The market of information provision — particularly the media and social media corporations, but also a lot of public outlets like the BBC — tries to project an image of neutrality and plurality.
But a recent announcement by Jeff Bezos about the Washington Post went some way to removing that mask.
Bezos, founder and executive chairperson of Amazon and the third-richest person in the world, bought the Post in 2013. Last week, he informed people of a change to its opinion section, “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
Effectively, he outed the billionaire filter — the media’s narrative loyalty to its owners. That narrative includes the algorithms of Facebook and Instagram (owned by Mark Zuckerberg — the second-richest person), and the algorithms of Google (owned by Alphabet, the third-largest tech company after Amazon and Apple), and of ChatGPT (owned by billionaire Sam Altman).
The billionaire filter usually works in more subtle ways than what Bezos announced, though there have been other exceptions. Last year, for example, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked the editorial board’s plans to endorse Kamala Harris for president. He has also required editors to send him “the text of every editorial and the name of its writer” before publishing, according to a staff memo.
But normally, the pro-corporate filter takes the form of: excessive coverage of business news over news that affects ordinary people; excluding most news about the Global South from so-called “international” news sections; fostering prejudice by quoting corporate leaders (renowned for lying and exaggerating) as serious experts, while portraying environmental activists and oppressed peoples as fringe; using racist and classist language like “illegals” for migrants from Global South countries; and excluding historical and economic context so as to whitewash the impacts of empire and of current corporate looting.
The filter involves using language, style and content choices that locate big businesses as serious, important and legitimate actors in society, while denying their power abuses and lack of ethics.
The billionaire class knows how important narrative discourse is. That’s why billionaire John Henry bought the Boston Globe days after Bezos bought the Post. Billionaire Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, and his wife bought Time magazine in 2018. The Atlantic and Bloomberg are also owned by billionaires. Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim became the largest individual shareholder of the New York Times in 2015 (to then sell some of his stock in 2017).
Chatchaval Jiaravanon, a member of the family controlling Thailand’s largest private company, The Charoen Pokphand Group Company, owns Fortune magazine. The Economist is owned by the Italian Agnelli billionaire family, as well as by the Cadburys, Rothschilds and Schroders.
And of course, there is the Murdoch empire — a family that owns the Fox network, Fox News, Sky News in Britain, the Times of London, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and other major newspapers and television outlets in Australia and Britain.
Even outlets like Reuters have a billionaire filter. Owned by Thomson Reuters Corporation, with annual revenue in the billions, Reuters may use bare sentences, focus on “facts” over opinion, and claim to be free “from bias”, but CEO Steve Hasker describes Thomson Reuters as a “business information services” company.
Its three core branches are business, financial and global news, and Thomson Reuters’ top client categories are legal and corporations. It is not in the firm’s interest to provide much corporate criticism. That means they’ll cover the M23 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but they won’t mention the corporate mineral grab underlying the conflict. Instead, they make the violence out to be ethnic and nation-based.
Why use a camouflage of neutrality?
Nevertheless, mainstream media outlets need to build legitimacy by upholding a few basic standards, and by publishing slightly more diverse opinions than their owners represent. Like politicians that are funded by business interests but seeking the popular vote, media outlets need to sustain some facade of information provision rather than just corporate propaganda. They need to pretend not to be a mouthpiece for the powerful.
Their mask of neutrality may mean including some content that supports women’s or sexual diversity rights, or something fluffy about a collective in Nigeria recycling tyres, but the mask rarely extends to properly questioning financial power and abuse, exposing empire carnage for what it actually is (genocide, imperialism, invasion, looting, mass extreme exploitation) or corporate hellholes (including oil spills in Nigeria or transnational collusion with organised crime in Mexico).
“Neutrality” involves nice little stories that put a humanistic gloss on media coverage and make the corporate product more palatable, but, in a world of systemic injustice and gross inequalities, there is no such thing.
Good, quality information though, is a basic human right and need. Journalism that actually critiques forces of power and helps deepen readers’ understanding through context is vital. As much as we need food, we need boldness and realness, reflection, data and dissent. Silence gives injustice permission, but in light of the corporate control over much media, and the eurocentrism of outlets like the BBC, not to mention the mediocre and misleading content prioritised by social media algorithms, where do we get our information? How do we know who to trust?
It’s worth supporting and reading media and social media projects that centre critiques of power, genuinely shine a light on oppression, expose environmental destruction and value resistance to it. Spaces like the Fediverse, though admittedly a little difficult to master, are worth the effort because they are not propelled by profit, value privacy (instead of mining user data like many social networks, as well as companies like Temu do), and are community-run.
There is courageous and informative journalism out there, and it is worth seeking out, and likewise it is worth lowering the level of tolerance for corporate and Eurocentric spin, no matter how cleverly disguised.
[Tamara Pearson is an Australian-Mexican journalist, editor, activist and literary fiction author living in Puebla, Mexico. Her latest novel is The Eyes of the Earth, and she writes the Global South newsletter, Excluded Headlines.]