The Media Mogul Protection Racket, guys like Mike Bloomberg, Carlos Slim, and Warren Buffett became rich first then bought ownership of newspapers, magazines or websites enabling them to count on a certain type of reporting or lack of it

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12/7/12, "The Media Mogul Protection Racket" M. Continetti, Washington Free Beacon

"The moguls who benefit from the media protection racket tend to be dilettantes who came into their fortune outside of journalism and who see the ownership of a newspaper or magazine or website as an indulgence they can afford to enjoy. (Think of Sidney Harman’s temporary ownership of Newsweek.)

What is most remarkable is that these moguls are exactly the type of characters liberals would otherwise despise and delight in cutting down. Take for example the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim, a Mexican national of Lebanese descent who is insanely wealthy thanks to the endemic cronyism of the Mexican telecommunications industry. He also bailed out the New York Times Company with a $250 million loan in 2009 and as of October 2011 owned a little more than seven percent of the property. What do you know, the Times is not exactly flooding-the-zone with reporting on Slim’s treasure chest, his interconnectedness with global politics, and the outer limits of his ambition.  

When Slim visited Washington, D.C., in February to huddle with Hillary Clinton, Janet Napolitano, Ron Kirk, Gene Sperling, Julius Genachowski, John Bryson, John Kerry, and others, 

only Univision and the WFB deigned to mention it.

Warren Buffett is another crony who benefits from bailouts of financial institutions, structures his company to avoid paying taxes, and owes millions of dollars in back taxes. His faith in government seems not to extend to the estate tax, as can be seen in his support for the Giving Pledge, which billionaires take to “pledge their fortunes early in their lives, so that they can have more control over how it’s spent.” Also he is a weirdo who lives on a 12-year-old-boy-diet of Cherry Coke and hamburgers and appears to limit his interviews to attractive women. Ordinarily, of course, liberals would raise hackles over his selfishness and peculiarity.  

Yet Buffett has invested in the flailing Washington Post Company for decades, bought a majority stake in a local newspaper conglomerate with 25 dailies across the country earlier this year, and of course spouts the liberal Democratic gospel of higher taxes on the wealthy. If liberals don’t owe him for providing them jobs, at least they owe him for copy that reinforces their prejudices. Naturally he has been apotheosized as one of this country’s secular saints. He is called the “Oracle of Omaha,” lionized on the cover of Time magazine (“Warren Buffett is on a Radical Track”) and seemingly immune to serious inquiry or incredulity.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is a mixture of Lee Kuan Yew and Napoleon Bonaparte. He says he knows better than the rest of us when it comes to smoking, eating, governing, term limits, and life in general, and he is prepared to use his $25 billion to shape America so that it produces little (littler?) Bloombergs. His media company, Bloomberg LP, is a behemoth that employs more than 10,000 people.

That is basically the equivalent of an army division covering and influencing financial services, international business, and United States politics. Yet Bloomberg media practice a studied incuriosity when it comes to their namesake. In October for instance New York City’s Campaign Finance Board rebuked the mayor for not reporting $1.2 million in contributions to the Empire State’s Independence Party. Plenty of New York media covered the decision; the Bloomberg properties did not.

Mayor Bloomberg also seems to have been unprepared for the severity of Hurricane Sandy. His response to the disaster in boroughs where he and his rich friends do not live has been less than satisfactory. He was reluctant to postpone the New York City Marathon even though it was scheduled to take place days after one of the worst natural disasters in modern memory and was to start in a borough that had been ravaged by floodwaters.

What did the mayor do? He had the brilliant insight that he would avoid blowback if he could shift media attention to climate change. And he did. The first post-Sandy cover of Bloomberg Businessweek carried the headline, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid,” and neatly coincided with the mayor’s endorsement of Obama on the basis of climate policy. Bloomberg has been coy but people expect him to leave office in 2013 when he will take up writing, philanthropy, and interfering in the lives of the rest of us."...via Instapundit



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