The New York Times wrote about the control of the mass media by billionaires, an issue that should concern us all. Not only do they own the media, some use it to promote their financial self-interest and political ideology.
This is is not an entirely new phenomenon, the story notes, mentioning William Randolph Hearst as an example. But Hearst co-existed with thousands of community newspapers. In this age of concentrated ownership of the media, a handful of moguls own the news.
Jim Rutenberg, the reporter, points out an ominous development. Billionaire Peter Thiel bankrolled a lawsuit by wrestler Hulk Hoganagainst Gawker.com, a gossip website, as payback for Gawker’s report that he was gay. Hogan won $140 million, which, if upheld on appeal, would put Gawker out of business.
This is an ingenious way to stifle dissent. If a billionaire doesn’t like a website, he or she can sue it into bankruptcy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Unfortunately, the “sue to oblivion” philosophy is not just limited to media. The US court and healthcare ‘systems’ enable any and all with financial privilege to assert their will on an undue basis against anyone not in their club. This in anti-democratic, and anti-human decency at its zenith.
LikeLike
It’s been reported that Peter Thiel (on Z-berg’s Facebook Board, aside a board member who said India was better off under colonialism), wrote at a libertarian blog, “extending the voting franchise to women…rendered the nation’s capitalistic democracy into an oxymoron.”
Capitalism’s survival is threatened by the ruthless selfishness, lack of understanding about what fuels international and national economic growth and, the contempt for democracy, that describes today’s American capitalists.
LikeLike
He might not have been before the award, but I bet he was pretty gay afterward. 🙂
In fact, I don’t know anyone who would not be gay (as in jubilant) after getting $140 million dollars.
LikeLike
I don’t think Thiel is receiving any of that money. That’s all for the Hulkster.
LikeLike
The 140M goes to Hulk Hogan, Brother.
LikeLike
FLERP!
I was not talking about Thiel
LikeLike
I read “a lawsuit by wrestler Hulk Hoganagainst Gawker.com, a gossip website, as payback for Gawker’s report that he was gay.” as “that Hogan was gay”
I’m not up on these important matters.
My bad.
LikeLike
Congrats on managing to ignore a sex-tape scandal. I shouldn’t know about it. I should know more about what our own Hulkster, Mikey the Mulk, is up to.
LikeLike
So did Thiel deduct the money he paid to the lawyers as a charitable contribution? Or was it a gift to Hulk Hogan by paying a few million to underwrite a lawsuit that would pay out 140 million? Will he be paying a gift tax on it?
LikeLike
In the 1990s book, “The Media Monopoly”, Ben Bagdikian outlined the current trend in media. It was worthwhile then and even more worthwhile now.
LikeLike
Ah, yes, Peter Thiel, the self-described “libertarian” whose data analysis firm, Palantir, received seed funding from the CIA’s in-house venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel.
LikeLike
Billionaire control of the media is a very serious problem. Alternative media sources like The Young Turks, Democracy Now!, and blogs such as this one are essential to combat the tyranny of the mainstream media.
However, the Hulk Hogan lawsuit is a separate issue. Gawker published a very explicit pornographic video of Hogan that was secretly recorded, without his knowledge or permission. Americans have the right to sue when their rights have been violated, no matter who pays their legal fees.
LikeLike
Excellent alternative media include Truthout and PR Watch.
LikeLike
I read and watch alternative media daily . Unfortunately as good as it is, it does not reach enough people . The Young Turks may be the most popular web based news service but they reach relatively few people. Same with The Nation, Truthdig and Democracy Now…. ….
The cable networks are all now totally corporately controlled from CNN, to FOX to MSNBClinton .With a center right to right wing tilt.the Turk was dispensed with for criticizing Obama ,Schultz for his position on Unions and Trade agreements. Van Jones quipped on CNN after the Indiana primary “can’t anybody say Bernie won” .
The fact that Trump got hours of MSM coverage , to Sanders seconds ,tells us they prefer an Oligarch friendly ,demagogue to FDR style reform. The vast majority of Americans get their news from the boob tube or daily papers. Our man Clinton did away with protections designed to keep Oligarchs from owning too many media sources in any given market . So do you really think that Rupert really would object to a Clinton victory.
As I said in the post on education reporting; that Powell Document has come to fruition .
LikeLike
The description of ed rephorm’s success, during the Clinton administration, is posted in the History section of the Aspen Society and Education Program web page.
LikeLike
Exactly what Bernie has been yelling about for 3 decades.
Indeed, 5 major corporations own about 80 -90% of the “news” that most Americans watch. Guess whose interests they promote.
LikeLike
CBS, since, the Fox guy took over news management, is almost entirely corporate spin.
LikeLike
Should I cheer your comment or sob with you .
LikeLike
To concerned citizen:
I completely agree with you. Gawker abuses its power to shame people’s reputation unlimited.
Hopefully, all LAUSD jailed veteran teachers can hire lawyer Lederman to represent them in a class-action-suit to sue Cortine who masterminds in implanting and in accusing pornography or twisting private emails into teachers’ school laptop. Back2basic
LikeLike
EDWeek editorial content is paid for by major foundations, with not much remainder for other topics. The claim of editorial independence cannot be sustained. Moreover in education reporting there is a churn from “producing news” for USDE and other government officials, moving into public relations for foundations, then setting up a for-profit operation doing work for those same clients, and/or having “non-profits” set up an operation and hiring shills to churn out reports. Campbell Brown and Peter Cunningham are shills. Lynn Olson, a senior editor at EdWeek, has migrated to the Gates Foundation. And so the round robin goes. Several years ago a reporter for Time indicated that story priorities were related to keeping or attracting specific advertisers–not entirely new but not often explicit. That information was not supposed to be leaked.
LikeLike
I devoutly wish that I didn’t get emails from EdWeek promoting the miracle of tech in the classroom. They are just selling product for advertisers.
LikeLike
In agreement 100%. As usual another extraordinary
piece. God Bless
We need you in Politics!
LikeLike
There’s an interesting dynamic in the media, they are beholden to ownership, but also to ratings and, during the prolonged campaign season, to the money that rolls in from political ads. None of them want to put too bright a light on Trump for example, since if they cross whatever his invisible line is, they get banned from press conferences and have no lurid content to fight the viewership/ratings war with.
LikeLike
And their portrayal of Clinton as the presumptive nominee before the first primary???????!!!!!!!.
LikeLike
This my friends is a transformative era…this ‘age of information,’ and whomever controls what the people know, controls how they make decisions.
Look at how Diane’s post which was critical of the tests being devised to test our kids and evaluate our teachers, was removed form The Huffington Post, because of lies by the corporate entity Pearson, claiming copyright infringement.
And while the popular media does its THING to confuse the public, BEHIND THE SCENES powerful tech companies (Facebook) are lobbying against good privacy laws…state by state to use YOUR information. The proposed amendment, In Illinois, would have carved out an exemption for any biometric information collected through a photograph or video!
This “helps to illustrate how from drone aircraft to genetic information and statutes that govern how companies sell consumer information to data miners, tech companies are in a capital to capital fight to keep new laws from being passed or to soften those already on the books. The Illinois biometric privacy act is one of the best new privacy laws in the country,” said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “It’s bad news for consumers when Internet companies start lobbying.”
But to me, it shows how the billionaires who are looting the world, are also ensuring that the information age works one way… for them. You are limited in what YOU can know, but THEY can know anything and everything about you… ORWELL TURNS IN HIS GRAVE!
LikeLike
Orwell was very much influenced by Jack London . If you really want to get depressed read the “Iron Heel ” written in 1906 not much has changed.
LikeLike
Why, thank you. I never read that one, but I have read dystopian futures by Robert Silverberg, Clifford Simak, Jerry Pournelle, Clark, Asimov and …well I love the genre : ‘if this continues.”
LikeLike
AND Speaking of Truth, and lies, and the manipulation by the media.
I recommend an OLD book, published just as tv was at its infancy. The Social Contract – Book Review The Hidden Persuaders”
http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc1004/article_903.shtml
Packard foresaw how the image media would sell us everything, using the psychological techniques for persuasion. This was the time when Marshall McLuhan wrote The_Medium_is_the_Massage
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25955.The_Medium_is_the_Massage
and then there’s Al Franken’s LIES & THE LYING LIARS WHO TELL THEM,
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/11/highereducation.news1
and then Al Franken tells ‘The Truth’ after telling ‘Lies’:
http://www.today.com/id/9805738/ns/today-today_books/t/al-franken-tells-truth-after-telling-lies/#.VvA_rscw2B0
Both were written before our current road to mendacity where lies are truth, and the words of a candidate for the Presidency has ‘mistruths’ 76% of the time… (you know I would not make that one up).
http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/
“Why Trump Can Lie and No One Seems to Care:The GOP candidate gets away with outrageous, contradictory statements because the mainstream media and the public let him.” This from Bill Moyers:
“Donald Trump is a serial liar. Okay, to be a bit less Trumpian about it, he has trouble with the truth. If you look at Politifact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning site that examines candidates’ pronouncements for accuracy, 76 percent of Trump’s statements are rated either “mostly false,” “false,” or “pants on fire,” which is to say off-the-charts false. By comparison, Hillary Clinton’s total is 29 percent.”
“But if Trump doesn’t cotton much to the truth, he doesn’t seem to cotton much to his own ideas, either. He waffles, flip-flops and obfuscates, sometimes changing positions from one press appearance to the next, as Peter Alexander reported on NBC Nightly News this past Monday — a rare television news critique of Trump.
“I say “rare” because most of the time, as Glenn Kessler noted in The Washington Post this week,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/few-stand-in-trumps-way-as-he-piles-up-the-four-pinocchio-whoppers/2016/05/07/8cf5e16a-12ff-11e6-8967-7ac733c56f12_story.html MSM — the mainstream media — just sit back and let Trump unleash his whoppers without any pushback, even as they criticize his manners and attitude.”
Robert Becker, an editor at Oped where I write, discusses the mendacity afoot out there:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Looming-Trump-Whoppers-Wh-by-Robert-S-Becker-Bullying_Demagoguery_Farce_HUMOR-SATIRE-160526-514.html
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/11/highereducation.news1
and the last word is from Bill Maher: “The truth is dead and the internet killed it,” Maher proclaimed as his Republican panelists silently nodded.”
“Somewhere along the line the internet became Bullsh*t Boulevard and the truth became road kill.
”http://www.salon.com/2016/01/30/the_truth_is_dead_and_the_internet_killed_it_bill_maher_mourns_the_good_old_days_of_gop_zombie_lies_like_trickle_down_economics/
“In this week’s “Real Time” segment “New Rules,” host Bill Maher longed for the nostalgic days when the GOP would just tell blanket “zombie lies.” http://www.salon.com/2010/07/01/economy_fail_right/ You know the kind of lies that can’t be killed; it’s where the GOP convinces people that trickle-down economics works or voter fraud being real and idiots follow blindly drooling with blank stares until Rick Grimes comes to take an ax to their head. http://www.salon.com/2015/04/16/sarah_palins_incoherent_facebook_brag_i_was_in_our_bus_wrapped_in_the_constitution/
LikeLike
Trump is four decades in the making. Truth be told Reagan is elected
due to the “Southern Strategy” and not just in the South.. Maher did an excellent take down of Reagan pointing out that Republican lunacy is not a new phenomena.
However dismal Democrats create and empower Republicans, Thomas Frank’s “Listen Liberal ” .nails it . Both Clinton and Obama were elected in response to economic pain. . Both could have been trans-formative . In Obama’s case the country forgot they had voted for a black man and voted for “Hope and Change” . On so many levels both have delivered policy from trade to education reform and a lot in-between, that the business wing of the Republican party only dreamed of …
http://www.salon.com/2016/03/14/bill_clintons_odious_presidency_thomas_frank_on_the_real_history_of_the_90s/
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/noam-chomsky-obama-would-have-been-called-moderate-republican-recent-decades
If I don’t have the courage to vote for Jill Stein, I will do what I always do and vote for the lessor of two evils.
I am afraid that after another Clinton Presidency Trump will look like a moderate.
LikeLike
I just read today’s NY Times, which had a front page article describing the scam of Trump University, something that in itself reveals the character of thiamin who would be king.
Former Trump University Workers Call the School a ‘Lie’ and a ‘Scheme’ in Testimony – http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/01/us/politics/donald-trump-university.html?emc=edit_th_20160601&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=50637717&_r=0
But, not content with that revelation, it produced this editorial, which I am copying below the link itself, because it is a MUST READ!
I copy here first the final paragraph, which, sums up: “Mr. Trump has said so many irresponsible or dangerous things so often and in so many settings that there is a real risk that many voters will simply tune out and his campaign will somehow be normalized. So it is particularly important to note when Mr. Trump’s statements go beyond the merely provocative or absurd and instead represent a threat to America’s carefully balanced political system. This is such a moment. It is not too late for Republicans who revere that system to question how they can embrace a nominee who has so little regard for it.”
“Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy presents decent people everywhere with a dilemma: Sprayed with an open fire hose of schoolyard insults, locker-room vulgarities and bizarre policy pitches by the presumptive Republican nominee, they must make hard choices. Is this latest comment so outrageous, so much worse than all the others, as to require its own response?
‘Speak up too often and you risk sounding like a car alarm, so urgent and yet so familiar that residents no longer hear it. But don’t speak up often enough and you risk turning the unacceptable into the unremarkable.
At a rally in San Diego on Friday, Mr. Trump again steered his pirate ship into uncharted waters, firing off personal and racially tinged attacks against a federal judge hearing a case in which Mr. Trump is the defendant.
The judge, Gonzalo Curiel of the Federal District Court in San Diego, is presiding over a class-action lawsuit that accuses Trump University of defrauding and misleading customers who spent $1,500 for three-day seminars that promised to teach Mr. Trump’s secrets of success in real estate. Shortly after Mr. Trump’s rally, Judge Curiel ordered the unsealing of about 1,000 pages of the company’s internal documents. The release, which came in response to a request by The Washington Post, was standard procedure for a civil suit.”
NOTE: see how TRUMP TALKS ABOUT HIMSELF IN THE THIRD PERSON… this is very telling to anyone who knows about PSYCHOPATHS!
THE EDITORIAL CONTINUES:
“But Mr. Trump doesn’t do standard procedure. In a rambling, 11-minute stream of vitriol, Mr. Trump, who has attacked Judge Curiel before, called him “very hostile” and a “hater of Donald Trump,” and said he “should be ashamed of himself. I think it’s a disgrace that he’s doing this.”
“One would think Mr. Trump, whose sister is a federal appellate judge, would know how self-destructive it is for any litigant anywhere to attack the judge hearing his or her case. But Mr. Trump is not any litigant; he is running to be president of the United States — a job that requires at least a glancing understanding of the American system of government, in particular a respect for the separation of powers. When Mr. Trump complains that he is “getting railroaded” by a “rigged” legal system, he is saying in effect that an entire branch of government is corrupt.
“The special danger of comments like these — however off the cuff they may sound — is that they embolden Mr. Trump’s many followers to feel, and act, the same way.
“For good measure, Mr. Trump added that Judge Curiel “happens to be, we believe, Mexican.” False; the judge is from Indiana. But facts are, as always, beside the point for Mr. Trump, who reassured his audience that “the Mexicans are going to end up loving Donald Trump when I give all these jobs.” (Presumably he was not referring to those he has promised to deport if he is elected.)
“In a masterpiece of understatement, Judge Curiel, who is prevented by ethical rules from responding directly to comments like these, noted in his order that Mr. Trump “has placed the integrity of these court proceedings at issue.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump turned his fire back to the media in addressing news reports that he had failed to give a $1 million gift to a veterans’ charity as he had promised in January. He said the donation had now been made, called one reporter “a sleaze” and complained that the news media “make me look very bad.”
“Mr. Trump has said so many irresponsible or dangerous things so often and in so many settings that there is a real risk that many voters will simply tune out and his campaign will somehow be normalized.
“So it is particularly important to note when Mr. Trump’s statements go beyond the merely provocative or absurd and instead represent A THREAT TO AMERICA’S CAREFULLY BALANCED SYSTEM. This is such a moment. It is not too late for Republicans who revere that system to question how they can embrace a nominee who has so little regard for it.”
NOTE: I say this about that: YOU CANNOT HAVE A LUNATIC IN THE BALANCED SYSTEM. CORRUPTION may be ENDEMIC, BUT CRAZY CANNOT ATTAIN THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE
LikeLike
Alabama teacher suspended for questions on LA Math Proficiency Test:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3620550/Alabama-middle-school-teacher-suspended-giving-math-quiz-referencing-drugs-prostitutes.html
LikeLike