The serious layoffs at the Los Angeles Times have other journolists — The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias. — up in arms, not in the least part because they are seriously worried about being the next victims themselves.

Billionaires Are Journalism’s False Saviors

by Sarah Jones | Wednesday, January 24, 2024

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.

A threat to journalism? If Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong hadn’t bought the Los Angeles Times, would that newspaper even exist today? If Jeff Bezos, the founder of amazon.com, hadn’t bought The Washington Post when the Graham family realized that they had to sell, would the Post exist today, and if so, in what form?

Dr Soon-Shiong is a billionaire, but not one of the super, super wealthy ones: with a guesstinated net worth of ‘just’ $5.4 billion, his family and he can’t keep just taking $50 million a year losses in keeping the Times afloat forever. Mr Bezos, on the other hand, is worth something on the order of $180.0 billion, so yeah, he could absorb, the Post’s losses more easily, at least if his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez doesn’t demand too many more ridiculous mansions and yachts, but even he has been demanding that his newspaper do something really radical like start to break even.

But here’s the part that Sarah Jones, the New York Magazine author of the cited article, just doesn’t quite understand: these august newspapers, both considered one of America’s five “newspapers of record,” were losing money before the billionaires bought them. It isn’t Mr Bezos’ or Dr Soon-Shiong’s fault that they are losing money!

Miss Jones lamented that, “Plain business interests are taking over,” as though newspapers are somehow not businesses like any other. Yeah, I know: a lot of credentialed media people, basing their view on the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of the press, somehow think that they are not just special, but super-duper special, but, just like every other business, they have to produce a product that other people are willing to buy. And newspapers, facing the competition of a mostly free internet, have not been producing a product that enough people have been willing to shell out their hard-earned money to buy.

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.

Really? So Miss Jones is telling us that more journalists had jobs at the Times for awhile, because of Dr Soon-Shiong’s ambitions, but, Alas! his reach was greater than his grasp, and he just couldn’t realize his dreams. Where would the 115 laid-off staff have been during the last several years if he had not bought the Times? Baristas, anyone?

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.

That Miss Jones is a fairly far left liberal is obvious from her article list on New York Magazine. But this site has expended considerable bandwidth on documenting how The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and a clearly left-oriented publication, has continually censored information that just didn’t fit Teh Narrative.

I’ve quoted more of Miss Jones’ article than I’d like, but there’s one more sentence from her concluding paragraph that deserves some real attention:

Journalism doesn’t function like a traditional business, nor should it; its objective isn’t profit but service.

Lots of businesses provide services: cleaning services, financial services, medicine. Miss Jones apparently believes that journalism is somehow different, and deserves your fealty and respect, perhaps more than roofers or concrete finishers or garbagemen. But her take on the difference raises the obvious question: if “journalism doesn’t function like a traditional business,” how can it be supported? Who pays the journalists — and sadly, journolists — if it’s not a business?

The answer is that journalism always has been a business, with reporters being paid, and printing presses run, by ordinary people subscribing to the newspapers and paying good money to consume the journalists’ product. Now? Print journalists are finding that fewer people are willing to shell out good money for their product when there are so many free sources of information on that internet thingy that Al Gore invented. I’m not a subscriber to New York Magazine, but found her article thanks to a tweet from someone I do not follow, but a couple of the other people I do follow, follow! That’s all thanks to another billionaire, Elon Musk, net worth $204.3 billion. Who would have even seen what she wrote, other than subscribers, without Mr Musk providing Twitter — I refuse to call it “X”! — for free?

I haven’t seen the calls yet, though it’s very possible that I have just missed them, for the government to subsidize or pay for, or even own, the newspaper industry. With Miss Jones most certainly not the only Democrat with a byline, as Robert Stacy McCain would call them, who believes that journalists are somehow special, somehow members of an elite and should-be-protected class, I expect such calls to be made.