Jackson Jambalaya

What is the future of news? One writer argues that the centers of media power will shift from New York and Washington to Silicon Valley as a new generation of oligarchs arise. Oligarchs  who want to dominate journalism in ways Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch could have only imagined.  Chris Morris writes in the Orange County Register:


The rising tech oligarchy, having disrupted everything from hotels and taxis to banking, music and travel, is also taking over the content side of the media business. In the process, we might see the future decline of traditional media, including both news and entertainment, and a huge shift in media power away from both Hollywood and New York and toward the Bay Area and Seattle.....

In the past, more hardware-oriented companies provided the “pipelines” through which traditional media disseminated their products. But increasingly these industries are being subsumed by the oligarchs. On the hardware side, they seek to supplant the traditional telecommunications companies with their own series of global digital pipelines; at the same time they are looking to gain control over large parts of the entertainment, news and other media providers.

The transformation of media to online platforms has already precipitated an enormous shift from traditional advertising – largely seen on television, in movies and print media – to Silicon Valley-based companies. By 2013, Google’s ad revenue surpassed that of either newspapers or magazines.....

To the new oligarchs, traditional media are holdovers from what one venture capitalist derisively called “the paper economy” that is destined to be swept away by the new digital aristocracy. As relatively young people – even Bill Gates is barely 60 – they will have the money, and the time, to disseminate their views both to the masses and the influential higher echelons.

One way to consolidate such influence – as happened with Gilded Age moguls like William Randolph Hearst – has been to buy up the former bastions of old media. Chris Hughes, a Facebook billionaire and Obama tech guru, has bought the venerable New Republic. Perhaps more importantly, the purchase of the Washington Post by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, now the country’s fourth-richest person, has placed the tech oligarchy at the center of media in the nation’s capital.

Yet, over time, acquiring existing media may prove just a sideshow. Far more critical will be the growth of their own oligarch-controlled news media. Yahoo is the No. 1 news site in the U.S., with 110 million monthly viewers. Google News isn’t far behind, at No. 4, with 65 million users. Facebook, according to Pew, has emerged as the second-largest source of political news, after local television.....

The politics of the oligarchs need to be better understood as they exert more control over our media. An analysis by researcher Gregory Ferenstein found that most Internet company founders are liberal Democrats, favoring increased immigration, with its promise of cheap, more pliable labor for their own operations. Unlike old-style Democrats, they are strongly hostile to unions, dismiss issues of class and believe that most issues can be addressed by digital technology and education. Hey, it worked for them!

This belief system, which Alphabet (Google) chairman Eric Schmidt said is a “kind of religion in and of itself,” assumes technology can address virtually all social problems. They see this happening largely by pushing media in the direction of their own version of progressivism. EBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar has pledged large sums to support a largely left-of-center investigative reporting site, First Look Media. Both Vox Media and Buzzfeed, emerging digital news brands, have received major investment from Silicon Valley firms.....

These and other tech applications could give the oligarchs a reach beyond that which the likes of Joseph Pulitzer, Horace Greeley or even Rupert Murdoch could imagine. With media consumers constantly on their phones, looking at their smart watches or logging onto their tablets, the flow of media messaging could become ubiquitous to a degree imagined before only in dystopian science fiction, or in how North Korea attempts to convince its impoverished, often-malnourished citizens through incessant propaganda that they live in an evolving socialist fairyland.

Reflecting a tech world that is ever more dominated by a few players, we may be on the verge of seeing news, culture and analysis concentrated in ever fewer hands. This could allow the oligarchs to become a media power of unprecedented dominance, a ubiquitous Big Brother looming from cyberspace..... Rest of article.