Ever since Microsoft tried, and failed, in cable news with MSNBC, tech has been leery of investing in media.
There have been exceptions. Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post. Marc Benioff bought Time. But these were personal investments, not corporate. They were made for political reasons, not business ones.
The result is that the media remains run by conservatives, by junk men, and by useful idiots. Fox News has been joined by OAN and Newsmax. Local papers are being destroyed by hedge funds like Alden, who are more interested in the tax breaks than the product. CNN, MSNBC, and The New York Times remain committed to “both siderism,” which allows the right to drive the agenda.
This is threatening the country, the economy and (most important) tech. Billionaires like the Smith family, which owns Sinclair, come from the resource industries. They see labor as fungible. They see the world in black-and-white. They don’t see change and they don’t want change.
Change is what tech thrives on. It’s what tech produces. Brains are the gating factor to technology growth and it’s clear that today’s conservatives hate brains. Otherwise, they would have endorsed the vaccine and wouldn’t have pushed Trump.
A half-century ago the right saw this kind of threat and acted. The myth of the “liberal media" is based on the idea that reporters were professionals, but it didn’t understand how Vietnam was a Cold War activity. It didn’t see the coming resource wars. Only the resource industries, the oil guys and lumber guys and real estate guys, saw that.
That’s when the present media landscape was born. Conservative media is run from the top-down. Only the owner, through their CEO, is allowed to have an opinion. Everyone else is a mouthpiece. This is not un-American. It’s very American. It’s how the media was organized from the nation’s founding through the late 19th century, when manufacturing economics took command over it.
Industrialists ran media for a century, and professionalized it, because they had an ad-based business model that worked. When it stopped working, the old idea of controlling media for political purposes came back.
Today, technology controls the media business model, but it doesn’t pay for media creation. This has let industries opposed to technology take control over it. Tech needs to ignore the losses caused by owning media, which are a rounding error against multi-trillion dollar market caps, and buy-in.
If the Cloud Czars can’t see this now, with their business models (and even their existence) under direct attack, they don’t deserve their crowns.
