People outside the United Kingdom should pay attention to opinion pieces by The Guardian’s Jane Martinson. The article that caught my attention today was Why own a newspaper in 2023? Ask the very rich men trying to buy the Telegraph:
So much has changed in the generation since the Telegraph newspapers and the Spectator magazine were last put up for sale in 2004, including how much money they make. Yet one constant remains: the desire of very rich men to own them.
…This desire says a lot more about power than profit. …owning a newspaper tends to put senior politicians on speed dial.
On Monday, the Barclay family launched a last-minute attempt to keep the titles, reportedly funded by £1bn raised from investors in oil-rich Abu Dhabi.
…interest suggests the titles aren’t just some ordinary financial asset. Conrad Black, an unusual Telegraph owner in the 1980s, being neither British nor titled, called the paper “the passport to other people’s drawing rooms”. He only sold it when he was facing legal challenges of his own...
What do business moguls gain from spending vast sums on media properties? With few exceptions, motives are self-interest, not altruism.
Owning news sources gains access and influence. That influence can provide valuable returns. Of course, ego plays a part as well. A person successful in one field may imagine self-perceived brilliance guarantees success in managing other ventures. After a while, unless asset stripping is incomplete, boredom may shift attention elsewhere.
Rupert Murdoch has probably been the person most able to affect the world around him. He has exercised power and accumulated striking affluence. His wealth is currently estimated between C$10 billion and C$30 billion.
In April, Jane Martinson wrote about Fox News C$1.05 billion settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, a company with Canadian roots now controlled by a New York private equity firm. She said the settlement:
has allowed the media mogul to avoid having to take the stand and defend lies told on his television channel about the last US election. It’s an escape hatch. It’s also a massive humiliation.
About Rupert Murdoch stepping down, Martinson writes that successor Lachlan Murdoch’s own politics are considered more libertarian and rightwing than his father’s.
Rupert inherited and expanded his father’s media business. While a commonly repeated curse predicts wealth gained by one generation will be lost by the third, reality is different. It is hard to imagine the Murdoch empire becoming more foul, but that is a distinct possibility under Lachlan’s control.
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Categories: Journalism
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Of course people want to own newspapers, just as they want to own radio and t.v. stations. It gives them something more valuable than money: influence and the feeling of importance. They can then pontificate on whatever they want.
It is really about time governments break up the communications monopoly and foreign ownership of Canada’s media
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In the past, the news paper was the “fourth estate”; to day the news paper is a “Pravda” spewing propaganda, paid for by those who wish to lie and deceive.
News is no longer “fact checked” or researched, thus government or corporate news releases are treat as real news and eagerly presented as real news.
Lies become truth; historical fact becomes yesterdays fake news and the public is presented with a host of alternative facts.
As the government allows this to happen, they are complicit with the dumbing down of news and the demise of the newspaper.
The lack of any sort of fact checking and allowing almost all libelous and slanderous drivel to present itself as news on social media further erodes any confidence in the news as we remember it.
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