The Real Scandal of Our Media Tycoons
They’re rich, powerful, and increasingly antagonistic to the journalism they fund.
Quote of the year so far, from Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago yesterday: “In the first term, everyone was fighting me. This time, everybody wants to be my friend.”
Amazing how many friends you can make with just a few well-chosen threats of vengeance against your remaining enemies!
By Andrew Egger @ TheBulwark
It’s the Silent Surrenders That Should Scare You
It’s no surprise media owners are rushing to make good with Donald Trump; they know he’s eager to hit them where it hurts. Trump hasn’t just vowed to punish media orgs that displease him1, he’s also made it clear that owning such institutions is enough to earn a mogul his economic and political enmity.
If you’re a newspaper owner or a corporation with a cable channel in your portfolio, the cost of subsidizing media that tells the truth about Trump has been jacked up tremendously. Say goodbye to that tariff waiver; good luck with that attempted merger.
Before Trump, owning a media outlet was often considered a luxury piece for the mega-rich. You made your money in tech or healthcare or finance—the major newspaper or TV network was the gaudy bauble you picked up on the side, a conspicuous way to be seen as “giving back.” Now, though, you’re realizing the president-elect is going to make your real job way harder because your bauble really pisses him off. It’s a lot more than you bargained for when you bought it.
Some owners are currying favor more blunderously than others. Over at the Los Angeles Times, owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s meddling with the paper’s editorial coverage is getting more overbearing by the day. As Oliver Darcy of Status News reports, Times opinion staffers are now accusing Soon-Shiong of prohibiting editorials criticizing Trump on any issue unless they are paired with another piece representing the “opposing view.” He is also reportedly requiring the text of every editorial to be emailed to him in advance.
This sort of thing sucks—especially for the good people who work at the LA Times—but it’s not apocalyptic. Today’s opinion journalism is a broadly distributed property; if nothing else, humble little Substack properties like ours [Editor’s note: SUBSCRIBE, YOU FOOLS], to say nothing of America’s federated legions of bloggers and posters, will keep to the gritted-teeth task of talking through the actual costs and consequences of Donald Trump’s actions.
The more worrisome costs of media-mogul quiescence to Trump aren’t the messy public fights that spill out between owners and the takesters they employ. They’re the quiet decisions of owners who sit down to look at the future of their paper and think: Is it really in my interest to beef up my news teams right now? Why chase scoops about the new administration when they might put a target on my back?
Think back, for a second, to this moment in 2016, when there was an immense sense of mission and purpose in the news industry. Accountability for an incoming Trump administration was not just a moral imperative, it was a business opportunity. News outlets saw an influx of readers and media moguls envisioned great ROIs on buffing up their operations.
None of that is happening now. We’re sputtering out 2024 at the end of the grisliest two-year run for media layoffs in a decade. Owners are skittish about drawing Trump’s eye. While not everyone is taking aggressive steps à la Soon-Shiong, virtually all of them seem uninterested in investing their prodigious wealth into expanding their journalistic footprint.
Instead, they seem inclined to cut, slash, and let their unprofitable newsrooms continue to wither into inoffensive obscurity. The civic purpose that they claimed to possess when they purchased their outlets has seemingly vanished.
This, more than handcuffed editorial boards, is what should really alarm us. Your favorite substacker can turn an argument as well as a credentialed editorializer. But when it comes to holding power to account and shining the disinfectant of sunlight around, nothing beats the newsgathering power of a big newsroom. The danger isn’t that this or that paper won’t react with sufficient scandal to the latest Trump outrage. It’s that there won’t be anybody around to discover the outrage happened at all.
As a result,
Kristen Stewart Nude Tit Slips Out In Public
Actress Kristen Stewart repeatedly slips out her nude tit while out braless in a Chanel jacket in the video above.
Of course if Kristen Stewart was not such a hardcore lesbodyke she would be a much bigger sex symbol in the infidel West, for the non-circumcised men think it is pointless to fantasize about her floppy breast bags as they know they have no shot at ever sexing her sin holes.
However, the virile Tamudic men do not see things this way… For we know that just one peek at our mighty massive meat scuds can turn even the Ellen-ist of lesbos into a cock obsessed cum queen.
TRASHY | SCANDALOUS
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