In 2016 there was a Trump Bump: a boost for left- and right-wing media from US audiences either repelled or enraptured by their new president. This time it’s a Trump Jump, with media owners vaulting over each other to win favour in the run-up to the inauguration. (I was going to say Trump Hump, which while perhaps more accurate just sounds a bit gross.)
A stream of the biggest players in US media has made a festive-season pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago bearing gifts. Billionaire Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s owner and publisher of the Washington Post, brought offerings including a $1m donation to the inauguration fund, another $1m in-kind contribution and a new Amazon documentary about Melania Trump made by Brett Ratner, who hasn’t directed a major film since 2017 when he faced claims of sexual misconduct and harassment by six women (which he has denied).
Another present for Trump must surely be the exodus of talent from the WaPo following the title’s refusal to endorse a candidate ahead of the election. On 4 January, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit after a cartoon including Bezos and other tycoons kneeling before a Trump statue was spiked.
Meanwhile, the biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, who stopped his title from endorsing a presidential candidate, reportedly “asked” staff to “take a break” from writing about Trump and banned critical editorials of him unless published alongside an opposing view. Editors have also been told to send Soon-Shiong editorials – including the name of their author – ahead of publication.
Mark Zuckerberg arrived at the Florida resort offering up a pair of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses and a new career direction for Nick Clegg. OK, Clegg is indicating he left his role as head of global affairs at Meta voluntarily, but he is replaced by the prominent Republican and former George W Bush deputy chief of staff Joel Kaplan.
Another visitor was TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew. The platform is due to be shut down in the US the day before the inauguration. A new law with cross-party support requires its owner, ByteDance, to sell the social media platform to an American firm or face a ban. The US Supreme Court will make a final ruling on 10 January, but Trump (formerly a TikTok critic) has asked for a delay while he works on a “political resolution”.
His @realdonaldtrump TikTok account, with 14.7 million followers, has had 1.4 billion views. Meanwhile, the @teamtrump campaign account, with 8.3 million followers, had 2.4 billion total views. Videos using the hashtag #trump have had 36 billion views.
The list goes on: left-leaning MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski visited, and ABC News, owned by Disney, has agreed to pay $15m plus $1m in costs to settle a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump. A lot to lose, but not as much as licences for the 230 local TV stations it runs.
Trump has made no secret of his belief that the media is “the enemy of the people”. A reckoning lies ahead, including potential legal cases and rumoured plans to pursue whistleblowers under the Espionage Act. All of which will worry journalists and admirers of a free press.
But these may be further down the list of concerns of the media-owning billionaires. For those such as Bezos, Soon-Shiong and the big media corporations, news ownership is a tiny, usually loss-making part of their empires.They may once have regarded their ownership as influential or philanthropic. What they won’t allow it to become is problematic for wider business interests.
Let’s imagine: Tesco is unwrapping Mars Bars, replacing them with poison and reselling them. Mars finds out and says: “This is outrageous. Leave our Mars Bars alone.” Tesco responds: “Look, we’ll warn people they might not taste like Mars Bars. But that’s it – and don’t cause a fuss or we’ll sell KitKats instead.”
This is pretty much what is happening at Apple as it takes BBC content, mashes it up through AI and regurgitates it as false app alerts. Examples include a notification that Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering a healthcare CEO in New York, had killed himself. He hadn’t. Another claimed Rafael Nadal had come out as gay. He hadn’t. Apple is refusing to pull the tech, saying only that it is working on an update that should “further clarify” that the alerts are AI summaries.
Shockingly, the BBC isn’t deploying teams of lawyers or demanding Ofcom intervention. Let’s hope it’s not for fear of losing Apple’s traffic. Without trust, all the BBC has is reruns of Dad’s Army.
They say you can’t keep a good (news) man down. The career of David Montgomery, a former Murdoch exec who edited the News of the World and Today before becoming chief executive of Mirror Group, appeared just weeks ago to have reached an end when his National World (which owns the Scotsman, Yorkshire Post and other regional titles) was the subject of a takeover move by one of its investors.
And yet now Montgomery is rumoured to be dealing with Chelsea owner Todd Boehly to bid for the Telegraph. The New York Sun owner Dovid Efune has been in talks to take on the Telegraph, but Efune is yet to find the eye-watering £500m price tag. Monty may march again.
[See also: Looking back on a year of great drama for the media]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 08 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Great Power Gap