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For Marius Dragomir, Director of the Center for Media, Data and Society in Budapest, who grew up in Romania where his family once huddled around the radio listening to Radio Free Europe with the volume low and the drapes closed, Trump’s recent attacks on the electoral process along with his actions over the past four years are heartbreaking. “America was the model and the dream for Eastern Europe, especially after 1990. But it’s not anymore,” he says, “especially after Trump.”
Seeing Trump place family and friends in positions of power while continuing to make money from official visits to his hotels and resorts was reminiscent to Dragomir of the kleptocracies that emerged after the breakup of the Soviet Union. His colleagues kept asking, “‘Is it really possible for the American president to do whatever he wants and to mix his business interests with the position he has, to do bad things with impunity?’ We are used to that in Eastern Europe — but to see it in America was strange,” he says. “People lost the appreciation they once had for America” — all the more over the past month when Trump went after anyone who failed to bend to his insistence that he’d won. The difference, says Dragomir, is that somewhere like Romania or Bulgaria, Trump probably would have prevailed.
That dip from Romania should be very concerned about all this who became very rich only after being in office.
Marius Dragomir, Director of the Center for Media, Data and Society in Budapest
More legacy media propaganda.
But in the last few years, especially since the crash, there’s been the emergence of these big asset managers like BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard. Now it’s mostly finance that owns the media. The New York Times, I believe is 93 percent owned by financial institutions. For every major media company, with the exceptions of Bloomberg and The Washington Post which are privately owned, institutional investors own controlling interests in those companies. Now, it doesn’t mean they run them day-to-day, but they do get to choose who runs them day-to-day. And if they don’t like the way it’s being run, they can change the management.
Finance has control over the media in a way it didn’t have before. And what’s important is not only the imperative of short-term returns on capital invested, but also the same financial institutions own Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and the rest of the military-industrial complex. They own a controlling interest of shares of fossil fuel companies. So, these media companies now are not just monopolies, they’re integrated and part of financial monopolies that kind of own everything. ... So, no wonder they don’t want to see the left wing of the Democratic Party showing up on television. ...
When Bezos bought The Washington Post — I forget the price he paid for it — but he probably paid one tenth of what he would have had to pay for it a decade earlier. I mean, it has no value. [Laughs.] And he bought it not to make money; it’s a vanity buy so he could influence politics and push his agenda. It’s not because he said, “This is a great investment!” It’s a crappy investment. It’s the worst investment in his portfolio, no doubt. But it’s the best method to get political influence that will protect his portfolio.
Onvacation saysMarius Dragomir, Director of the Center for Media, Data and Society in Budapest
He has worked for Open Society Foundation, which is funded by a well-known ex-Hungarian gentleman. No surprise there
https://people.ceu.edu/marius_dragomir
You're a better reporter than any in the MSM
patrick.net
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