The worldwide rolling takeover of traditional media by the global billionaire class took another lurching step over the weekend, with India’s richest petro-billionaire Mukesh Ambani adding Disney’s Indian assets to his family portfolio to create a nationally dominant $13 billion TV and streaming arm.
It comes as hedge fund billionaire and right-wing activist Sir Paul Marshall has been lining up fellow billionaires to battle a United Arab Emirates-backed group to take over the Conservative’s voice of choice, The Telegraph (aka, The Torygraph). Here in Australia, meanwhile, our own billionaire Stokes family has entrenched its hold on West Australian media with the launch of the mining industry-friendly The Nightly.
Once upon a time, rising men full of ambition would buy into the media to make themselves unimaginably rich. Now, it’s the other way around: it’s the already profoundly rich that are buying up media — not to make money but to protect the money they already have.
It’s all part of a global push by the billionaire class — particularly the fossil-fuel-reliant wing — to build a new political movement for their 21st-century needs through a mix of right-wing media, think tanks and astroturfed campaign groups.
Wannabe Telegraph-owner Marshall is deeply active across the range, being an early investor of UK’s Fox equivalent GB News, a Brexiteer Tory donor, and a co-founder of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. (ARC is the who’s who of the global political right, with an Australian weighting on its advisory board that includes John Howard, Tony Abbott, Andrew Hastie, Amanda Stoker and John Anderson.)
In Australia over the weekend, voters in Dunkley faced down the “campaigning” front of the Advance hysteria to vote pretty much as they did in 2022 — and as almost two years of polling have suggested they intend to do in next year’s federal election (despite efforts by the News Corp-led Canberra gallery to pump up the Albo-in-decline narrative).
We’re so inured though to old billionaire ownership of our media — the US-based Murdochs and Redstones, the much-mourned (in some quarters, at least) Fairfaxes and Packers – that we’re missing what the new caste of billionaires is doing to both global and Australia’s traditional media.
It’s part an ideological project, part a crucial tool in the government-reliant crony capitalism that is replacing the market-driven neo-capitalism that collapsed in the 2007-08 global financial crisis. Through ownership of media, billionaire activists have discovered they can pair the ideology of a “free media” with their corporate, cultural and political interests.
The two sides were on proud display on the front page of the billionaire-controlled The Australian this weekend: “Tech tyrant goes to war with Australia” screamed the US-owned masthead’s campaign manifesto dressed up as journalism, powered by the urgency of protecting the multimillion-dollar payoff Australia’s commercial media were able to wangle out of big tech back in 2021 (thanks to the intervention of then treasurer Josh Frydenberg).
It’s a sharp reminder that patrician media suddenly find itself exchanging the power that independence gave them for a friendlier regulation along with government funding. In Murdoch family media, it took a generational shift — from Rupert to Lachlan — for their companies to accept the hard fact that power has changed, demanding a renewed enthusiasm for Donald Trump, the likely future US president (based on a recent New York Times poll, at least).
The role of media when fossil-fuelled crony capitalism meets the cultural demands of populist nationalism is probably best understood in India. The Disney takeover is just the latest of the media buyouts by the country’s rich list pair, Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani (best known in Australia for his company’s involvement in Queensland coal). It’s included taming critical voices like NDTV with what Hinglish rhyming slang calls Godi (literally lap-sitting) media.
As Pamela Philipose, the ombudsperson of India’s digital voice, The Wire, wrote on the weekend: “The mainstream media’s affection for the ruling party is a many-layered thing — and certainly one of the layers is the financial reward that flows seamlessly to the proprietors of media houses.”
Meanwhile, the very “tech tyrant” Australia’s old media are urging the Australian government to take on — Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg — was in India, sharing toasts with the country’s latest media baron as a guest at the celebration of the all-billionaire wedding of the younger Ambani son, Anant, to the Merchant family’s Radhika.
It’s a small world when you’re a billionaire: also at the party were Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, along with the other big tech signer of the cheques to Australia’s old media, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai.
Wonder whether Australia came up in conversation.
There’s not much point trying to categorise billionaires or the owners of our mainstream media, they fit neoliberal, oligopolies, crony capitalists, conservative etc.
The main point is they get to choose what is news and whether they like a government decision or not. They also provide a guiding hand in what our entertainment should be and what advertisements compliment their vision for the rest of us.
It has been very obvious for a very long time that many of these choices are detrimental to a democracy and that even when in power a government is at the mercy of these dictators of public opinion.
Nothing can change in our country (except for a few crumbs from the table) until the problem is brought to parliament and legislation passed that breaks up this chronic abuse of ethics and decency.
Media outlets can make no obvious profit and still be a very valuable assett in shaping opinion.
Thanks for the article
Agree, and guess which media proprietor’s son was more or less hands on post Jan 6 insurrection, liaising in the background with key people on the ‘Big Lie’?
According to Brian Stelter in (2023), has ‘receipts’, ‘Network of Lies: The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American Democracy’
“There’s not much point trying to categorise billionaires or the owners of our mainstream media”
Sure there is. The category ‘enemy of the people’ would be very useful.
Christopher, a wonderful article. We poor citizens of Australia seem to believe that the crushingly identical coverage of world events, economic journalism and world conflict seen daily in Australia’s MSM (& ABC) is somehow related to ‘truth’. You would have this pleasant multilayered croissant of fiction crumble before us if we had to understand that there are forces such as inter-connected billionaires who have decided that fear, hatred and doom are a useful toys to play with to obtain the international political leaderships required to preserve their wealth and control of fossil fuels, and to delay any meaningful addressing of oncoming climatic catastrophe. I stupidly thought it was the Houthis, a minor Yemeni political force, who are causing the international price and of oil to increase dramatically and delaying shipment of all other components vital to modern technological societies.
Tell us it is not so simple as a thought bubble from Andrew Hastie and co, that is commanding our so called ‘News’. It is very interesting that Dutton does not time (?) to join such commanding international think-tanks, or is it that the biollionaires have already decided that he is passe? Will his visit to WA for the birthday bash save him?
Is it true that the acronym ARC has a soft ‘c’ and is pronounced ‘arse’?
Any group with Howard, Abbott, Anderson (gag) in it is decidedly haemorrhoidal.
I think this needs to be overlaid with what is clearly happening at Nine – whereby a bunch of people who share these sorts of ideologies but who aren’t rich enough in their own right to go out and grab themselves a media plaything comprise the virtual entirety of senior management (irrespective of whether they’ve ever edited a single publication – it’s hire-by-ideology), and they are very clearly seeking to steer the editorial content such that it just coasts along in their ideological wake.
And if that’s half of our media duopoly and the other half is News Corp, and if the ABC is utterly hobbled by a false balance agenda dictated to it by one half of that duopolgy, then I just … can’t even bear to finsih that sentence …
Has Roberts ever told the truth, or is there evidence he knows what truth is? A blurted impression or confection is, effectively a lie, and Roberts seems to be, over time, a chronic or serial liar.
I think just a fwit.