Media's 'Masks-Off' Moment: Can Billionaires Save Democracy?
When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke about the "masks-off" moment in American media following last week's election, she wasn't just offering another post-election hot take.
She was noting a seismic shift in how power operates in our democracy that’s worth paying more attention to.
"Our entire political apparatus has been captured by the corporate and billionaire class," she said in a nearly hourlong Instagram Live video on Nov. 7. "And that billionaire class went fully, masks-off this cycle: Jeff Bezos pressured the Post into not making a presidential endorsement this year.”
She is right. Even for a grim, challenging period for the media business, we’ve been hitting new lows. For the first time in decades, both the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times withheld presidential endorsements this cycle–bowing under the pressure from their billionaire owners Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong. While editorial independence has long been journalism's north star, the growing concentration of media ownership among billionaires has clearly cast a long shadow. I’m sure more outlets will follow suit and sit out elections in the future, now that that’s an option.
The numbers on public trust in the media also tell a stark story. Public trust in traditional media has hit a historic low of 32%, according to recent Gallup polling. This erosion of trust coincides with unprecedented consolidation of media power in the hands of a few billionaires.
The breadth of threats to media outlets is also staggering and is not reported on enough. We’re seeing a re-emergence of coordinated influence operations that bypass traditional media entirely. Russian propagandist Margarita Simonyan recently boasted (in the lead up to the presidential election) about building "an enormous media organization" of bloggers with "unbelievable audiences" to counter mainstream American news coverage. That such a brazen admission barely registered in major news outlets speaks volumes about our industry's blind spots.
What’s also troubling is that some of the members of the incoming Trump administration appear to be openly at war with so-called legacy media, with Elon Musk working tirelessly every day to weaken confidence in traditional media like it’s one of his day jobs.
“Trust in the legacy media is rightfully at an all-time low and declining,” he posted on X on Nov. 12, a week after the election. “Send X.com links to friends, especially of actual source material, so that they know the truth of what’s going on.”
When billionaires start seeing themselves as solutions to saving journalism, you know we are in trouble. The challenges facing American journalism are existential. With threats against journalists intensifying and press freedom increasingly under siege, we must ask ourselves: Can independent journalism survive in an era of billionaire ownership, outright threats from tech moguls and algorithmic manipulation? How can we protect the freedom of speech on social media platforms from foreign actors like the Kremlin's bots, without jeopardizing the trust in the electoral process and news media?
The answer lies not in retreat, but in renewal. Local investigative reporting, always the backbone of American journalism, must be strengthened. News organizations must find ways to make quality journalism accessible to all Americans, not just liberal elites. Social media strategy and distribution need to be taken more seriously across the board.
Most critically, we must rebuild trust with communities and our audiences that have come to view mainstream media as out of touch with their lives and concerns.
What's at stake isn't just the future of our industry, but the public's right to information untainted by billionaire influence. As this election has shown, that right has never been more vulnerable – or more essential to defend.
AOC's "masks-off" observation isn't just about the last election – it's about the future of informed democracy itself.