Media's billionaire backlash
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Once seen as saviors to a dying industry, some billionaire media owners are now facing a backlash from their newsrooms.
Why it matters: President-elect Trump's victory has prompted wealthy executives to reconsider their resistance to the MAGA movement. Journalists say they're pandering to power by meddling with important work.
Driving the news: Longtime Washington Post opinion columnist Jennifer Rubin said she is leaving the paper to launch a new publication called The Contrarian with former Obama White House ethics czar Norm Eisen.
- "Jeff Bezos and his cronies accommodate and enable the most acute threat to American democracy —Donald Trump—at a time when a vibrant free press is more essential than ever to our democracy's survival and capacity to thrive," Rubin wrote in a resignation memo, calling out the Post's owner.
Zoom in: The Post experienced intense reader backlash in response to Bezos' decision to kill an endorsement for Vice President Harris days before the election, leading several people to step down from the paper's editorial board.
- Cartoonist Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize winner, quit last Friday after claiming one of her cartoons was killed because it targeted Bezos. The Post's editorial page editor, David Shipley, said he pulled the cartoon because it was redundant.
- Several members of The Los Angeles Times editorial board also resigned in protest of owner Patrick Soon-Shiong's decision to kill The Times' Harris endorsement.
- Both papers saw a wave of canceled subscriptions.
Time magazine staffers "have grown increasingly unhappy" with the owner Marc Benioff and CEO Jessica Sibley's public warmth toward Trump, according to the SF Standard (a publication also backed by a billionaire —investor Michael Moritz).
- Time staffers have not expressed any such frustration publicly, however.
- The purchase of the Baltimore Sun by wealthy, conservative TV magnate David Smith has also sparked outrage and anxiety from journalists.
The other side: Newsrooms with left-leaning billionaire owners haven't experienced any major turmoil over potential conflicts of interest.
- The Atlantic, which recently poached a pair of star reporters from The Washington Post, largely avoided any newsroom backlash over owner Laurene Powell Jobs' close connections to Harris.
Reality check: Billionaires who suddenly decide to snap a media company aren't doing it for the money — even a profitable outlet is usually only a sliver of their portfolios. And that raises obvious questions about their motivations.
Between the lines: Wealthy owners can use their media influence not just for politics, but also personal agendas.
Axel Springer received a lot of pushback last year for commissioning an internal review of a story in Business Insider, which it owns.
- The story centered on plagiarism allegations against the wife of hedge fund manager Bill Ackman — and critics saw the review as an overreach meant to appease a wealthy, vocal billionaire.
"It would be very difficult" to found a media company today that aggressively covered wealthy, powerful people, former Business Insider editor Nicholas Carlson, told Mediaite in an interview Monday.
- "Anybody can sue anybody for any reason," said Carlson, who led Business Insider during the Ackman review. "It is chilling."
What to watch: A similar reckoning is happening in the tech industry, with liberal employees at Meta and Amazon expressing frustration with their billionaire founders' efforts to cozy up to Trump.
