Utsav Gandhi explores how billionaire media owners, from Musk to Bezos, are influencing newsrooms, altering editorial policies, and reshaping the future of press freedom in the United States.
Speaking on stage at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Elon Musk claimed that “a massive amount of your tax dollars is going to legacy media companies directly from the government” and that in response, he bought X (formerly Twitter) for an overvalued amount because “freedom is priceless.”
However, congressional appropriation data reveals that the United States federal government allocates around $500 million annually, or $1.60 per person per year, for public broadcasting (not for any particular outlets directly). The Center for Public Broadcasting then divides this money among hundreds of local public television and radio stations across the U.S. Meanwhile, Japan spends over $40 per citizen per year, the UK about $100, and Norway over $176.
Americans have always had part of their public information subsidized by the government right from the time of the country’s first significant communications network: the postal system. But Musk is not alone in threatening the press, Republican Presidents since Nixon have been attempting to paint the “mainstream media” as a weapon of bias against them.
Inconvenient questions. What does that term mean when it comes to freedom of the press? John Milton’s foundational text, the Areopagitica (1644), inspired the classical liberal notion that the best ideas naturally arise when diverse viewpoints are fully exposed. Later, in 1919, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously argued that the “ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”
This became known as the classic ‘Milton-Holmes’ approach to press freedom and laid the foundations for the ‘marketplace of ideas.’ The argument also goes back to John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech in On Liberty (1859): “Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.”
Freedom of the press must be considered in the context of the continued decline of local journalism and its effects on communities. According to a study at Northwestern University, in 2024, Donald Trump won the presidential election in 91% of the country’s designated ‘news deserts.’ This refers to counties lacking a professional local news source.
While not determinately causal, there is a possible correlation here. Research on corporate misconduct has found that after a local newspaper closure, local facilities increase violations by 1.1% and penalties by 15.2%, indicating that the news closures reduce firm monitoring by the public. The underlying economic conditions, local fraud environment, or firm conditions do not drive this effect.
The news industry’s troubles have been exacerbated by technological changes: 40% of Americans under 40 now get their news from ‘influencers.’ The Pew Research Center published a deep 122-page report which found that this news influencer landscape skews male and leans disproportionately conservative.
The Case of the Los Angeles Times
The decline in readership is not restricted to local newspapers. The combined average daily circulation of the 25 largest audited newspapers in the U.S. dropped 12.7% year-over-year by the end of September 2024, new data shows. The most significant drop in circulation was at the Los Angeles Times, whose owner, biotech entrepreneur and billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, has been accused of decisions influencing the editorial process of the paper.
In October 2024, the LA Times was the first major outlet instructed by its owner to withdraw from presidential endorsements. This led to a staff exodus at the LA Times, followed by an editorial board shakeup and mass unsubscriptions. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, the LA Times saw its daily print circulation drop 25 percent, from nearly 106,000 as of September 30, 2023, to 79,000 by the same date in 2024 (even before the endorsement announcement).
As CJR reports, Soon-Shiong had publicly started to weigh in on matters ranging from LA city governance to public health. “In recent months, Soon-Shiong has written numerous posts on X praising Elon Musk (who, like Soon-Shiong, is a South African–born entrepreneur), Donald Trump, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” reports CJR. “He has also vowed to remake the editorial board, saying he would hire Scott Jennings, a Trump supporter who appears frequently on CNN, to join it.”
On cable network Fox News, Soon-Shiong said that the paper had started to conflate news and opinion, and vowed to take it in another direction so that “all voices” will be heard. He also floated the idea of adding an “AI-powered bias meter” – which could be fraught with legal complications – and teaming up with conservative podcaster Candance Owens to build a new project targeting youth.
The Case of the Washington Post
When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos initially bought the Washington Post in 2013, he declared, “The values of the Post do not need changing. The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners.”
However, Bezos started criticizing then-President Joe Biden in a series of tweets, especially on domestic and fiscal policy. Journalism educators and professors cautioned about how Bezos’ public outburst could affect the internal culture at the Post. “At a minimum, the positions he’s taking are going to change the way staff at the Washington Post are perceived,” said Edward Wasserman, the former dean of Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. “Right now, I’m just saying ‘perceived.’ But it would be grossly unrealistic for us not to imagine that his preferences will influence how the newsroom operates.”
Bezos followed Soon-Shiong in changing the editorial endorsement policy for their respective papers. Trump met with executives from Bezos’ Blue Origin company right after the paper’s endorsement announcement.
Notably, the Washington Post continues to do some of the best investigative reporting on Musk’s government contracts and what has led to his wealth and success thus far. Interestingly, in late October 2024 after the Presidential endorsement announcement, the Post also published a detailed investigation into Bezos’ own conflicts of interest with the federal government. Former Editor Marty Baron noted in the piece that there was no history of Bezos interfering with the paper’s editorial process, but he has slammed Bezos in recent days over the latest announcement that the opinion section of the paper would only publish pieces in support of “personal liberties and free markets”.
Other Billionaire Media Owners: Benioff, Jobs, Taylor, and Henry
Soon-Shiong and Bezos are not the only billionaire media owners, but they might be the most vocal. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff purchased TIME Magazine in 2018. Former Editor-in-Chief Ed Felsenthal, who worked extensively with Benioff, insists that Benioff has kept himself out of editorial decisions and instead has brought a tech “ethos” to the magazine.
Last month in January 2025, as TIME’s editorial leaders rushed to defend their choice of Donald Trump as “Person of the Year,” the president-elect appeared at the New York Stock Exchange alongside a grinning Jessica Sibley, the CEO of the magazine. Benioff tweeted in support of Trump, saying, “This marks a time of great promise for our nation. We look forward to working together to advance American success and prosperity for everyone.”
Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, who owns a majority stake in the Atlantic, has not yet come in the crossfires of Trump. In his first term, however, after the Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief rebuked Trump for mocking fallen service members, Trump tried to drag Jobs into the fight by instructing his followers to “call her, write her, let her know how you feel!” Jobs was a key figure in Kamala Harris’ run for office, and their friendship goes back more than twenty years.
Jobs’ ownership of the publication has also remained relatively steady, except when it laid off 68 employees (17% of its staff) during the pandemic. Northeastern journalism professor Dan Kennedy criticized her for not stepping in with her wealth to “sustain the organization during bad times.”
The Minnesota Star-Tribune is owned by Glen Taylor, a billionaire who also owns several Minnesota sports teams. He bought the paper for about $100 million in 2014, several years after it filed for bankruptcy. The paper has been profitable every year since he bought it and is leveraging Taylor’s cash injection to expand to other areas of the state. The final example to note is Boston Globe owner John Henry, who also owns the Boston Red Sox, which is the central conflict of interest he faces in a town obsessed with their sports teams. However, up until now, media analysis say that journalists at the Globe continue to cover sporting and managerial decisions at the Red Sox with apparent objectivity.
Henry has also advocated this ethos since he bought the publication: “Journalism is under attack in this country. We all know facts are under attack. What should be under attack in journalism these days are not facts but the lack of objective reporting. I reject the notion that you can’t have highly objective reporting, although the media seems to believe it isn’t possible. To me, that is a long-held myth that has no place in a democracy. A news journalist (as opposed to a columnist) has an obligation to sift through whatever evidence he or she can find and give the reader what has happened or is happening to the best of his or her ability, much like a juror in a courtroom. Today, we get the news interpreted far too often rather than reported,” he said.
Actions by Brendan Carr, Chair of the FCC
Last month, the Associated Press was barred from a White House event because the AP Stylebook says reporters should refer to the Gulf of Mexico by its original name and not the “Gulf of America,” like Trump wants. AP executive editor Julie Pace accused the administration of violating the first amendment.
In December, Disney settled a defamation suit brought by Trump against ABC News over coverage of E. Jean Carroll, who has accused Trump of sexual abuse. This week, Paramount, which owns CBS, is talking with Trump’s lawyers about an even more dubious lawsuit involving editing a 60 Minutes episode. CBS provided a transcript of the Harris interview to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which later released it to the public. In a statement on the CBS News website, the company said the transcript showed that the 60 Minutes broadcast “was not doctored or deceitful.” The outcome of mediation might affect the administration’s willingness to allow Paramount’s sale to the tech mogul Larry Ellison (Ellison, who owns Oracle, is also a part of the Trump AI consortium with OpenAI and SoftBank, and at one point was also in talks to buy TikTok). In other words, CBS might be forced into a settlement to advance the business interests of its parent company and those of a multibillionaire close to the president. Over in the social media world, Meta has also agreed to pay Trump $25 million to settle a lawsuit over Facebook and Instagram suspensions.
The person in charge of the FCC, Brendan Carr, also wrote a chapter on the media and the First Amendment for Project 2025, a blueprint and roadmap for the second Trump administration co-authored and published by former Trump officials and the Heritage Foundation, which is a conservative think tank. In his chapter he supported eliminating Section 230 for companies engaging in “biased content moderation” (without defining what that means), advocated for a TikTok ban on national security concerns, and proposed more oversight of American companies from aiding China’s technology growth.
As a member of the FCC during Trump’s first term, he also voted to approve millions of dollars in subsidies for Musk’s Starlink and supported the merger between Sprint and T-Mobile, which has been described as a “disastrous deal from the start.” His first few actions as FCC Chair have included investigating Comcast over DEI initiatives, George Soros for taking a ‘shortcut’ to buy 200 U.S. radio stations, and local outlets over First Amendment-protected reporting on Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Last month, he also sent letters to NPR CEO Katherine Maher and PBS CEO Paula Kerger, warning that the administration may go after their public funding.
The Road Ahead
What are some of the immediate questions that need to be addressed by the press? First is the need to figure out alternative business models so that they are less susceptible to billionaires buying the companies. The Guardian, France’s La Monde, ProPublica, and other local American outlets like Block Club Chicago, City Bureau, and Resolve Philly are all exploring fundraising and nonprofit foundation models, though it’s not a systemic fix. New Jersey, California, and New York are exploring public funding options at the state level. Again, these are not systemic fixes and speak to broader structural vulnerability, especially if Musk’s DOGE takeover extends to the IRS and threatens the tax-exempt status of nonprofits.
As Luigi Zingales wrote in ProMarket last week, the circulation of ideas is becoming increasingly restricted in the United States. When a small handful of people, each with their personal interests and conflicts, also control most of the major news outlets, the spaces for debate, discussion, ideas, and free expression can suddenly diminish before our very eyes.
Author disclosure: Utsav Gandhi is a paid summer research intern and former Research Professional at the Stigler Center, ProMarket’s supporting research center.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
