Who Owns the Media?

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Who owns the media seems like a simple and straightforward question that can be answered with a brief search, corporate registration papers and ownership records. Or so you might think.

The ongoing battle over the Washington Post between its actual owner, Jeff Bezos, the 2nd wealthiest man in the world, who paid $250 million for it, and the staff, show that, at least when it comes to the media, the question of ownership is about more than who legally owns it.

Last year, Bezos decided to change course at the paper which had adopted its infamous “Democracy Dies in Darkness” tagline amid a promise to bring down Trump as a sequel to Watergate. After eight years in which the paper managed to do little more than settle out of court after libeling a high school kid as a racist, subscriptions by the true believers were declining.

Hoping to reboot the paper, Bezos brought in Will Lewis, formerly of the UK’s Telegraph and the Wall Street Journal, who in turn tried to bring in The Telegraph‘s Robert Winnett as editor. The staffers revolted and coordinated a campaign with allied leftist media to smear Lewis and Winnett until the latter decided to drop out. While the objections around past British media scandals, the real issue was that Bezos was bringing in new leadership associated with centrist media to move the paper to the center. And the employees wouldn’t have it. CNN staffers had similarly ousted their new boss Chris Licht who had tried to move it more toward the center.

But while CNN is a low-tier property in an entertainment conglomerate whose executives are concerned with other matters, Bezos wouldn’t let matters rest at the Washington Post.

The usually hands off owner intervened aggressively, ordering the paper not to publish an endorsement of Kamala Harris. In response, an editor-at-large, columnists and editorial writers left, and and other columnists including some with extremely checkered reputations like Karen Attiah, at the heart of Qatar’s Jamal Khashoggi influence operation,  Max Boot, whose wife would be indicted for acting as an unregistered foreign agent, and Jennifer Rubin, who was practically on Biden’s payroll, wrote angry columns protesting the non-endorsement.

The Post featured these diatribes prominently. Post columnists, including its alleged ‘humor’ columnist Alexandra Petri (married to the paper’s current deputy opinion editor), took shots at Bezos in his own paper. The paper promoted ‘outrage’ by readers who threatened to cancel their subscriptions for ‘threatening democracy’ as if the average Post reader were likely to vote for anyone but the ‘D’ even if he were the devil himself.

Washington Post ‘cartoonist’ Ann Telnaes resigned after the paper wouldn’t publish a cartoon of Bezos bowing before Trump. Other staffers also headed for the exit in various tantrums.

Truly fed up now, Bezos announced that the new missions of the editorial page would be “personal liberties and free markets” and contended that “these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion.” Opinion page editor David Shipley resigned.

“Bezos argues for personal liberties. But his news organization now will forbid views other than his own in its opinion section,” complained former executive editor Marty Baron, who had turned the paper into a monoculture and appeared to have targeted the David Horowitz Freedom Center for retaliation after Front Page Magazine had criticized his mismanagement of the paper.

(Shortly after our criticisms, the Post ran multiple hit pieces on the Center, accusing us of being the secret force behind the Trump administration and inciting a federal investigation of us.)

Democrats seemed baffled and outraged that Bezos dared to set policy at a newspaper that he owned. “This is what Oligarch ownership of the media looks like,” Sen. Bernie Sanders complained. “The second-richest guy in the world, Bezos, owns The Washington Post. He has now declared that the editorial page of that paper is going Trump right-wing.”

That is how private ownership of things in general works. But the Post hasn’t gone ‘right wing’.

Apart from more resignations, the paper’s opinion pages look much like they used to. The Editorial Board has ‘moderated’ and appears largely in line with the Amazon founder’s diktat, focusing its attacks on Trump mostly over tariffs and offering tepid views on other issues, but the remaining columnists and the rest of the op-ed section remains the same political monoculture. (Along with George Will who, like counterpart David Brooks, focuses on social observations.)

Current plans are to divide up the paper into two divisions between a ‘politics’ and ‘news’ desk with the Democracy Dies in Darkness crowd being shuffled off into the politics section in the hopes that the newspaper might finally be able to report some non-Never Trump news. This has spurred more rejected anti-Bezos editorials and columns, and another wave of resignations.

Why should anyone outside D.C., the media or politics care about this inter-paper drama? Because it goes to the larger question of confronting what is really wrong with the media.

If the second richest man in the world doesn’t even control the paper he bought, who does?

The answer is right in front of us. Much like the corporate world, the C-suite isn’t really in charge, and neither are the owners, and certainly not the shareholders. When even a man wealthy enough to drop a quarter of a billion on a paper has struggled to enforce his will, the average CEO is much less likely to have sway over what goes on in the real centers of power.

The struggle sessions within the New York Times, the ousting of CNN’s CEO, and a smaller scale struggle between the owner of the LA Times and the staff show that while the formal power may be with owners and CEOs, the actual centers of power lie in leftist networks within the media that are able to defy owners, executives and anyone who tries to moderate them.

The media always had its biases and clubbiness, but during the Bush and Obama administrations the centers of gravity shifted away from an older formal leadership, which became all but irrelevant, to a younger internet-savvy club of activists, which closely coordinated on their political agendas behind the scenes while creating a new covert media cartel.

Early leaks that revealed the coordination between members of the so-called ‘Juicebox Mafia’, activist bloggers turned journalists with a knack for social media and appearing influential, were shrugged off. By the next decade such coordination had become routine and unwelcome members like Bari Weiss at the New York Times were ousted with bullying, leaks and ‘revolts’.

A major turning point was reached when Dylan Byers, a member of the ‘Juicebox Mafia’, wrote an article smearing New York Times’s executive editor Jill Abramson based on quotes from anonymous staffers. Abramson was ousted and was replaced with Dean Baquet who lived in terror of a similar fate. Just how little power Baquet had was exposed when Donald G. McNeil Jr, the paper’s science and health reporter, was ousted in a baseless cancel culture incident. Even though Baquet urged that McNeil be given another chance, 150 staffers demanded that he be ousted, and they got their way, making it clear that the activist network was really in charge.

What happened at universities, where non-activist faculty live in terror of activist students, and administrators live in terror of activist faculty and students, has happened in the media, and to varying degrees in corporations. But where corporations began reclaiming power from HR departments and DEI affinity groups in recent years, that has not happened in the media.

And Bezos’s efforts to wrest control back over his paper may be a bellwether.

Bezos bought the Washington Post for financial reasons, not ideological ones, and his desire to retune the paper away from woke politics likely has to do with winning federal contracts. The billionaire remembers clashes over Amazon’s federal cloud contracts during Trump’s first term and doesn’t want to see the company lose billions over tantrums by a paper that was supposed to aid his business interests by influencing D.C. politicians, not obstruct or sabotage them.

What he did not understand was that the paper he bought was not really his. It belonged to an activist network that used it as a platform with little regard for who actually owned it. This media ‘deep state’ is in charge in a way that mere corporate owners can never be because it is not dependent on any single outlet or all of them but is an element of a larger political organization.

Personnel is policy. Ideological networks and cultural conformity are far more pervasive than mere orders and policy statements can ever be. That’s why a leftist takeover is so hard to end..Bezos is one of the biggest capitalists in the world, but he’s up against an anti-capitalist movement that has plenty of experience infiltrating and taking over workplaces.

And that is who ‘owns’ the media.