Media, Moguls and Democracy

Their successors who run the country's technology and media giants appear to be doing their best to prove Brandeis dead right today. Larry Elison buys Lanai, chokes off local businesses, evicts long-time residents, and transforms the Hawaiian island into a private retreat. Elon Musk, who owns SpaceX, proclaims he plans a city on Mars, presumably including gated communities where homeowners one day can commute by rocket for, as Musk put it, a measly $100 thousand a ride. Meanwhile, back on earth, Peter Thiel, the tech world's MAGA magnate, pours tens of millions into the campaigns of extremist election deniers, while grousing about the deficiencies of the democracy he is helping undermine.

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Let's stipulate that the financial flows from mega-rich donors and their companies to fund their chosen fantasies, far right politicians, and parties aren't unique to the technology and media industries. Neither is their sense of entitlement and political access. In the Gilded Age, the big shots bought political bosses, communing with their acquisitions over brandy and cigars at elegant private clubs in New York and Chicago. These days politicians and CEOs schmooze at Silicon Valley dinners, where they share deep thoughts on policy over Sonoma's finest wines while doubtless also ironing out pesky legislative details.

Brandeis would have recognized the symbiosis. He was anything but a theoretician when it came to what the law allows in a democracy. Having come of age when oil, railroad, and meatpacking monopolists claimed their strangleholds on the market as God-given rights, he would see through the libertarian malarkey cloaking the self-interest of the current high tech and social media billionaires. The pioneer of fact-based legal arguments, Brandeis focused on the injustices produced by bigness, whether the issue was government infringing on freedom of speech or companies denying workers their rights.

What Brandeis might say, if he were here, about the modern media industry and its political role is worth pondering. When it came to the news media, of course, he lived in a different world. To be sure, media barons like William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce owned powerful newspapers and influential magazines. National networks that controlled radio, then technology's cutting edge, also were growing fast. But in the 1920s television was barely out of the lab -- and forget about the wired world. Computers, smart phones, 24/7 instant connectivity and the rest of the Internet's information age weren't even a glimmer in a futurist's eye.

It's a good bet a Louis Brandeis transported to the 21st Century would be conflicted. Take censorship. Conservatives claim social media's liberal machinations are silencing right wing voices, despite their metasticizing mendacities such as Donald Trump's stolen election lie. Brandeis viewed the First Amendment as central to all other Constitutional rights. He would argue the antidote to lies rests in the contest of ideas. Or as he put it, the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the "competition of the market."

But Brandeis also recognized that political speech has its limits. In 1919, writing in opposition to the court's majority decision in a case involving the Espionage Act, he joined Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes in an important dissenting opinion. In fact, their views laid the groundwork for the Supreme Court's more liberal interpretation of free speech rights a decade later. Nonetheless, Brandeis's dissent clearly allowed that the First Amendment doesn't protect political expression that "so imminently threatens immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country."

In the wake of January 6th, Brandeis would recognize something else: the dangers facing the country in the actions of a media industry that has promoted, proliferated and profited from just such "immanent threats." The multibillion-dollar suits against Fox News for propagating the stolen election lie are the cases in point. The suits allege the network and its primetime commentators knowingly promoted baseless claims that Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, an election systems company, threw the 2020 election. The consequences: the gullible in the audience haven't just spun themselves up. In addition to joining the January 6^th insurrection, they're making serious threats of violence against elected leaders, election officials and the democratic process itself.

As Brandeis might have said, the facts speak for themselves. Rupert Murdoch has watched his network's relentless prevarication boost its bottom line for years. The political impact of that success is obvious: Tuning into its commentariat's promotion of the big lie, a majority of Republicans believe the democratic process is corrupt and the presidency stolen from Trump. Fox isn't Trump's only propagandist, of course. One America Network and Newsmax on cable and Parler on line play their part, to name just a few. But whatever their lack of journalistic integrity, none have melded mendacity and media power as profitably.

And lawsuits or not, Fox's influence from monetizing the big lie is continuing to grow. Consider CNN. Fox's liberal nemesis is now tucked inside Warner Brothers Discovery, the merged entertainment giant created this year. CNN's new management has launched what any Chinese Communist would recognize: a rectification campaign. In addition to a new party line proclaiming an end to its liberal bias, the network is nixing judgmental vocabulary, such labeling Trump's big lie, well, a lie on air. To make the point to its cadre, CNN's new chief Chris Licht is defenestrating journalists.

Among the malfactors' acts, the recently departed Brian Stelter and John Harwood have called out both Fox's propagandizing and Trump's statements, including reporting on what's true and what's false. A pair of firings don't make a political purge, but the ousters aren't the only two-by-fours in the wind. Mirroring the desire of Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zaslov, who reportedly wants CNN to have a "non-ideological" hue, Licht has said the network is seeking more Republican guests and commentators. That presumably will include past and present elected GOPers. Facing CNN's ideologically gelded crew, the Republicans should feel comfortable peddling their prevarications about electoral fraud, Trump's stolen victory, and whatever other fables come to mind without fear of questions that contradict their baseless claims.

That Zaslov and Licht hope their actions will boost CNN's ratings and revenues, long lagging Fox, goes without saying. But like the four-year-long marriage of Murdoch's news network and Trump's White House flacks, a look higher on the corporate food chain suggests politics as well as profits explain CNN's rectification campaign. The evidence: with seeming clairvoyance, cable media mogul John Malone, a Warner Brothers Discovery board member, described his vision of the future on CNBC last year when he discussed the then forthcoming entertainment giants' merger, the cable news competition, and CNN's fate.

"Fox News," Malone said, "has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have news news, I mean some actual journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions. And I think they've been relatively successful with a service ... that [tries] to distinguish news from opinion. I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing."

Combined with his whitewash of Fox's propaganda machine, Malone left no doubt where Warner Brothers Discovery's most powerful board member thought the news network needed to go.

Comments from others in media industry C-suites assert Malone isn't the type who gets involved in pedestrian hirings and firings. Of course not. With $10 billion or so net worth, why bother? But the fact is Malone's hands-on isn't necessary. A conservative multibillionaire, his views are well known. The United States "needs Fox News or something like it. Because otherwise, everything's leftist," he told the Financial Times in 2017. Referring to the Fox News network's launch in 1996 and the then 20 percent stake held by TCI, his company, in Rupert Murdoch's new venture, Malone added, "I was the co-founder of the damn thing."

And that, Justice Brandeis might say, is the point. As the technology and media industries consolidate, the politics of their owners and corporate captains and its impact on American democracy carry a weight well beyond the big checks written to their candidates of choice. A John Malone who lauds Fox News but is clueless about the damage to democracy done by the network as well as the continuing threat its emulators and others represent isn't alone.

In its 2021 study, "The Big Lie and Big Tech," the Carter Center put it this way: "It is impossible to ignore the role of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. in the information ecosystem, the scale and scope of harmful narratives on their platforms, and the power they wield to blunt some of the harmful effects of misinformation." However egregious social media's failures, the analysis is no less relevant to the owners of the news media today.

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