- 19 Aug 2018 23:36
#14940844
Oh, and I forgot the Kochs, they own Time Inc.
Socialism without freedom is fascism.
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So what is it with billionaires wanting to own newspapers even though they have a "terrible future," as Buffett had put it so elegantly in 2009 before he started buying newspapers himself?
Wealthy people buying and running newspapers is a well-established practice. And fortunes have been made founding the old print media, including by such newspaper moguls as William Randolph Hearst. It's just that there are a lot more billionaires these days, with asset prices inflated as they have been since the global money-printing orgy started in 2008. The print media may be in a death spiral, but some of their online versions have a large and growing readership, though they might still lose money. And a little red ink may well be worth the price to influence the debate.
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-bil ... ral-2018-2
Sivad wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDlI-t25D7c
Dyer just had his WordPress blog deleted this week, without warning (violation of TOS), despite being a paid WordPress patron, and despite WordPress' alleged commitment to free speech.
colliric wrote:We give cash to right-wing media personalities to keep doing what they're doing... So what?
Sivad wrote:Many of them are. You want me to list them?
Carlos Slim - New York Times
Rupert Murdoch - News Corp(The Wallstreet Journal)
John Henry - The Boston Globe
Jeff Bezos - The Washington Post
Patrick Soon-Shiong - Tribune Publishing Co.(Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune)
Cox Family - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Donald and Samuel "Si" Newhouse - Advance Publications
Warren Buffet - 31 daily newspapers, 47 weekly newspapers, 32 "other print products," and a TV station in Miami
Sheldon Adelson - The Las Vegas Review-Journal
Mortimer Zuckerman - US News & World Report, New York Daily News
Barbey family - Village Voice
And that's just the billionaires, if I included the $100 millionaires it would be every major newspaper in the country.
Sivad wrote:Not hard to do when there's an oligopoly.
Sivad wrote:Oh, so there are no barriers to entry in the national newspaper business?
Sivad wrote:You're talking out your ass. Media concentration is a huge problem in the US. There's also the problem of interlocking directorates where members of the board of a media conglomerate sit on the boards of numerous other multinational corporations. Money also owns the politicians who (de)regulate media.
Rugoz wrote:I looked up the first one. Slim currently owns <8% of class B shares, and all class B shareholders appoint 1/3 of board members. Meaning Slim effectively owns 2-3% of the NYTimes in terms of voting rights.
I haven't look up the rest of your claims, but I suppose they're equally dubious.
Is it? The national TV market probably, but newspapers? We would need some actual data on this.
With the internet there's basically no barrier except attention.
As for newspapers: If there's a sufficiently large market niche one can expect investors to close it.
But obviously you'll just deny the profit motive when it comes to media investment/ownership.
What is the alternative to private media ownership anyway?
I live in a country where TV is almost entirely state-run (with 72% of the population backing it in a recent referendum). I don't think it's fundamentally different from private newspapers or in fact privately-owned newspapers in the US (obviously US news are generally somewhat more right-wing). I don't watch US TV so I cannot speak for that.
New York Times Silent On Major Carlos Slim Lawsuit
The New York Times’ lack of coverage on a major lawsuit involving its billionaire shareholder Carlos Slim has at least one writer wondering if Slim has bought the paper’s silence.
The Big Money’s James Ledbetter wrote over the weekend about “The Story The New York Times Won’t Touch.” Slim, who bought a large stake in the New York Times in 2008 and then raised his stake in early 2009, is a Mexican telecom billionaire.
Slim is involved in a lawsuit that includes both JP Morgan and his main telecom rival, as summarized by Reuters’ Felix Salmon:
JP Morgan took one of its longest-standing clients in Mexico — Grupo Televisa — and tried to hand all of its secrets over to its biggest rival, Carlos Slim. And the way it tried to do that was by selling Slim a loan larded up with covenants which would essentially force Televisa to reveal any and all information to the holder of the debt.
Ledbetter argues that the size of the trial’s parties, as well as the scandalous details, would merit an article in the New York Times business section (he notes that it was covered by both the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg). And yet, the paper has not covered the lawsuit at all, leading Ledbetter to wonder if Slim’s stake in the newspaper is the reason:
This is a scandalous story, involving one of the world’s largest banks, a powerful federal judge, and two Mexican telecom giants. Under any other circumstances, the business section of the Times would be expected to cover it, as the Journal and Bloomberg have. Yet as of Saturday midday, I cannot find a single mention of any aspect of this case, anywhere in the physical New York Times, or on its Web site—not even a blog post or a wire story. Perhaps as the lawsuit moves on, the Times will be compelled to cover it. But for the moment, it certainly appears that Carlos Slim’s investment has bought the silence of one of the world’s most important newspapers.
A search on NYTimes.com Monday confirmed that the case has not been mentioned on the paper’s website.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/ ... 71230.html
Sivad wrote:As of April 2018, Slim owns "24 million shares in the publisher, a stake of about 14.6%, according to a regulatory filing." That's down from 17.4% before April 2018. He's the largest single shareholder. The family that owns controlling interest is worth a half billion, so even if you did have your facts straight I'd still be essentially right. 14% gives him considerable access and influence and that's likely all he was after anyway.
Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecommunications mogul, has sold half of his shares of common stock and warrants in the New York Times Co., valued at just under $240 million.
With the stock up 50 percent of the past year, Slim appears to be reaping a huge profit.
The 77-year-old investor was the single largest shareholder of common stock at NYT before the selloff.
Divesting the warrants for future shares means he is cutting down what would have been a 16.9 percent stake — had he had he kept the warrants for himself — to somewhere between 6.9 percent and 8.5 percent of the shares after the selloff.
The Ochs-Sulzberger family still controls the board through its control of Class B shares.
With the selloff, it appears entitities controlled by Slim and his companies could be the second-largest NYT shareholder, behind BlackRock’s 8.1 percent stake.
Sivad wrote:I just showed you that it is...
Sivad wrote:It's why there are so many people like you in the world, your pompous ignorance is the product that Money pays the media to make.
Sivad wrote:I don't deny the profit motive, the profit motive perfectly explains why Money would want to control mass media.
Sivad wrote:I don't care if Money has mass propaganda outlets as long as there's a democratic national media right along side it to counter the bullshit.
Sivad wrote:You're right, it's the same shit, that's because the same rich assholes that own the media also own the government.
Mr Jones said on his broadcast last week that he had told his staff to delete material after CNN cited Infowars content that violated Twitter’s policies, according to the motion filed Friday.
Friday’s motion is the latest legal salvo in three separate defamation lawsuits filed by Sandy Hook families, which seek tens of millions of dollars in damages and pose an existential threat to Mr Jones’ business.
Should the court find that Mr Jones and Infowars willfully destroyed evidence, he, and possibly his lawyer, could be assessed fines and be subject to punitive action.
Most importantly, the material that was destroyed could be presumed by the court as supporting Mr Heslin’s claims against Mr Jones, bolstering his case.
Mr Jones has been protesting an unprecedented effort this month by Apple, Facebook, YouTube and other services to remove Infowars content from their platforms.
At least some of the deleted content was considered evidence in the Sandy Hook cases, and Mr Jones had been informed in writing in April that he was obligated by law to preserve all relevant material, according to the court filing in District Court in Travis County in Austin, Texas.
Rugoz wrote:Here's my source:
https://nypost.com/2017/12/19/carlos-sl ... -for-240m/
I suggest you post your own.
No it doesn't. If you do not exploit a market because of political considerations, it means you're foregoing profits.
If referendum-approved state media aren't democratic, what the are democratic media supposed to be?
Politics and media would look completely different if they only served the interests of the rich, where I live and to a lesser extent also in the US.
You have a ridiculous black and white view on basically every topic.
Behind the Scenes, Billionaires’ Growing Control of News
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/28/busi ... -news.html
an aggressive bid by the very wealthy to control the American news media at a time when it is in a financially weakened state, struggling to maintain its footing on the electronic frontier’s unstable terrain.
But billionaires do not become billionaires by being passive about their own interests. In other instances, once wealthy individuals are involved, those interests can appear to take over. Michael R. Bloomberg has built Bloomberg News into a formidable organization. But when its founder seriously contemplated a run for president, Bloomberg News editors steered their reporters away from covering it.
Of course, powerful media executives have long been part of the global fabric. Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation executive chairman, has been at it for decades, and his influence over his news group has taken on mythical status.
And long before Mr. Murdoch, there was one William Randolph Hearst, who defined what it meant to be a media mogul.
But there is a difference between Hearst and the many billionaires who are trying to control today’s news media, said David Nasaw, the author of the great Hearst biography “The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst.” “Hearst made it abundantly clear — ‘This is my newspaper, these are my views, take or leave it,’” he said. “Hearst put his editorials on the front page, with his picture, and he signed them, for God’s sake.”
Mr. Nasaw, on the other hand, sees Mr. Adelson as “dissembling” when he says he isn’t involving himself in editorial decisions at the paper. And then there are the Silicon Valley moguls, he said, who “try to have it both ways — they try to say, you know, ‘Oh no we’re playing by the rules and we’re not indulging in our personal whims.’”
Rugoz wrote:You didn't show anything, even if we assume your anecdotes are correct.
Here's a chapter on market structure in the daily newspaper industry in the US (page 109).
I quote (page 112): "In concentration terms, this situation is moderate."
At the end of 2004, the three largest companies owned 487 newspapers with a combined circulation of 9.8 million. Today, the three largest companies own about 900 papers that have a combined circulation of 12.7 million.
http://newspaperownership.com/executive-summary/
Sivad wrote:https://www.barrons.com/articles/carlos-slim-sells-40-million-more-in-new-york-times-stock-1524244371
It's pretty dishonest to pretend that Slim hasn't been the largest shareholder with 17% ownership for the last 5 years.
When the World’s Richest Billionaire Owns Your Paper
Sivad wrote:Not if it will end up costing you more in the long term, which is why Money doesn't invest in populist muckraking.
I don't know where you live but it's pretty clear you know next to nothing about US politics or media. Politics and media do overwhelmingly serve the interests of the rich, it's why there's a massive wealth gap, it's why neoliberalism holds sway, it's why politicians are all crooks and liars, it's why the newspapers don't do journalism but only act as stenographers for power.
Sivad wrote:Maybe you should look into that before spouting off about it.
Sivad wrote:There are always people like you in every society who deny or downplay the corruption and dysfunction of the staus quo. You're the people that are always in the way of a better world.
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