When Media Moguls Own the News
The mega-rich managing the news isn't just business. It's a peril to democracy.
“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both,” Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said a century ago. Among the most influential jurists ever to serve on the high court, Brandeis was talking about the power of the industrial barons at the turn of the last century. Their successors who run the country’s technology and media giants are doing their best to prove Brandeis dead right today.
As the news business consolidates, so does the grip of its owners on the most vital moving part in the democratic—small d—political process: the vehicles that bring citizens the information they need to decide and choose well before they cast their votes. No matter the platform, control over the news is passing into fewer and fewer hands.
Does it matter if great wealth exercises great sway over news outlets? Is Fox News in the hands of the Murdoch clan, or CNN, now a profit center buried in the entertainment giant Warner Brothers/Discovery, just the 21st Century’s version of the trade’s one-time “ink stained wretches” and doing their job, or are they something else? What happens when propagandizing lies produces big ratings and profits, or when boardroom pronouncements from a corporation’s heavyweights none—too—subtly shape the content of the nightly news?
The First Amendment, Justice Brandeis argued, was the foundation stone of the American democracy. When the news becomes its corporate owners’ political catspaw, he would have recognized the threat.
My latest column on Mediavillage.com addresses the challenge to American democracy. Click on the link or go to www.Mediavillage.com to read more.
https://www.mediavillage.com/article/media-moguls-and-democracy/