The greatest con trick of the modern age is not Brexit, crypto, or trickle down economics. It is the belief that media organisations owned by millionaires and billionaires exist to serve the public interest.
They do not. They serve capital. Everything else is branding.
This is not a conspiracy. It is an incentive structure. You do not buy a media outlet to undermine the system that made you rich. You buy it to operate comfortably within it. No secret meetings are required. The bias emerges automatically from ownership, advertising dependence, and access. The boundaries are understood long before anyone needs to enforce them.
When a billionaire owned newspaper claims to speak for “ordinary people”, the obvious question is why ordinary people apparently require a billionaire to speak for them at all. The second question is who only ever appears in the frame as a problem to be managed.
Notice the pattern of blame. When wages stagnate, housing collapses, or public services rot, the culprits are never monopolies, rent extraction, financialisation, or capital flight. They are migrants, benefit claimants, public sector workers, students, environmentalists. Always sideways. Never upwards.
Culture wars make this work. Real social disagreements exist, but they are selectively amplified, simplified, and monetised because they are cheap content with high emotional yield. Outrage drives clicks. Fear drives dwell time. Complexity drives people away. A structural explanation of why housing is broken cannot compete with a headline screaming about foreigners. Editors know this. Owners definitely know it.
Advertising funded media does not sell truth. It sells attention. Its success is measured in impressions, engagement, and velocity, not accuracy. That does not make journalists liars. Most are working hard inside a system that punishes depth and rewards noise. The problem is not bad people. It is structural capture.
And this is where the damage becomes self sustaining.
A large section of the electorate has had its critical faculties quietly dulled. Not through stupidity, but through saturation. Years of repetition, emotional framing, and curated outrage have trained people to respond to cues rather than arguments. They recognise tone, tribe, and confidence long before evidence. They know who to boo before they know why.
Critical thinking takes effort. It requires holding uncertainty, resisting easy villains, and accepting that the world is usually more complex than a slogan. The modern media ecosystem actively discourages this. It rewards instant judgement, moral certainty, and perpetual grievance. Thinking becomes optional. Feeling is enough.
So when a billionaire owned outlet tells them who is to blame, it does not register as a claim to be tested. It feels like reassurance. Anything that challenges it feels hostile, elitist, or suspiciously clever. An electorate trained this way is not informed. It is managed.
You cannot seriously challenge wealth concentration from inside a business owned by concentrated wealth. You can nibble at the edges. You cannot bite.
Which is why something interesting is happening.
An increasing number of journalists have had enough. Enough of owner pressure, advertiser vetoes, access journalism, false balance, and being told what cannot be said because it might upset the wrong people. So they leave. Not journalism, but the institutions that neutralised it.
Some build their own outlets on YouTube. Some turn to podcasts. Some form small, crowdfunded teams. Others strip commentary away altogether and simply project politicians’ own words back at them, unfiltered and undeniable. No editor smoothing the edges. No owner in the room. Just receipts.
This is not a golden age. Independence is not a guarantee of quality. Some of these ventures are rigorous and brave. Others chase outrage just as cynically as the outlets they left. Independence is a necessary condition for accountability, not a sufficient one. But it is still an antidote to ownership capture.
These projects are smaller, poorer, legally exposed, and permanently one lawsuit away from extinction. They are also disproportionately effective at holding power to account. That is why they attract hostility. Power does not fear criticism. It fears independence.
The right loves to sneer at “state media” while bowing before private empires owned by tax avoiding oligarchs. Public accountability is portrayed as sinister. Private power as wholesome and patriotic. You are expected to accept this contradiction without noticing it.
So apply a simple test. When a media outlet claims to be on your side, ask whether its prescriptions would ever seriously reduce the wealth, power, or influence of people like its owner. If the answer is no, then you already know whose interests it serves.
Media that serves democracy rather than capital is messier, smaller, less polished, and more irritating. It asks awkward questions. It refuses easy villains. It does not flatter prejudice. That is precisely why it matters.
If you want journalism that challenges power, you will not find it roaring from a billionaire’s printing press. You will find it limping along on subscriptions, donations, podcasts, projections, and stubborn refusal to play the game.
That discomfort is not a flaw. It is the point.
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