Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Michael Bloomberg! On Sunday, after weeks of dithering, the former mayor of New York swooped into the presidential race with lofty promises and deep pockets. “We cannot afford four more years of President Trump’s reckless and unethical actions,” Bloomberg announced. The 77-year-old billionaire can certainly afford to run for office, however; he kicked off his campaign with a record-breaking $31m (£24m) television ad buy, the most money a candidate has ever spent on a week of political advertising. Nothing says “democracy” like a billionaire buying his way into an election to try to unseat another billionaire.
You know what else just screams democracy? A presidential candidate owning an eponymous and influential news service that has been barred from criticising him. On Sunday, the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News sent a memo to the company’s 2,700 journalists telling them they were not to do any investigative stories on Bloomberg’s campaign. While Bloomberg outlets will cover the day-to-day of the presidential contest, they will not be conducting in-depth investigations into their boss. Nor will they investigate his Democratic rivals. They will, however, continue to engage in journalism vis-a-vis Trump’s campaign.
It is astounding that a mainstream news organisation has effectively said it will scrutinise Trump but give the Democratic contenders an easy ride. It’s also one of the best things that could have happened to America’s incompetent incumbent. It plays right into Trump’s narrative that the crooked mainstream media are out to get him and I imagine he will milk this for all it’s worth.
Bloomberg charging into the presidential campaign without bothering to sell his news empire is, to borrow his own language, “reckless and unethical”. It undermines already fragile trust in the media and, arguably, it threatens free speech. As David Sirota, Bernie Sanders’ speechwriter, noted on Twitter, reporters are well aware that if they criticise Bloomberg “they risk enraging a person who owns a sizable segment of the media job market”. And it also goes against Bloomberg’s previous promise to divest from his businesses if he ran for president. “The company would either go into a blind trust or I would sell it,” he told Radio Iowa last year. “Quite honestly, I don’t want the reporters I’m paying to write a bad story about me. I don’t want them to be independent. So you’re going to have to do something.”
Bloomberg was on to something there. There has been a lot of noise recently about how big tech’s untrammeled power and unethical practices represent an existential danger to our democracy. While that criticism is certainly valid, there may have been rather too much scapegoating of Facebook et al and not enough scrutiny of traditional media. If we want a truly independent press, we are going to have to do something about the fact that a small number of billionaires own a worryingly large chunk of the media landscape. There are the old media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch, of course, but there’s also a new wave of billionaires busily buying up news companies – often in the name of philanthropy. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong owns the LA Times. The founder of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, owns Time magazine. Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Job’s ex-wife, controls 70% of the Atlantic. Boston billionaire John Henry owns – alongside Liverpool FC – the Boston Globe. The entrepreneur Joe Manuseto bought the Fast Company and Inc magazines. These billionaires may profess to having the most benevolent of intentions but, as we’re seeing with Bloomberg, that doesn’t prevent them from having a scary amount of influence.