Tech oligarchs and the media

Joel Kotkin in The Orange County Register:

...The public so far still does not disdain the tech oligarchs as they do Wall Street or energy firms, but they are clearly threatened, both politically and in their wallets. Their once seemingly unstoppable hold of the capital markets also has started to slip somewhat as investors begin to worry about a potential decline in social media as well as technical failures undermining the value of companies like Uber, Tesla and Snapchat.

Not that the oligarchs will change their ways without coercion. Mark Zuckerberg, amid the uproar, still seems determined to block privacy protections in California or elsewhere. 

Facebook’s arrogance has even incited tension between the tech overlords, with Apple’s Tim Cook assaulting Mark Zuckerberg for privacy violations. The fact that Cook did this in Beijing, world capital of advanced surveillance, makes the public spanking even more bizarre.

If you don’t like the media, buy it

Yet even if their net worth drops a bit, the tech oligarchs have more than enough money to subtly change the conversation. One primary way is to buy the financially stressed media, particularly the print side. 

Tech money in recent years has bought such venerable institutions as the New Republic and, most importantly, the Washington Post, putting the world’s richest man in charge of one of the nation’s most influential newspapers. 

More recently Laurene Powell, the left-leaning widow of the late Steve Jobs (net worth $20 billion), has scooped up the Atlantic for a nonprofit that will compete with more traditional competitors who still, sadly, have to make money.

Perhaps most important has been the move by Google, which is also promoting journalism by robots, to invest $300 million into subsidizing favored reporters. Given the generally poor condition of the business, this will be as alluring to many scribblers as a fat beef shank would be to a hungry dog...

What will be the tech-controlled media agenda?

The oligarch’s leveraged buyout of journalism could shape news in the decades to come. When the equally rapacious moguls of the early 20th century, like the McCormicks of Chicago or William Randolph Hearst, bought papers, they pushed an agenda of imperial expansion, anti-unionism and resistance to those assaulting their fortunes.

Our current crop of moguls also has an ideology — the politics of gentry liberalism. This includes promotion of dense urbanism (although not usually for themselves), open borders and a heaping portion of identity politics. But they, like their forebears, want to keep their money, embracing a quasi-libertarian refusal to address the dangers posed by the concentration of wealth and power, notably their own...

Less room will be provided to anything associated with grassroots-based populism, whether the Trumpian version or that of Bernie Sanders. Jeff Bezos might detest Trump, but recall that in 2016, he turned his guns on Bernie, whose policies might threaten his enormous wealth and corporate power...

Ironically, the brouhaha over Russian efforts to influence the election may provide the oligarchs with the license to “curate,” or more accurately censor, views they don’t like. 

For the most part this censorship is being carried out under guidance developed largely by progressive groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which often labels anyone outside its ideological “safe space” as racist bigots. What is considered hateful speech by the politically correct does not have to reflect neo-Nazi or Putin-inspired opinion...