The billionaire method: control the media, control speech

Everything is just so dumb.

In 2022 Elon Musk bought Twitter because he was convinced that the platform was censoring Republicans. Which, of course they weren’t. And then for the next few years, Musk and his other billionaire media owners convinced themselves that the Free Speech tenets of American society were being dismantled by liberal academics and the media. Which, of course they weren’t.

If you’ve been paying attention the last decade (this goes back even further but that’s a different story for a different day), the Musks of the world are great at one thing: lying. And from there, projecting. They lie by accusing Democrats of doing bad things and they project by actually doing the bad things they accuse democrats of doing. See, for just one example, Republican claims of Democrats rigging elections while trying to … rig elections.

So here we are three weeks before the midterms at a time when people are pissed at Trump (lowest polls ever) and the platforms owned by the world’s wealthiest people are reminding folks that having billions of dollars means they, and not the people elected to govern, are the rulers of the land, deciding what billions of people see.

TikTok bans Musk documentary accounts. Meta puts its thumb in Brazil’s elections, burying Lula’s posts while boosting Bolsonaro. Xitter censors…advertising?

(Note: Ellison’s Skydance owns CBS; Ellison’s dad, Larry, owns 80% of TikTok’s US operations. Billionaires are in a small club!)

In other words, “free speech for me, but not for thee”.

If the platforms continue to show that they are not good corporate citizens, actively harming people’s lives while serving as the conduit and amplification of lies and disinformation, while also suppressing facts and journalism, where can people go for actual information, because traditional media ain’t doing so hot, either.

Take for example this extraordinarily embarrassing display of journalism from CBS News. Over the weekend, as The Handbasket’s Marisa Kabas found, a right wing Christian white nationalist plant tried to gotcha Michigan senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed by asking AES whether he denounces the Muslim Brotherhood. AES flips it around, gives a lesson in both humility and the Constitution. It’s very much worth watching because you can see that when you take a bad faith question and answer it in good faith, the bad faith people have literally nothing.

But CBS News, under new owner David “Larry’s boy” Ellison, believes that the story isn’t the bad faith actor or even the correct and right response from AES but how AES didn’t say the specific words CBS News wanted to hear, which I think was “I denounce the Muslim Brotherhood”. Which is also kinda weird since AES multiple times says “yeah absolutely” when Tommy the plant asks if he’ll denounce.

Just as troubling: this is CBS News’s SCOTUS reporter. Troubling because if you have a reporter thanking a white supremacist for both attempting a gotcha AND for completely buying into the bad-faith premise, how fair do you think her reporting is on the nine most powerful people in the country? (Hint: not very!)

All this to say: things are bad in large part because the bad faith and dumb people have the money and means of media distribution; the power. As long as the people controlling how messages are disseminated to the public — what we read, see, and hear; but also what we think about — things will continue to be both dumb and bad. And you can guarantee that the billionaire class will do everything it can to maintain its power.

Good thing we have elections in three weeks; let’s see what the platforms throttle and what they promote.