comes to mind, as does Ken Silverstein, who was hired in late 2013 and left just over a year later.

In a 2015 Politico piece, Silverstein called The Intercept “a slowly unfolding disaster” where “journalism goes to die.”

When I spoke to Silverstein, he made it clear that his problems with The Intercept didn’t stem from censorship, but rather bureaucratic hindrances — like a disorganized editing structure and lack of communication from management.

“In a way … I think there was just too much money,” he explained. “That’s a luxury, of course. But I mean, it’s not that hard to create a news outlet. You hire writers and editors and just let them do their work.”

Silverstein assured me that he was never told what he could and couldn’t write about — even when he was going after Democratic politicians and figures.

“If that happened, I certainly didn’t know about it,” he added. “But I do think people were at least vaguely aware of what Pierre’s political instincts were.”

Silverstein previously noted that the company’s culture centered on Omidyar — which he found odd, given that he made his billions in tech, not from a spectacular journalistic track record.

“He’d come up every once in a while,” he told me. “And I sort of feel like the less I know about the publisher, the better. I’d rather not have to wonder, ‘God, is this going to piss a higher-up off?’”

As for the circumstances around Greenwald’s resignation, Silverstein said he’d prefer not to comment since he left The Intercept long before it happened.

“I still read The Intercept from time to time, and I’m sure they were far more sympathetic to Biden,” he told me. “At the time, I can imagine they would have been looking that story over and … wondering about it. But if that’s the case [that Greenwald was censored], I think that’s a legitimate reason to be angry.”

A 2021 study by Benson and Timothy Neff examined how ownership might affect news coverage — including the tendency to mention or praise owners’ and investors’ interests, a phenomenon they called “promotional economic instrumentalism.”

Using a sample of 19 prominent U.S. news outlets, the researchers analyzed mentions of owners and their economic interests. What they found is that privately held media engage in significant promotional economic instrumentalism.

In the case of the WaPo, the majority of mentions were deemed “neutral” (for example, passing disclaimers about conflicts of interest). Still, there were four times more positive mentions of the Post’s owner than negative ones.

Potential promotional surpluses were also found at The Boston Globe, where British soccer team Liverpool F.C. — in which the Globe’s owner John Henry has a big stake — appeared twice as frequently as it did in other news outlets.

In a 2013 investigation, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) critiqued The New York Times for covering Slim — its largest individual shareholder owner – “carefully.”

Whereas other outlets may examine Slim’s telecommunications monopoly with a more critical eye, bringing in diverse perspectives and sources, FAIR reporter Zaid Jilani noted that the Times tended to “bend over backward to credit the views of Slim and his defenders.”

To that end, a 2015 Times article, “Why Americans Don’t Want to Soak the Rich,” explored all the potential reasons why Americans (supposedly) don’t want to tax the wealthy more heavily.

It’s a hot take from a newspaper owned by the 12th richest guy in the world, especially when — as FAIR noted — countless Gallup polls have shown most people believe the rich don’t pay enough in taxes.

(In a 2017 interview with The Daily Beast, Slim was asked how he felt about tax plans that would require billionaires to pay the same rate as middle-class people, and he responded: “You don’t need to raise taxes on rich people because they create capitalization and investment.”)

Did a billionaire publish th– oh wait pic.twitter.com/0FZlRLBSrc

— P Nielsen Hayden (@pnh) June 10, 2021

Jeff Cohen, media critic and founder of FAIR and RootsAction, told me that while some billionaires have bailed out newspapers that may have otherwise gone under, the potential pitfalls that come with this model are impossible to ignore.

“It’s a good thing when newspapers are shrinking or going out of business, as the advertiser-driven revenue model of newspapers has fallen apart,” he explained.

“But it’s not a good thing that [Bezos] owns WaPo if you believe, as I do, that he is a dangerous force in the political and economic life of our country.”

As evidence of Bezos’ potentially problematic power, Cohen cited the Post’s conspicuously harsh coverage of Bernie Sanders during the 2016 and 2020 presidential primaries.

It’s no secret that Sanders has been openly critical of Amazon’s wages and working conditions, as well as of Bezos himself for maintaining “morally obscene” wealth while managing to pay very little in taxes. It may also be worth noting that Sanders has also vocalized disapproval of the CIA.

In 1974, he called it a “dangerous institution that has got to go,” and in 1989, he argued that the CIA or other arms of the U.S. government had overthrown every “revolution for the poor people” in Latin or Central America. (More recently, he’s seemingly softened his stance and clarified that he doesn’t advocate outright abolishing the agency, but still has “a lot of problems” with its activities.)

While the Post adamantly asserts that its editorial board remains independent from Bezos’ influence, Cohen says it’s impossible not to raise an eyebrow at the newspapers’ laughable, “let’s-twist-ourselves-into-pretzels” fact-checking of inconsequential details in his otherwise accurate statements.

Case in point: in 2016, WaPo reporter Philip Bump wrote a piece with the headline “Bernie Sanders keeps saying his average donation is $27, but his own numbers contradict that.” Indeed, the Vermont senator’s average donation is $27.89.

Would the Post have bothered to nitpick over 89 cents if Bezos didn’t stand to lose so much by Sanders being elected? Reporters also repeatedly bent over backward to deny Sanders’ claims about Bezos being one of the world’s richest people as if this were a refutable fact.

In 2016, the Post famously ran 16 negative stories about Sanders (and zero positive ones) in a span of 16 hours. Some readers were left wondering: why wasn’t The Washington Post hairsplitting every one of Hillary Clinton’s claims, too?

(Note that while Clinton was Secretary of State years earlier, the State Department awarded Amazon a $16.5 million five-year contract to launch the Kindle Mobile Learning Initiative. In 2017, Clinton praised Bezos for — in her words — “saving” The Post, adding that to her knowledge he’d been “hands-off on the editorial and content front,” allowing reporters to “get out there and do investigations.”)

When Sanders himself suggested that The Washington Post’s unrelenting attacks may have something to do with the fact that he’d encouraged taxing Amazon, the executive editor brushed this off as a “conspiracy theory.” Baron insisted: “Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence, as our reporters and editors can attest.”

Benson said he wasn’t surprised by the WaPo’s anti-Sanders coverage — not just at that particular newspaper but also at other mainstream outlets — because of an ideological bias that’s long existed in U.S. journalism. While it’s largely known that the Post is left-leaning, there’s a big difference between neoliberalism and democratic socialism.

“Most though not all elite American journalists, whether at The Washington Post, The New York Times, or elsewhere, are liberal but not on the ‘social democratic’ left,” he explained.

“You see the same attitudes in their often condescending coverage of western European welfare states. In the news reporting, though, it’s often a matter of making a judgment about what’s politically realistic or viable in the American context, and they see Sanders as out of step with the mainstream, as not ‘electable.’”

According to Victor Pickard, a media studies scholar, UPenn professor, and author of “Democracy Without Journalism?”, this is partly why billionaire-owned news media are more likely to exhibit subtler forms of censorship — like prioritizing certain issues over others.

“This kind of ‘news redlining’ favors issues important to white communities and wealthier socioeconomic groups as opposed to those issues important to the working class, poor and communities of color,” he told me.

If you ask most editors whether their ownership impacts decisions about what to cover and what not to cover, Benson said most will tell you it doesn’t happen.

“And just out of their own self-interest, most owners aren’t going to be too heavy-handed, because that undermines staff morale as well as the credibility and ultimately the value of the ‘brand,’” he explained.

“And yet with any news outlet where the owner has outside economic interests, the risk is always there of news coverage that either ‘promotes’ good news or ‘suppresses’ bad news about these interests.”

That’s where self-censorship comes in.

Why would journalists bite the hand that feeds them?

In a 2000 Pew Research and Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) survey, 41% of journalists admitted they’d either purposely avoided newsworthy stories or “softened the tone” of those stories to benefit the interests of their news organizations.

In other words, writers don’t necessarily need their editors to tell them not to pursue a story. Instinctively, they know which ones could put their job success at risk.

Sometimes they’re even told more explicitly what not to say. In 2017, The Washington Post updated its social media policy, banning employees from posting anything that adversely affects its advertisers, suppliers, vendors or partners.

Doing so could result in suspension or termination. A particular clause included in that policy also encouraged staffers to tattle on their colleagues if they violated the new rules.

When Washington Post employees were asked to share their thoughts about Bezos’ ownership in a 2018 HuffPost article, the feedback ranged wildly from “I’m grateful Bezos bought the Post, because I probably wouldn’t have a job here without it,” to “Our values are wildly out of sync with his shitty treatment of his own workers.”

“I tend to do less critical thinking about Amazon than I do, say, about Facebook or Google or Walmart, and the reason is fairly obvious: because I am thankful for the opportunity I have, which wouldn’t exist without Jeff Bezos,” one employee admitted.

“Absent a deep, more thoughtful analysis, do I have concerns about Amazon’s impact on the world — labor practices, antitrust law and the future of small businesses? Yes. And would I say that out loud at work? No.”

Whether they realize it or not, writers hoping to advance in their careers do tend to hesitate before being too critical of their bosses, according to Benson.

“It’s also structural in that the orientation of most reporting is outward not inward,” he told me, adding:

“There are not going to be a lot of reporters at any outlet with the responsibility or the bandwidth to keep an eye on the boss.

“It’s one of the blind spots that every news outlet is going to have: They are rarely going to be the ones to take the lead in cleaning their own house. That’s why competition and robust media criticism are important.

“But when your boss is a major company like Amazon, and problems emerge, it becomes a matter of professional honor to cover the story as well as or even better than others.”

All that said, Benson pointed out that the Post has published some quite critical stories about Amazon’s working conditions and anti-union drive over the years. But of course, there are limits.

“It would be crazy to rely on The Washington Post to ferret out everything that is going on at Amazon,” he said.

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