What Happened to News?
Main audience: everyone
Carole Cadwalladr uncovered a whopper about media ownership. Before I send you to her investigative discoveries, let’s peek at why it matters.
Last week organizers for No Kings 3 said they improved procedures for estimating and reporting attendance this time around. With more than 3000 event locations (including some abroad in 16 countries), final figures can’t be quick. We’ll have to wait for their figures to get a more accurate sense of yesterday’s turnout than the preliminary figure of 8 million, the largest one-day turnout in USA history. From what I see in people’s photos, I won’t be surprised if the final figure is higher.
In the meantime, what estimates do we get from mainstream sources?
USA media is warped by the regime there, tending to heavily downplay protests and resistance. Let’s look at the UK where I live. We had a large rally in London opposing the far right. We don’t call ours No Kings because we do have a king in a mostly ceremonial role. We rally alongside the USA’s Resistance to show our support and to say we don’t want authoritarians.
So far, about London:
The Independent headlines the organizers’ estimate that half a million people participated.
The Guardian says tens of thousands participated and mentions the Metropolitan Police estimate of 50,000.
I would mention the BBC’s estimate, but nothing about the event is on its home page. My searches for it there only turned up coverage of Tommy Robinson’s rally there last September to promote the far right.
I avoid tabloids and newspapers with a definite slant to the right.
Visuals from London don’t look like only half to a third of the turnout at last September’s far right rally, so why did the Guardian use the Met’s figure? The Guardian has a long history of reliability and independence, partially shielded from the usual pressures by the Scott Trust that backs it. We should not see what looks like deliberate downplaying of this type of event from them. We should not see BBC making low-key mention of it before it happened and completely ignoring it now that it has happened. But we do.
This brings into focus Cadwalladr’s long, detailed piece The broligarchy’s war on journalism. It’s about more than what happened to make the Guardian swerve, but she delved into that question the most.
Three weeks after the transfer of the Observer [from the Guardian] to Tortoise Media took place, the UK government changed the law to allow foreign state ownership of UK news titles. They also backdated the legislation to a year previously.
At least four news organisations lobbied the minister in question to get this law changed according to a report in the Guardian. The details remain secret.
Why is that significant?
Because some of the ownership of the Observer is now an opaque organization called the North Hatley Trust…
which is registered at the same suite as USA private equity firm Hellman & Friedman…
which in turn received an undisclosed amount of investment money from Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund Sanabil…
which is headed by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman…
who the CIA says ordered the gruesome murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Hellman & Friedman’s investments include Axel Springer, a German family company which owns Politico, Business Insider, the tabloid Bild and broadsheet Die Welt. That list has a distinct right wing slant. Axel Springer is buying the UK’s newspaper the Telegraph with ambitions to perhaps expand its reach into the USA.
Cadwalladr is candid about not being able to fully prove linkages or causation. She also says about this topic, '“When I came to read it again, I doubted that anyone outside the small world of UK media would understand it or be interested. Stories about financial disclosures are pretty dull.”
But she shows how the takeover of major media outlets by oligarchs and pro-authoritarians is not limited to any particular country, and how money flows across borders to facilitate it. That is alarming, not dull.
Click here to read Cadwalladr’s post. It may shed new light on what you are getting (or not getting) as “news” from major media sources.