patrick.net

In the old days, newsrooms were full of smart men from blue collar backgrounds who had little respect for their betters and had few compunctions about following stories where they took them. The shrunken reporting world is full of Ivy League grads and elite wannabes. ...

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. ...

I’ve been preoccupied with BlackRock, this big asset management company. It controls seven trillion dollars. Between them, State Street, Vanguard and some of the other smaller ones, they vote the shares that control something like 95 percent of the S&P 500. But when I tried to find stories about BlackRock that really are revealing, the place I found them was on Bloomberg. Well, Bloomberg is privately owned, whereas The New York Times is owned by BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, and the other institutional investors. I guess people know where their bread is buttered. ...

The great political problem: how do you get sufficient public funds to support independent, uncensored news media, but without letting the government control who gets the money and how it’s used? That’s the problem. Is it solvable? Well, the postal subsidy solved it. The postal subsidy? Everyone got it if you were a newspaper. They didn’t care what your politics were.

In fact, the reason why we know it was such an extraordinarily successful policy is that the first great scandal with the post office till big newspapers came was in the antebellum period when Southern postmasters refused to carry abolitionist newspapers. And that was considered such an outrage in the North, it was one of the main factors that drove northern anger at the South and hatred of slavery. It would take away democracy if you couldn’t even talk about slavery or abolition. There’s a handful of other incidents in which you have the post office attempting censorship. They were always criticized. In fact, during World War I when anti-war tracts were censored, what the US government did was deemed so outrageous that it led to all the great First Amendment decisions the Supreme Court made that we live with today. They came on the heels of World War I. A lot of that came from most Americans considering the post office’s censorship of anti-war material just obscene.