Media and Tech Billionaires Helped Elect Trump — and Now They're Ready to Serve

Surveying the wreckage after the 2024 election, many post-mortems have tried to explain the tactical or messaging mishaps that led to Trump’s victory. But a lot of them have missed the most obvious culprit: the media.

Yes, in this case, it is appropriate to blame the messengers —– or at least their billionaire bosses. 

In 2024, instead of acting as a check on power, the media aided and abetted Trump’s restoration at every turn — whether by outright manipulating their platforms to push Trump propaganda, relentlessly amplifying racist conspiracy theories, suppressing political content while groveling before Republican politicians, abandoning political endorsements and undermining their own journalists, profiting off the relentless onslaught of misleading political ads, or focusing on the horse-race stories, opinion-poll watching and fake scandalizing that infects political reporting everywhere.

As Michael Tomasky of The New Republic writes, the right-wing media “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.” The right continues to set the country’s news agenda, with mainstream outlets largely following along. And even when journalists did good reporting that exposed the danger and depravity of Trump — and so many tried — there was no one amplifying it in broad swaths of the country.

Now those same billionaires — when they’re not elbowing into Trump family photo-ops or meme-ing the destruction of the social-safety net — are kissing up to Trump and making out their wish lists of future favors: cutting taxes, blessing mergers, slashing public-media funding, securing bloated government contracts, busting unions, jettisoning regulations and all the rest.

Billionaires reporting for duty

Too many prominent newsrooms are still failing to meet the moment. There are milquetoast headlines greeting shocking appointments (“a provocative move” … “outside the norm”), the shrugging normalization of Trump’s return, the exit-poll hot takes that insist this or that shouting head knew all along what was going to happen but just forgot to tell us.

However, their bosses — the Los Angeles Times’ Patrick Soon-Shiong, the Amazon Post’s Jeff Bezos, along with the Murdochs and Sinclairs who’ve never made a secret of their loyalties — are reporting for duty. They’re ready to flatter and pay obeisance to Trump, promising a more “fair and balanced” approach as long as the favors and money keep flowing. The abandoned newspaper endorsements were just an amuse bouche — a small taste of how low media outlets are willing to go to stay on the right side of power.

Yes, we should be very worried about Trump’s fascist inclinations when it comes to free speech and freedom of the press — the “jokes” about killing journalists, the calls for FCC licenses to be pulled from broadcasters who expose his corruption, and the MAGA lapdogs who will soon crowd out actual journalists from the White House press room. There will be many outrage moments and loads of infuriating hypocrisy in the months ahead.

But the greatest dangers may come from the further concentration of media ownership among a few Trump cronies, an aggressive legal strategy to harass and bankrupt critical outlets out of existence, and the complicity of a coterie of billionaire media owners who are far more concerned with enriching and protecting themselves than with defending free speech, freedom of the press or democracy.

This is how authoritarianism works.

First, they come for the media

Trump and those around him have learned from other strongmen that rule once-democratic societies. Look at Hungary's Viktor Orbán, who told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2022 that the path to power is to “have your own media.” Or Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, where some of Trump’s biggest backers have tested these strategies and staged a right-wing media takeover, leading to a dangerous alternate reality on the airwaves that conceals war crimes and attacks dissenters.

Here in the United States, media conglomerates are already pleading to remove the few remaining limits on how many TV stations they can own. Nexstar CEO Perry Sook — whose firm controls 200 TV stations across the country — has pledged to deliver “fact-based unbiased local news” (familiar code to any Fox News viewer) and commit to “eliminating the level of activist journalism out there” if Trump and Congress will let him buy as many stations as he wants.

And why wouldn’t Trump go along? Allowing a few subservient cronies to control more media is the clearest path to continued political dominance. Plus handing licenses to your ideologically aligned lackeys is so much easier than launching a legal fight to take them away (though the likely next FCC chair might be open to trying that, too).

While what’s left of the journalism establishment might cry foul at an overtly partisan license challenge, they’ve never objected to consolidation that achieves the same result of silencing critical coverage. Similarly, you don’t have to try to censor news coverage when publishers and platforms will do it for you in exchange for avoiding scrutiny of their businesses, keeping their fat contracts with the defense and surveillance establishments, or slashing their taxes.

Watching Elon Musk’s moves is instructive. He overpaid for Twitter, wrecked it for most users, turned it over to white supremacists, and manipulated the algorithms to boost his own content (and ego) and campaign for Donald Trump. He lost billions, but he won a ticket to Mar-a-Lago and now the White House.

You can bet the Musk-run “Department of Government Efficiency” won’t have any problem finding money to purchase satellites, rockets and Cybertrucks. Ex-Twitter is just a loss leader, easing access to much bigger prizes and greater power.

The other billionaires are paying attention.

Lawfare against a free press

For those that won’t play along, Trump World is ramping up an outlandish legal strategy to tangle journalists, researchers and nonprofit groups in endless expensive lawsuits. These are designed to ruin the lives of critics, bankrupt institutions and make everyone else think twice about speaking out.

On Halloween, Trump sued CBS for $10 billion, alleging the network had unfairly aided his opponent. Trump lawyers also fired off threatening letters before the election to The New York Times, Penguin Random House, The Washington Post and The Daily Beast. “The drumbeat of legal threats signals a potentially ominous trend for journalists during Trump’s second term in office,” writes The Columbia Journalism Review. “Litigation is costly and time-consuming. Most news organizations will look to settle rather than face months—more likely years—of discovery and depositions, plus significant legal fees.”

Most journalists and independent news outlets — and especially those willing to challenge mainstream narratives and the status quo — don’t have the resources of the Times or CBS. The sheer cost of responding to these baseless lawsuits could lead to their demise.

Nobody knows this better than Trump’s favorite billionaires. It was Peter Thiel who funded the 2016 lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker. Musk has gone after organizations that have held him accountable like the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Media Matters for America — subpoenaing dozens of other groups as part of his witch hunt. (As of Nov. 15, X’s updated terms of service require any lawsuits from the platform’s users to be heard in a conservative Texas court hand-picked by Musk.)

Come January, the private-sector attacks will be paired with the government’s power to prosecute leakers and whistleblowers, take away broadcast licenses and revoke nonprofits’ tax status. There’s no federal law protecting journalists from government spying or from being forced to reveal their sources.

This is how repressive societies crush press freedom.

So what do we do about it?

Fascism feeds on fear and despair. While this much concentrated power in the hands of Trump and his allies — and so much acquiescence from media and tech outlets — can be overwhelming and discouraging, we can’t forget our own power to disrupt their plans.

This starts by exposing Trump’s massive giveaways to his media sidekicks — showing people how billionaires like Bezos, Musk and Rupert Murdoch are getting rich at their expense. The voters who returned Trump to office were worried about egg prices. They’re not asking for a media oligarchy.

For years, the billionaires have sabotaged progressive priorities and appointments. We must create our own roadblocks and obstacles to their agenda, defining their dangerous nominees in the public sphere and demanding hearings and investigations. We can challenge and delay their efforts in the courts with strategic lawsuits.

We must take advantage of infighting among politicians and the fissures between the big companies to derail Trump’s legislative and regulatory agenda. In a closely divided Congress — even one where the gavel rests with one party — you only have to move a few members to create deadlock. We can see a ray of hope in the successful mobilization that defeated a dangerous House bill that threatened nonprofit groups based on false and poorly defined charges that they might be supporting “terrorism.”

Now is also the moment when we must defend dissenting voices and protect their right to speak, even or maybe especially when you don’t like their messaging. Our collective priority should be protecting the most vulnerable — undocumented immigrants, people experiencing poverty, trans kids — and refusing to let the media ignore their stories or make them invisible.

And we have to support the outlets and journalists that are debunking the lies, exposing corruption and holding power accountable. Independent, BIPOC and locally owned media especially need your clicks and your subscriptions right now. 

“Do not obey in advance,” is historian Timothy Snyder’s first lesson on how to resist tyranny. Now’s the time to adjust your media diet and stand by those outlets, platforms and organizations that aren’t rolling over.

We still have much to learn from other countries — and our own history — about how people have resisted authoritarians, defended democratic norms and fought efforts to bend and control the media. Now’s a good time to brush up on your Maria Ressa, your samizdat and your Ida B. Wells, too.

There’s so much we can and must do to get through the next four years and rededicate ourselves to building a media system that serves the people, not a handful of billionaires. It won’t be easy. And we can’t give up.

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