Billionaires Are Journalism’s False Saviors

Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Times announced that it would lay off at least 115 journalists, 20 percent of the newsroom. The cuts would have been larger were it not for the newspaper’s union, which fought back and walked out of the office for one day last week in protest. The cuts follow a previous round of layoffs last June, meaning the Times has lost around one-third of its staff in under a year. The same day, Time announced cuts of its own. Condé Nast was already on the way to cutting 5 percent of its workforce when also on Tuesday, members of the company’s union walked out after the company proposed significant layoffs and downsized its original severance offer. Earlier, Univision announced significant cuts and the company that owns Sports Illustrated laid off most, perhaps all, unionized staff, which could kill the storied magazine. The Washington Post slashed its newsroom late last year. Journalism’s fate was never assured, but now it looks bleaker every year.

Many of these companies had been purchased by billionaires who struck an altruistic pose. At one time, they said they believed in journalism, not the bottom line. When billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong purchased the L.A. Times in 2018, he “knew in my heart of hearts” that “we need to protect the newsroom … I came in there with an inner belief it’s all or nothing,” he said in 2021. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in part because it’s an “important institution,” the New York Times recently noted. “I said to myself, ‘If this were a financially upside-down salty snack food company, the answer would be no,’” he told the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., in 2018. Marc Benioff, the billionaire founder of Salesforce, told CNBC in 2019 that he bought Time to address “a crisis of trust.” He added that his magazine “can be a steward of trust … It’s one of the core values of Time: trust, impact, the core magazine itself, and that it’s about equality.”

Now altruism has worn thin. Plain business interests are taking over, and media workers are feeling the blow. The implications for them — and the public — are devastating. “In 20 years you truly will not be able to believe anything that you see or hear online — which will be the only place you see or hear things,” Jack Crosbie wrote at Discourse Blog. “Every person trying to learn more about the world around them will be forced to navigate a chaotic ecosystem of rage and deceit in search of one of the few honest or good-faith news-providers that still exist. Almost all of us will fail at this.” Billionaires aren’t rescuing journalism. They’re a threat to it.

That’s partly because their greatness is a myth. In Soon-Shiong’s case, his business acumen was always a little unclear. He bought a controlling stake in Verity Health System, a California-based hospital chain, in 2017. He told employees he “was the last owner we were going to have,” Politico reported a year later, not long after the hospital chain announced it was in serious debt. It soon declared bankruptcy. “A big, rude awakening, from ‘I’m the savior’ to, ‘Maybe I’m going to keep my promise to you, maybe not,’” one hospital executive told Politico. There are troubling parallels to his management of the Times. He staffed up, expressing major national ambition. Workers are paying for the failure of his ambition.

The situation is revelatory. Media layoffs tell us something about an owner’s business prowess, but they also show bigger forces at work. Though companies say layoffs are business decisions, there is an ideology underneath the jargon. Owners like Soon-Shiong sound noble at first, but ultimately they prioritize profit over the public interest. Their goals, then, are at odds with the purpose of journalism. Media workers can’t serve the public if there are no opportunities for them to do so. By cutting jobs in journalism, the ruling class cedes ground to the rabid right-wing media — whose benefactors are committed to an ideological project. The prospect of an emboldened right wing and a corresponding reduction in reputable news sources does not trouble them nearly as much as the loss of profit.

There is no morality to that logic, and no interest in the world, for that matter. Media layoffs betray a damning incuriosity among our elite. They’re content to rule and fundamentally disinclined to understand or empathize with the people they dominate. In contrast, journalism at its best has the power to illuminate. A good journalist can pull back the layers of the world to show the structure underneath. Wealthy owners don’t want the knowledge and they don’t want the scrutiny either. They’re rather blunt about it, too: Layoffs speak loudly, as do corporate mouthpieces. A spokesperson for the L.A. Times said last week that “relying on a benevolent owner to cover expenses, year after year, is not a viable long-term plan.”

There’s some truth to that, admittedly, though Soon-Shiong is more than capable of eating his losses for years upon years to come. Billionaires are fundamentally untrustworthy. Journalism doesn’t function like a traditional business, nor should it; its objective isn’t profit but service. For that reason, most journalists know they can’t trust a billionaire’s whims. Media unions are growing because they offer some security and, crucially, a way to fight back. A billionaire can survive a news desert. The rest of us won’t.