Oligarchy and the Media

[00:00:01]Good news.

[00:00:03]The second richest man in America might might be prevented from taking over CNN.

[00:00:12]That's the good news. The bad news is, aside from the fact that he probably will manage to pull it off anyway, the bad news is that that would be only a small piece of the ongoing takeover of US media by oligarchs. And in turn, the media takeover is just part of the extraordinary exercise of power by the extraordinary wealthy small number of men who have been wreaking so much havoc with America as we know it.

[00:00:41]Hi, I'm Paul Krugman.

[00:00:43]Doing a video today because I didn't feel like doing a usual chart-heavy, analytics-heavy post. Um but very much on a topic I have been writing about and will continue to write about, which is the rise of oligarchy in America.

[00:01:00]Now, I know some people balk at that name at the at the word because it sounds extreme, but then the reality is extreme. We're not talking about some kind of hidden conspiracy. We're not talking about the protocols of the elders of uh of of uh PayPal. Um we are talking instead about stuff [clears throat] that's largely out in the open, though not fully understood, which is the way that an incredibly wealthy small group of men, mostly men, uh is able to commandeer a lot of uh the political life of a country that is still nominally a democracy.

[00:01:42]And that is that's a fundamental story of for our time, maybe the fundamental story.

[00:01:49]Um how does that takeover work? Well, the uh there is the what I think of as kind of the middle level, which is the place where most easily quantified, tends to get most of the attention, which is campaign finance. American campaigns are very money-intensive and have become more money-intensive because we've opened the floodgates with Citizens United. Um and a lot of that money comes from a very small number of incredibly wealthy people.

[00:02:20]According to the New York Times analysis, about 20% of all campaign contributions in 2024 came from 300 billionaires and their families. That's a pretty big uh impact. You know, country of more than 300 million people and 300 billionaires are a fifth of campaign finance and surely more strategic, more targeted than the average donor. So, that's really a very, very large role just in that direct sense of who who pays for campaigns.

[00:02:53]Um but that's not the only level.

[00:02:56]There is a lower level, which is just plain lower in the sense of morally lower, I guess, which is a plain buying.

[00:03:04]Uh politicians buying policies, paying for the policies you want with cash or crypto on the barrel.

[00:03:11]There has always been some of that in our system, but it was normally discreet, indirect, deniable. The revolving door. It was the case even more than 20 years ago that when the Bush administration pushed through a uh a Medicare bill that was very favorable to pharmaceutical interests, that the then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, who basically engineered and steered the the bill through Congress, then promptly retired and became the chief lobbyist for the pharma lobby. So, this kind of thing has been going on uh for a very long time.

[00:03:50]Uh but now it's just blatant, out in the open, and the sums are massive. So, we just have uh, literally billions of dollars thrown at the president and his family.

[00:04:02]Uh, no doubt large sums to other government officials, large sums to at least some members of Congress. So, just plain buying the policies you want, which is something not just that a large share of wealth is held by a small number of people, but that the those are the people who are best positioned to really their wealth to corrupt the system.

[00:04:25]There's also something, I guess you can call it a higher level, which is what military strategists call, shaping the information space.

[00:04:34]Uh, which occurs at a couple of levels.

[00:04:37]Um, one of them is the it is this sort of um, promotion of ideas and ideology that serve the interests of the very wealthy.

[00:04:50]Uh, you see that on many issues. You certainly see it very much on economic policy. If you ask me, why do people still go out there saying that tax cuts pay for themselves, and that tax cuts on the rich are an enormously powerful tool for stimulating economic growth, when we have That's been tested to destruction, and it just ain't so. But, it's a zombie idea.

[00:05:15]It keeps shambling along, eating people's brains, even though it should be dead. And the reason is, well, there's not money yet. If you If If you Google one of my, uh, some something I've written on, more often than not, when I do that, the top sponsored post at the top uh, of the search page is a uh, attack on me sponsored by some right-wing organization. And if you ask me, you know, who supports those right-wing organizations, well, guess Guess who. So, then that's it's equally or worse the case in climate science.

[00:05:51]There have been studies you know to the extent scientific journals have been pretty good at not publishing climate disinformation. But when they do publish things that are somehow uh skeptical or usually not outright denial but but you know attempting to sow discord about climate change, what percentage of those studies have received financial backing from fossil fuel interests? The answer is 100. It's all about the money.

[00:06:19]Uh this is again this is not new. Upton Sinclair it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. So that has always been the case but now we have something which is really really important and is another level of this which is the takeover of the media.

[00:06:40]So okay. Ellison or the E Ellison family cuz nominally it's the Ellison's son in charge of Paramount has already acquired CBS and is has hired Barry Weiss to basically corrupt and destroy that network. Um the uh if the deal for takeover of Warner proceeds then CNN which has been actually I'm finding CNN a very good news source in many ways just braver at taking on what's really happening than than my old employer the New York Times which is a great news organization and maybe more necessary than ever but they tend to be cautious and CNN is a little bit less cautious. But anyway, uh if he gets away with it then CNN will as CNN as we know it will almost disappear. It'll almost turn into Fox News. Now it won't that won't be a profitable venture.

[00:07:33]There's already a Fox News and so creating another one is not going to actually produce uh, a lot of profits if any. But, that's not the objective. This is buying influence.

[00:07:47]Uh, and it Okay. Um, Elon Musk, of course, took over the app formerly known as Twitter.

[00:07:55]Um, which was already becoming uh, a more difficult place even before his takeover. You know, I used to have, I guess, I think I had 4 million followers there. Uh, and but it was impossible. I had to shut off comments because of the cesspool that that Twitter had become. But, now it is really uh, by by design, it is heavily tilted. We did that can be quantified.

[00:08:19]The algorithm really tilts it towards right-wing stuff, really promotes really rapid uh, racist views. And um, unfortunately, the network effects, the centrality that Twitter used to have, still keeps a lot of people on X.

[00:08:39]Uh, where they are influenced. Uh, people's views change.

[00:08:44]And also, something that I think is I don't know how to quantify, but it's very obvious if you follow, if you pay attention to people's positions, people who spend a lot of time on Twitter, uh, elites who spend a lot of time on Twitter, start to think that the views they hear there are representative of where the country is, which they are not. But, it does, in fact, tilt uh, policy, tilt understanding to the right.

[00:09:10]Um, the third richest man in America is Mark Zuckerberg, who made his billions from Facebook, which is you know, it's old-fashioned. And I don't know anybody who uses Facebook Facebook, but I know lots of I know that lots of people do. And it's still a very important information source, and has again been tilted. On most of these media things, it's not uh, it's not as blatant as what Musk is doing at X. Uh but it still has a big influence on on changing the tone of the discussion and biasing the discussion towards positions that favor the interests of billionaires as well as favoring their prejudices if they happen to be like Musk uh authoritarian white supremacists.

[00:09:58]Okay.

[00:09:59]Um >> [snorts] >> and the fourth richest man in America is Jeff Bezos who purchased the Washington Post. I think he uh purchased the post initially out of a belief that he was going to uh become a you know that it was going to enhance his prestige. It It certainly looked in his initial tenure as if this was actually more of a vanity purchase than a political purchase. But billionaire's going to billionaire. And so he eventually shifted the Washington Post's editorial policy hard right, eviscerated the news division. There are still some brave plucky reporters doing good reporting there, but it's a shadow of what it used to be. And of course it's not at all the institution of Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee not anymore. So that's another channel.

[00:10:49]Um what do you do about this?

[00:10:52]Uh the uh obviously one does what one can to try to limit uh this takeover of the information environment. And so we have the suit brought against the uh attempted purchase of Warner hence CNN by Paramount hence Ellison. Uh and that might succeed not because I mean you would think well you know if it's delayed then what are the chances of actually ruling it out except that apparently there's a bit of a of a financial clock ticking for Ellison who really has extended himself pretty far.

[00:11:31]So that's possibly going to block it, and that's good. It would have been great if someone had found a way to keep Musk from destroying Twitter. Uh and, you know, we can you can look for solutions not to immediate threats, but, you know, you're not going to hit all of these balls.

[00:11:50]Uh and so, the the constant pressure towards a takeover of the news media, constant pressure towards a takeover of the general information environment by uh by a handful of billionaires is not going to go away.

[00:12:07]The constant threat or reality of corruption of the government by billionaires is not going to go away. Maybe once Trump is gone, it'll become less blatant, but it won't go away just because someone more discreet uh takes office, even if a if a we have a an honest president, which, you know, in current environment, I'm sorry, does mean a Democrat, but even if we have a an honorable president, the corruption of the system will still be a continual threat because of all the money flowing around. So, in the end, the only way out of this, the only uh reasonably durable solution is to not have so much wealth at the top.

[00:12:54]If you don't like what's happening to our institutions, if you don't like what's happening to the media, if you don't like the corruption of government, if you don't like the uh the uh overwhelming of campaigns by big money with uh nefarious ends, the only lasting solution is to reduce the amount of wealth at the top.

[00:13:19]In the end, if you're going to Woodrow Wilson, if there are men big enough to own the government, they're going to own the government. If we're going to have that much money in the hands of a few hundred people and in the case of uh of the real top of it, just a you 15 or 20 people, then you're not going to be able to maintain a truly uh democratic system of government. Uh oligarchy is not the only thing that is wrong with America. It's not the root of all the evil, but it's the root of a lot of evil. And until we bring that concentration of wealth at the top down, we're going to be fighting a constant rear guard action trying to save some of what America's supposed to be about.

[00:14:04]Have a nice day.