Billionaire Media Owners Aren’t the White Knights Journalists Dreamed Of
During a bleak period for the Los Angeles Times in 2006 under Tribune Co., editors quietly courted billionaire media mogul David Geffen to buy the newspaper, hoping that, in the spirit of civic-minded duty, he would run the Times as a public trust and protect its editorial integrity.
Almost 20 years later, the longstanding dream of billionaire White Knights swooping in to rescue journalism appears to gradually be turning into a nightmare, with some of those moguls revealing themselves, as fantasy characters go, to be something closer to Lex Luthor than the saviors that were envisioned.
Instead of the enlightened ownership for which journalists had hoped, the fear now is these corporate titans view newspapers as just another asset to help fuel their larger business objectives. For some, that has meant currying favor with the new Trump administration.
The latest rude awakening comes at The Washington Post, where owner and Amazon.com Inc. chairman Jeff Bezos on Wednesday mandated that the newspaper’s opinion pages only publish work that is supportive of “personal liberties and free markets.”
“Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others,” Bezos wrote in a note to staff.
The newspaper’s top opinion editor, David Shipley, quit in protest, and journalists in the newsroom — already in the midst of an exodus to other outlets — threatened they would do the same if Bezos’ meddling found its way to the news side of the operation.
As concerns about billionaire newspaper owners go, Bezos has received fairly stiff competition from Patrick Soon-Shiong, the proprietor of the Los Angeles Times, whose pivot to embrace the Trump administration has similarly alarmed staff, prompted resignations and thrown the future of an already-struggling enterprise beset by rounds of layoffs into further chaos.
The for-profit model of journalism, with its naive faith in supposedly public-spirited plutocrats as owners, is utterly failing in this time of existential threat to democracy.”
– Samuel Freedman
Indeed, the underlying notion behind the dream of the billionaire owner hinged on the fact that they could theoretically afford to safeguard the paper’s editorial mission while alleviating some of the grinding financial pressures. As The New York Times reported at the time of Geffen’s courtship, the DreamWorks co-founder had indicated to associates “that he would be willing to accept lower profits at the newspaper so he could invest in making it world class.”
That image of an almost philanthropic approach to journalism had some precedent, and stood in stark contrast to the corporate ownership of the Times by Tribune and Sam Zell. Known as “the grave dancer” for acquiring distressed properties, Zell’s tight-fisted stewardship heralded a cycle of cost-cutting and shrinking circulation that has defined the digital age and come to feel like an inexorable death spiral.
Ironically, nothing better exemplified the image of enlightened ownership than the image of the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham — having inherited responsibility for the paper — standing firm in the face of an assault on the free press by the Nixon administration during the Watergate years in the 1970s. That moment has echoed through journalism lore, immortalized by Steven Spielberg’s 2017 movie “The Post,” which essentially serves as a more Graham-centric complement to “All the President’s Men.”
Initially, Bezos — who bought the Post for $250 million in 2013 — did say all the right things, and invested in attracting top journalistic talent while encouraging experimentation to meet the demands of the digital age.
Soon-Shiong, a biotech billionaire, bought the Times in 2018, which felt like a relief after its final stretch under Tronc, the comically named company formerly known as Tribune.
“We look forward to continuing the great tradition of award-winning journalism,” he said when the deal closed, though losses continued to bloom and The Wall Street Journal reported in 2021 that Soon-Shiong had considered selling the paper shortly after he bought it.
Other warning signs of billionaire media ownership flared during the run-up to last year’s presidential election, when both Bezos and Soon-Shiong spiked editorial endorsements of Kamala Harris, in what many saw as a hedge-betting maneuver to avoid angering the notoriously vindictive Trump should he win.
Those actions prompted waves of canceled subscriptions that, in the current climate, such publications can ill afford.
Since then, Soon-Shiong has provided a steady drip of fodder to irritate and embarrass his newsroom, including interviews with conservative outlets, talking about affixing a “bias meter” to stories, or the Times’ editing of an op-ed piece about health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that appeared to mislead readers and outraged its author.
Bezos’ decree on his paper’s opinion section triggered immediate condemnation and derision. Former Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, writing in The Guardian, called it “a death knell” for a “once-great news organization.” Marty Baron, the Washington Post’s former executive editor, said he “couldn’t be more sad and disgusted” by Bezos’ decision.
George Conway, a high-profile attorney and fixture on MSNBC, posted on X: “Please do yourself, your journalists, and your country a favor by selling the formerly venerated journalistic institution you seem intent on destroying.” He described himself as “a former contributor and subscriber to the Washington Post.”
The problem, of course, is that efforts to pressure the likes of Bezos and Soon-Shiong run into the same issue that once made their control over the Post and Times appear to be a virtue — namely, their financial wherewithal allows them to absorb short-term hits in pursuit of larger objectives.
Only here, that mission transparently looks to be cozying up to the White House in a way that reeks of self-interest, as opposed to weathering economic storms to preserve and defend journalism’s highest ideals.
“The for-profit model of journalism, with its naive faith in supposedly public-spirited plutocrats as owners, is utterly failing in this time of existential threat to democracy,” Samuel Freedman, a professor at Columbia University’s journalism school, posted on Facebook.
In 2023, Washington Post interim CEO Patty Stonesifer said Bezos was pleased with “every dollar invested” in the company, adding: “Jeff’s second decade of ownership of The Post should be even more exciting.”
For journalists at the Post and elsewhere, that excitement again feels very much like a case of being careful what you wish for.
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