The winner of the US presidential election will owe their success to a tiny number of voters in a small number of swing states. With such narrow margins at play, will the candidates also partly owe their success or failure to some of the world’s richest men, whose wealth has bought them influence over those few voters? The billionaire owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, respectively, may have some soul-searching to do when they finally realise the enormous responsibility that comes with media ownership. The same goes for X owner Elon Musk – although whether he has a soul to search is less clear.
The Washington Post’s own journalists have reported that Bezos directed the paper not to endorse either candidate despite a leader column already having been written in Kamala Harris’s favour. Bezos defended the move as a “principled decision” to prevent the “perception of non-independence”. Staff and readers claimed it was to protect his business interests under a Trump presidency. Soon-Shiong said the LA Times would not make an endorsement to avoid adding to division in the country. Trump’s conclusion was that “they’re saying this Democrat’s no good… And they think I’m doing a great job. They just don’t want to say it.” Meanwhile, Musk constantly pushes anti-Harris and pro-Trump material on his own social media platform.
How much influence on voting do these decisions have? On the educated, affluent, Democrat-voting readers of the Post and LA Times, probably very little. But in the wider sense that these news media proprietors have deemed it better to accommodate a Trump presidency, perhaps quite a lot.
The story of wealthy media owners using the influence they have bought to protect their interests and shape the political world is as old as mass market newspapers. In The Men Who Killed the News, Eric Beecher shows the startling similarities that exist between so many of the big owners (or “barons”, as us tabloid journos like to refer to them). They follow a fairly well-trodden path: cocky young man (obviously a man) with something to prove (usually to his father) buys/inherits a struggling newspaper, smashes business norms, bulldozes way to success, amasses wealth, power and personal notoriety, then lives a life of irascibility and excess.
Common themes are an obsession with family control of the business, blindness to questionable behaviour by underlings, compulsion to influence national politics and, bizarrely (or maybe not), a fascination with Napoleon. Spoiler alert: few die peacefully in their beds surrounded by a long-term loving partner and well-balanced, harmonious children.
It all prompts the question: are amoral men attracted to publishing for the influence, access and power it brings? Or is it the acquisition of power that turns good men sour? Beecher concludes it is a bit of both, but the end result is that it’s not just a few bad apples in the global news barrel but a thoroughly rotten tub.
The cumulative damage they have inflicted on democracies dates all the way back to John Walter, a London coal merchant who launched the Times in 1788 from a disused printworks in Blackfriars, only to be jailed and sent to the pillory the following year for libelling the Duke of York.
In the US in 1878, Joseph Pulitzer, once a penniless Hungarian refugee, began his publishing empire by acquiring the St Louis Dispatch. Pulitzer knew what he was really buying, writing later: “I can never be president because I am a foreigner… but some day I am going to elect a president.” Around the same time William Randolph Hearst, on whom Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane was based, took over the San Francisco Examiner, making it “the birthplace of modern sensationalist journalism”. Hearst interfered at every level and hired columnists including Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Franklin D Roosevelt said he sometimes thought that “Hearst has done more harm to the cause of democracy and civilisation in America than any three other contemporaries put together”.
In the UK Alfred Harmsworth copied the Pulitzer and Hearst model, launching the Daily Mail in 1896. Within a quarter of a century Harmsworth (who became Viscount Northcliffe) and his brother Harold (who became Viscount Rothermere) had expanded their business to include the Times, the Observer, the Daily Mirror and the Evening News. Northcliffe supported Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts and the Nazis, and micro-managed the editorial direction of his titles through constant memos to editors. Lloyd George accused him of “diseased vanity”. Northcliffe also found himself a young protégé in Australia – a reporter turned editor, Keith Murdoch. Again from an immigrant family, Murdoch set about buying the Sydney Evening News with support from Northcliffe. On his death in 1952, the family business fell to his 21-year-old son, Rupert.
In Canada, Max Aitken, whose family had emigrated from Scotland, was the next to amass a publishing empire. But it was when he moved back to Britain that he really began to wield his power, bagging the Daily Express and a knighthood to become Lord Beaverbrook. In 1947, Beaverbrook told the Royal Commission on the Press that he ran the Express “purely for the purpose of making propaganda, and with no other motive”. Clement Attlee called him “the only evil man I ever met”.
Another Canadian, Conrad Black, controlled – with his business partner David Radler – half of Canada’s daily papers along with the Daily Telegraph in London. A decade later Black and Radler were accused of siphoning off 95 per cent of the profit of the company they controlled (but didn’t own) to fund ludicrously lavish lifestyles. Black believed that “greed has been severely underestimated and denigrated – unfairly so, in my opinion”. In 2007 he was convicted of fraud and jailed (he later received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump).
Amid the chaos, the Telegraph was offloaded to the obsessively secretive and insular Barclay brothers, whose tax controversies and tangled business webs came to light when Frederick Barclay sued his nephews for allegedly bugging family members inside their Ritz Hotel. Adherents of the “history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes” school of thought will be pleased to learn the prospective buyer of the Telegraph, following the Barclays’ collapse, is Dovid Efune, whose New York Sun news website has links with… Conrad Black.
The list goes on. Robert Maxwell bought the Daily Mirror, the New York Daily News and others before drowning in debt and the Atlantic Ocean one November night in 1991. Richard Desmond owned the Express for 18 years, during which time he was alleged to have punched a member of staff over a story (Desmond paid a settlement but denied the incident ever took place). In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi controlled 90 per cent of national TV broadcasting during his four terms as prime minister and a litany of criminal cases.
It is, however, Rupert Murdoch who is the main character of The Men Who Killed the News, and author Eric Beecher’s bête noire. Murdoch poached Beecher to edit the Melbourne Herald but when the author felt his “moral compass became dysfunctional” he quit the “propaganda sausage factory”. Beecher later became locked in a vicious defamation case brought by Murdoch’s eldest son, Lachlan, after his website Crikey drew links between the Murdoch-owned Fox News and Donald Trump’s 2020 stolen-election lies.
Rupert Murdoch turned his father’s small publishing business into arguably the world’s biggest media empire spanning the UK (the Times and the Sun), the US (Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post), Australia and Hong Kong. How much influence Murdoch exerts over his titles has long been debated. Soon after buying the News of the World in 1969, he told an interviewer: “I did not come all this way [from Australia] not to interfere.” The former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil claims he was never instructed by Murdoch not to do anything. But influence is much more subtle than that. The former Times editor Harry Evans talked of “charismatic authority”, whereby underlings didn’t need to be told what to do because they were so innately desperate to please. And yet the Dominion defamation case – in which the voting systems company sued Fox News for alleging that their machines were rigged against Trump – revealed specific editorial directions in emails from Murdoch to senior Fox TV executives.
Murdoch has probably been more influential on the shape of the US today through his ownership of Fox News than anyone else. In the UK, successive prime ministers have paid homage. Tony Blair made a 50-hour round trip to meet Murdoch ahead of the 1997 election. One of Boris Johnson’s first engagements as prime minister was to see him, and Keir Starmer sweated blood to win support from the Sun in July’s election.
The former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd once said: “Everyone’s frightened of Murdoch.” As they should be. But what of Elon Musk, who dominates our timelines with his pro-Trump pronouncements and has allowed misinformation and hatred to fester on his social media platform? Beecher alleges that “Musk has meddled in ways that Beaverbrook, Hearst and Murdoch could never contemplate”.
Crucially, though, influence has become less about alpha males and more about algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) giving new forms of media mass penetration, and bringing polarisation and misinformation. A Citizen Kane-style character dictating editorial policy down the phone from his yacht has become the least of society’s problems. Meanwhile, media business models are unravelling due to the dominance of tech platforms and their control of data and advertising. The result has been financial collapse for news organisations and mass redundancies of reporters.
In their place comes AI, which allows information and images to be manipulated, personalised and rapidly disseminated, often without the involvement of a human editor or creator. Content that divides and angers wins attention, so the technology will create more to field that demand. AI “will rain a hellfire of fake and doctored content on the world”, warns one American news CEO quoted by Beecher.
At the end of October, an investigation by NBC accused X of allowing the platform’s AI technology to boost spread of voter-fraud conspiracy theories and smears against Kamala Harris. The content is appearing in a beta feature on X (which means it’s not available to all users) named “Stories for you”, which uses X’s own AI software, named Grok, to aggregate trending social media topics. (X did not respond to NBC’s request for comment.)
Beecher’s book rails against “the men who killed the news” only to conclude, as we all must, that it is machines and Big Tech that are really destroying it. Few news organisations will survive. It will only be those who can build a direct relationship with readers based on trust, community and quality content. All of which costs money.
And so the influence of billionaires who can fund struggling news organisations may grow stronger than ever. Our democracy is clinging to the best a free press can offer. A free press dominated by the unshakeable power of big business, and now Big Tech.
Alison Phillips is the New Statesman’s media columnist and a former editor of the “Daily Mirror”. Listen to her discuss the changing role of the media mogul on the New Statesman’s Culture podcast.
The Men Who Killed the News
Eric Beecher
Simon & Schuster, 416pp, £20
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This article appears in the 07 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump takes America