It’s time for governments to curb the domination of global media barons
Opinion
In the aftermath of the events in Iran, Gaza, Ukraine, Venezuela, Sudan and on the streets of Minneapolis, Nick Manning calls on responsible governments to provide alternatives to the media baron-run platforms.
It is even darker and colder than usual in the depths of the Northern Hemisphere winter, and the atmosphere at the World Economic Forum in Davos was especially chilling.
This year’s agenda was dominated by Donald Trump, including a challenge to Greenland’s sovereignty with ugly threats of huge trade tariffs and the launch of his new ‘Board of Peace’.
That same week, thousands of people were massacred or maimed by their own government in Iran. Trump encouraged the protestors to keep going, telling them that help was on its way.
As the Davos delegates met, Ukraine was being bombed and frozen nightly by Russia, which seemed determined to ruin its own economy in the pursuit of an undefined goal.
Meanwhile, Trump invited the noted pacifist Vladimir Putin to join his ‘Board of Peace’ for a $1bn fee, while imposing no tariffs on Russia and failing to end the one war he could have stopped. Instead, he has installed pictures of himself with Putin in the White House.
Gaza lies in ruins, with many thousands of dead and wounded. The survivors have to live in shattered buildings and make do as best they can, the victims of the kind of suffering so tellingly described in ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’, a film that once seen is never forgotten.
But never mind, Gaza can be rebuilt by the real estate moguls into one big holiday resort that will no doubt yield plenty of profit for the usual suspects, but not the Gazan people. No one from Gaza is on the ‘Board of Peace’ that will supposedly decide its future.
The civil war and famine in Sudan didn’t seem to be mentioned at all, even though millions of people are in danger of starvation. There’s not much media coverage of this either, perhaps because the big nations aren’t interested unless there is a mineral or tourism opportunity.
Davos took place only a few weeks after the US exfiltrated the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and put him in a New York jail. The unlawful bombing of civilian boats and his kidnapping were justified as an attempt to control the drugs trade, but no one talks about that now; the US has allegedly sold off $500m of Venezuelan oil, with the proceeds being controlled by the US Government.
There was only a muted reaction to the US abduction of a country’s leader, an event that would lend succour to other authoritarian leaders with similar ambitions.
There were some high points in Davos, including Mark Carney’s speech and some European solidarity, but the US controlled the news agenda from start to finish and was allowed to do so.
Maybe the US Government was playing 3D chess by distracting the world away from truly important global events, and if so, it was very successful.
Much of the world’s media is controlled by supporters of the US administration, so this shouldn’t surprise, but Davos was further evidence of the emasculation of independent, fact-based, responsible reporting at a global scale.
Back home in the US, Trump has seemed more preoccupied with his new ballroom and his wife’s unpopular film than with the deaths of US citizens at the hands of ICE agents. He has belatedly acknowledged that people shouldn’t be killed on American streets for no reason, but only after a desperate attempt at a cover-up.
The demise of responsible media
At any time in the past, the events in Iran, Gaza, Ukraine, Venezuela, Sudan and on the streets of Minneapolis would all have dominated the news agenda, every day, spurring the governments of the world and an increasingly anonymous UN into action.
They would be challenged to resolve and prevent conflicts, not just win prizes.
The manufactured crisis over Greenland would have been viewed by the media as only one of the major issues, possibly a red herring, and the ‘Board of Peace’ would have rightly been ridiculed.
Traditionally, the people doing the challenging would have been the Fourth Estate: brave, committed reporters risking their lives on the front line, aiming to present the facts on the ground; it would have been the courageous proprietors and editors who resisted pressure to ignore or tone down sensitive pieces.
They would do this as part of their natural mission to hold the powerful to account on behalf of the rest of the world. Truth would matter, rigour would be mandatory, and little weight would be granted to pure opinion.
We saw in Davos that the demise of responsible media is almost complete and that the tradition of fact-based reporting is as dead as the rules-based world order.
Even the BBC seemed more interested in the Beckhams. Just when truth-tellers are needed most, they are in short supply.
We have moved into a new era of global media barons
The Hearst-like media moguls, domestically powerful, have been replaced by a new cadre of billionaire media tycoons who control most of the global internet and an increasing proportion of the world’s legacy media, the mooted merger of DMGT and The Telegraph being one example.
Now that the internet is the main source of news for the world’s population and the big US platforms can throttle access to other news providers, they control the supply of the world’s information and algorithmically control who sees what, how and where.
The internet is supposed to be a haven for free speech, the new ‘town square’ and the first draft of history, but this idea is now dead. The supposed libertarian veneration of the First Amendment has been exposed as a fig leaf, only decried as ‘censorship’ for political reasons.
The new media oligarchs include the increasingly powerful Ellison family, Marc Zuckerberg, Alphabet, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, the Murdochs and now Sam Altman; their interests are now indistinguishable from those of the US administration, whose patronage they buy and whose interests they serve.
There is nothing Trump likes more than a spotlight; the new media moguls provide it 24/7/365, and Davos was the latest example of how their control over the world’s communications has overtaken previous norms.
Furthermore, since Davos, there have been new reports that Meta and TikTok, under its new US controllers, are suppressing posts about ICE and the Minneapolis killings and that the Washington Post is planning to axe its overseas reporting staff.
The net result is that the majority of the world’s population now has much less access to news and current affairs based on fact-based analysis, leaving the field open to bias, propaganda, prejudice, and opinion, largely in the service of authoritarian governments.
Mis- and disinformation are now rife, and AI will ensure there is even more of it, spread even more rapidly.
Yes, those who can afford it can still find very strong reporting behind paywalls, and some countries have robust legacy public service news coverage, but these are in decline, and people who pay are in the minority. And there’s always niche publications for the minority of more interested observers.
Even erstwhile stalwart champions of fact-based reporting, such as the BBC, are being undermined by political factions and their own unforced errors.
The only remedy is governmental
News is free to most people because advertising makes it possible, but the dominance of media moguls extends to advertising as well. Given the stranglehold the platforms hold, there is no real reason to believe that advertisers’ actions will alter the direction of travel.
It’s also not the responsibility of advertisers to protect democracy, and any advertisers who might heed the call to support news would not shift the needle.
The only effective remedy is governmental. We saw in Davos that the world can still act responsibly when compelled to. Despite extreme provocation, NATO will have to live without reliance on the US.
Ditto for trade. We see in the UK’s and Canada’s developing relationships with China and the EU’s with India that US isolationism can lead to the forging of other partnerships. Curiously, the UK may benefit from greater alignment with its European neighbours.
The situation for media is clearly different, given that US platforms are fully embedded in most democratic nations, but responsible countries should consider how to relieve the pressures placed on them by the US government and the platforms.
Jurisdictions such as the EU are being thwarted in their duty to protect their citizens by threats of reprisals from the US. This cannot continue.
In Davos, we saw the early signs of realisation that the collective power of responsible nations can act as a counterweight. The combined might of nations that want to do the right thing can still make a difference in a world of oligarchs.
Such governments will need to provide alternatives to the platforms run by the media barons and should combine their resources to do so. In the process, they can design the kind of media they would like to see, rather than regulate existing channels.
This could take the following forms:
* Technology innovation: the developed world has the experience, expertise and firepower to build new platforms with high content values, user privacy and safety. This can include sovereign cloud hosting platforms to avoid exposure to US entities.
The technology sector in Europe is significant, and its power can and should be harnessed to build a new media ecosystem that is better than the US model.
Europeans are among the largest users of AI, and a renewed focus on technology could enable Europe to achieve the growth it needs to regain its economic strength, particularly as it seeks new revenues to invest in defence.
Another example is news that France is developing search tools to emulate Google and is rolling out Visio, a competitor to Zoom and Teams.
* Regulation: enlightened countries can ensure that all media in their jurisdictions meet appropriate standards and take a leaf from Australia’s book by legislating for age-appropriate use.
* Financial aid: tax codes can be used to encourage innovation and business growth in media, and grants and loans can be used to incentivise the people who want to provide alternatives to existing platforms.
Offering low-interest, tax-efficient borrowing would help revive European media industries and enable them to compete with U.S. giants, potentially alleviating political pressure.
* Championing alternatives: democratic nations should aim to include their people in this process by making the creation and regulation of media a manifesto matter. People do care about the harms that social platforms inflict and would welcome alternatives to simply depriving young people of devices. This could and should be a voting matter.
The rest of the world has learned that hope and doing nothing are not strategies, and that co-operation with other partners can yield dividends and reduce reliance on an increasingly isolationist and erratic partner.
Ironically, US isolationism may spur a new era of globalisation in media at a time when nationalism is on the rise.
Any new media initiatives will take time and will be fragmented compared to the global reach of the US giants, but the belligerence of the US Government and the political bias of the new global media barons should lead, in time, to new competitors in the 96% of the world that isn’t the US.
It didn’t have to be this way, of course, and there is nothing inherently wrong with the US relationship with the world in the right hands, but the lessons of the last year are a cold gust of winter wind that the rules-based era is over in media as much as in anything else.
Nick Manning is the co-founder of Manning Gottlieb Media (now MG OMD) and was chief strategy officer at Ebiquity for over a decade. He now owns a mentoring business, Encyclomedia, which offers strategic advice to companies in the media and advertising industries, and is the non-executive chair of Media Marketing Compliance. He writes for The Media Leader each month.