Tne broligarchs

Krugman discusses the dire trend of anti-democratic billionaires burning money to turn real media outlets into MAGA propaganda networks:

Yet, ominously, Trump and Trumpism have powerful allies that had no counterpart in previous competitive authoritarian regimes. Namely, there is a network of deeply anti-democratic tech billionaires, of which Ellison is a very significant player. The Authoritarian Stack project, which tracks that network, calls it the “Authoritarian Tech Right”. I’ve put their chart of some of the keyplayers at the top of this post. Some of us refer to that network, less formally, as the “broligarchy.”

As I have written recently, the broligarchy has deep antipathy to liberal principles in general and to democracy in particular, which they don’t try to hide. Peter Thiel has declared, “I no longer think that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Musk has derided empathy and made common cause with the German neo-Nazi party AfD. Alex Karp, head of the Pentagon contractor Palantir, has said that he hopes killing helpless shipwrecked sailors will be made constitutional so that he can make more money selling equipment to the Pentagon. And Joe Lonsdale says that public executions should come back.

Consistent with their agenda of disabling a pluralistic, democratic society, the broligarchy is engaged in an effort to seize control of media, both traditional and social. With Donald Trump’s blessing, they are trying to control media so that, as in Orban’s Hungary or Chavez’s Venezuela, the only political news that we see is what the authoritarian powers want us to see.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and Jeff Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post were early stages in this campaign. Since Musk’s acquisition, the app formerly known as Twitter has become a bot- and Nazi-infested hellhole. My own account was hijacked by an entity in Saratov, Russia, and I have never attempted to reclaim it.

Then there is the sad story of the Washington Post. While it first appeared that Bezos would continue to run it as a quality news source, the owner’s increasingly blatant political agenda has led the once-great paper to hemorrhage both talent and readers.

Under Trump II, the broligarch campaign to take down independent media has gone into overdrive. And Larry Ellison is at the wheel.

This last summer Paramount merged with Skydance Media, whose CEO is David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s son. The main prize the Ellisons sought via the merger was control of Paramount-owned CBS News. Likewise, in Paramount’s hostile bid for Warner, the prize that the Ellisons are seeking is control of CNN. And they are not even trying to hide their Trump-serving agenda. CNN has been among the major outlets most critical of Trump, in direct, unvarnished and courageous reporting. As a result, Trump has openly called for drastic changes at CNN. When a CNN reporter asked why the Pentagon isn’t releasing footage of airstrikes on boats allegedly carrying drugs, he denounced it as “an arm of the Democrat Party”.

The true intent of the broligarchs’ actions is revealed by the financial numbers: these media outlets make only very modest amounts of money, yet the broligarchs are throwing billions at them. Moreover, previous takeovers have shown that the outlets make even less money when they are forced to serve a right-wing agenda. The Washington Post is bleeding talent and subscribers, while X/Twitter has lost so many advertisers as well as readers that Musk has sued former advertisers, claiming that their decision not to spend money on his platform is an illegal boycott.

Yet another example of the decline of a media outlet in the aftermath of a Tech Right takeover is CBS. After the Ellison takeover, Paramount put Bari Weiss — whose career was built on attacking mainstream media for alleged left-wing bias — in charge of CBS News. How’s that going? On Saturday, when Weiss led a news special featuring an interview with Charlie Kirk’s widow, major advertisers were conspicuously absent.

It’s depressing that Netflix buying Warner is probably the best viable outcome. A related perverse best-case scenario is that the bros continue to hire people like Bari Weiss as opposed to actually effective mass propagandists.