Who Owns the Media?
24th March 2025
If the second richest man in the world doesn’t even control the paper he bought, who does?
The answer is right in front of us. Much like the corporate world, the C-suite isn’t really in charge, and neither are the owners, and certainly not the shareholders. When even a man wealthy enough to drop a quarter of a billion on a paper has struggled to enforce his will, the average CEO is much less likely to have sway over what goes on in the real centers of power.
The struggle sessions within the New York Times, the ousting of CNN’s CEO, and a smaller scale struggle between the owner of the LA Times and the staff show that while the formal power may be with owners and CEOs, the actual centers of power lie in leftist networks within the media that are able to defy owners, executives and anyone who tries to moderate them.
The media always had its biases and clubbiness, but during the Bush and Obama administrations the centers of gravity shifted away from an older formal leadership, which became all but irrelevant, to a younger internet-savvy club of activists, which closely coordinated on their political agendas behind the scenes while creating a new covert media cartel.