Billionaires Destroyed American News Media on Purpose ⇥ readtpa.com
Think about where Stephen Colbert started. At Comedy Central, he played a character who parodied right-wing media manipulation. His whole schtick was pretending to be a Fox News-style propagandist who twisted facts, attacked critics, and defended power at all costs.
Twenty years later, he’s been silenced by actual media manipulation. Real billionaires wielding real power to protect their real financial interests.
The writers who created The Colbert Report couldn’t have scripted it better. Except this isn’t satire. It’s just what happens now when media companies need government approval for their deals.
Regardless of how much you like Colbert’s take on the Late Show — I do not care for it — the circumstances around its cancellation are suspicious and the implications are alarming. Were Colbert’s jokes truly cutting to the core of the Trump administration? I hardly think so. But it is nevertheless difficult not to see it as an olive branch for merger approval — an implied condition.
(Update: Anonymous sources swore up and down to the New York Times that this was purely a financial decision.)
Via Rusty Foster, who ties together a bunch of threads on this into the title thesis, “billionaires destroyed American news media on purpose”:
When I told my new friend that the American news media has been systematically and intentionally destroyed by a handful of billionaires, he asked an extremely reasonable question, which was: “but why?” And what makes this feel like a conspiracy is that there is no single answer to “why?” Sometimes it’s arrogance, sometimes it’s ideology, sometimes it’s purely money. Often it’s a messy combination of all three.
But if you really want to step back a bit, the reason why is that we have a socioeconomic system that concentrates nation-state level wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals, with virtually no checks on what they can choose to do with it. So if Larry Ellison wants to turn CBS News into Bari Weiss’s Free Press TV, or Jeff Bezos wants to make The Washington Post into an ideological subsidiary of the Cato Institute… what institutions of power will be left to disagree?
In related news, U.S. lawmakers voted to end federal funding for NPR and PBS. Conservatives in Canada are waging a similar campaign to stop funding the CBC, and I hope it fails.