Billionaires Destroyed American News Media On Purpose

Yesterday Washington Post Opinion columnist Philip Bump announced he was parachuting out of the Post’s extremely hardcore new right-wing reinvention by taking a buyout. Bump was the last remaining reason to visit the Post’s Opinion section, where he was a thoughtful and methodical practitioner of what we would have called “data journalism” before the spectacular flameout of Nate Silver’s career and the entire existence of David Leonhardt made the term too embarrassing to use. His last column was titled “When institutions crumble, strongmen step in,” and looked at a range of polls quantifying the decades-long decline of Americans’ trust in our institutions, including the news media. Bump’s tenure at the Post ended with the words:

In his monologue Tuesday, CBS Late Show host and my former boss’s former boss Stephen Colbert called his (soon to be) former boss’s current boss Paramount Corporation’s $16 million settlement with Donald Trump “a big fat bribe.”

Last night, Colbert announced that CBS will cancel The Late Show entirely at the end of his current contract, in May 2026. Colbert is currently the number one show in late night, and according to Jed Rosenzweig in LateNighter, “CBS’s Late Show was the only show among the nine tracked by LateNighter to draw more total viewers in Q2 than it had in the first quarter of 2025.” CBS released a statement saying that “This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show's performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount."

It’s definitely not part of the Trump bribe. Do not put in the newspaper that this is part of the Trump bribe. We’re just canceling the number one show in its time slot because of… reasons. Backdrops! Headwinds! Serious TV business.

This is, of course, obvious bullshit. Parker Molloy pulled together all the red yarn better than I would’ve had the patience to, so just go read why it’s bullshit over at The Present Age. But the main thing to know is that this whole CBS/Paramount/Trump settlement happened in order to secure Trump administration approval for a media holding company called Skydance to “merge with” (i.e. purchase) Paramount. Skydance is run by David Ellison, a large adult Butthead and the number one boy of Oracle founder, Donald Trump pal, and the world’s second-richest person Larry Ellison, who gave his son $8 billion to buy Paramount and turn it into more of the same cynical garbage that every other media company has become.

Earlier this week I met someone new and he asked me what I do for a living, and I said “I’m a writer,” and he said “Oh, what do you write?” This conversation happens often enough, and in virtually the same words, that I recognized right away where we were headed. I told him about Tabs and at that point although my new friend didn’t know it yet, we were already on a greased slide toward the moment where I would say: “…but these days I only write it once or twice a week, because the American news media has been systematically and intentionally destroyed by a handful of billionaires.”

“I realize that sounds a little crazy!” I always add with an apologetic laugh, because while outwardly he’s nodding and making a polite “oh really!” face, I can tell that on the inside he’s expecting me to bring up MKULTRA and possibly the JFK assassination next. But it’s not crazy, and you don’t need to believe in any conspiracy theories to see what’s happened. For example:

In 2008, Sam Zell bought the Tribune Corp, loaded it with debt like it was a distressed office building, and installed a drunk¹ radio DJ to run it. The Tribune Corp promptly went bankrupt and as part of its ensuing slow-motion collapse sold the LA Times to biotech tycoon Patrick Soon-Shiong in 2018. By 2025, Soon-Shiong had purged the LA Times of any elements distressing to his distinctly South African sensibility, such as institutional commitment to newsroom diversity or informing the public about things he would prefer we didn’t know.

Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a pittance in 2013, and for several years operated it as a reasonable and hands-off steward. But ten years later, Bezos would have a jacked new physique, a buxom new girlfriend, and soon he’d have a whole new set of buddies to impress. Claiming the Post was “on a pace to lose about $100 million in 2023,” (an amount of money it would take Jeff Bezos fully 28.5 hours of existing in the world to earn back) the newsroom job cuts began. By last summer, Bezos was bigfooting his own Opinion section’s Presidential endorsement and as of today, with craven former British tabloid bagman and drunk² Will Lewis nominally in charge, almost everyone in the newsroom who could get out has gotten out and the paper continues hemorrhaging subscribers.

Peter Thiel paid just $10 million to kill Gawker outright, without even the pretense of capitalism justifying it, although he did eventually bid to purchase its remains as a bit. Elon Musk paid $44 billion to turn Twitter into a Matrix-style battery farm feeding a slurry of racist posts into his A.I. MechaHitler. Three days after Trump’s second inauguration, as one witty and perceptive media watcher reported at the time, “CNN head Mark Thompson offered Jim Acosta the option of moving his show from 10am to midnight and renaming it “The Jim Acosta Sucks Fake News Hour (Do Not Watch).” Facebook built a trillion dollar business in part by providing its users a centralized and individualized feed of interesting news stories, and then shut off the click tap as soon as Mark Zuckerburg felt he could afford to. Google built a $2 trillion business indexing news stories for search, as well as absorbing something like one third of online ad spend, with much of that also coming from news websites. But the moment that Google could use A.I. to ingest all that news content and serve it up muddled and lightly de-plagiarized right there on google dot com instead, news publishers immediately saw their search traffic crater too.

This list is by no means comprehensive, it’s just what I could immediately pull off the very top of the domepiece before I got tired of typing. Suffice it to say: many such cases.

When I told my new friend that the American news media has been systematically and intentionally destroyed by a handful of billionaires, he asked an extremely reasonable question, which was: “but why?” And what makes this feel like a conspiracy is that there is no single answer to “why?” Sometimes it’s arrogance, sometimes it’s ideology, sometimes it’s purely money. Often it’s a messy combination of all three.

But if you really want to step back a bit, the reason why is that we have a socioeconomic system that concentrates nation-state level wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals, with virtually no checks on what they can choose to do with it. So if Larry Ellison wants to turn CBS News into Bari Weiss’s Free Press TV, or Jeff Bezos wants to make The Washington Post into an ideological subsidiary of the Cato Institute… what institutions of power will be left to disagree?

Today’s Song: “Work and Progress,” by my better half

Did you know the kids are still making lofi garage screamo? Maybe we’re not totally doomed.

1  ALLEGEDLY

2  ALLEGEDLY