From Columbia Journalism Review:

Billionaires Gone Wild

The set up:

In November, Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of online brokerage firm TD Ameritrade, patriarch of the family that owns the Chicago Cubs, million-dollar Trump donor, and father of the governor of Nebraska, shuttered DNAinfo, the local news startup he founded, and Gothamist, the network of city blogs he’d purchased just a few months earlier, in a fit of pique, after editorial employees organized a union. Shuttering the company meant nothing to him—DNAinfo reportedly lost money and the Gothamist network was not profitable enough to make an appreciable difference to a man with a net worth estimated at over $2 billion.

The return of the press baron:

It’s rote at this point to observe that many of the ways the media landscape has been transformed in the 21st century have oddly caused it to more closely resemble the media landscape of the 18th and 19th centuries, from the flourishing of a more openly partisan press to the erosion of the norms of “professionalism” that were built up in the era of post-war prosperity and supposed national consensus. Another throwback: The press baron. Not since the 19th century have so many individuals had so much power over the press.

Press barons have an agenda. I'm guessing WaPo will not be doing any investigative journalism stories about Amazon:

The press baron model works out so long as people want to be press barons. Generally, billionaires buy or start media outlets either for money or influence. There are ostensibly benevolent examples, of course. After personally purchasing The Washington Post, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has received a great deal of credit for investing in serious investigative journalism and giving the paper the resources to achieve major “digital growth,” as the press releases say. I worked (oh so briefly) for eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media, home to lots of great journalists given the resources necessary to do important work. I know Omidyar believes strongly and sincerely in the importance of independent journalism to a free society.

I've exchanged a few comments with joeshikspack about recent changes downward in coverage from The Guardian. I do not know exactly what is taking place there:

Those who initially decide to fund journalism out of a sense of selfless civic virtue will get bored or get tired of losing money, leaving only those funding it for some other, probably political purpose. (The Guardian is currently engaged in a fascinating experiment to see how long a rich man’s money and the economic laws of compound interest can be used to sustain a money-losing, public-interest-serving journalism shop.)

Malevolent control of the media reflects the same systemic takeover of all of our institutions by Oligarchs across the board:

What’s happening to the press is reflective of the broader transformation of our society. Rule by supposedly benevolent technocratic elites is giving way—in large part due to the fecklessness of those technocrats—to straight plutocracy. And really, that only makes sense in an era in which everyone feels like their lives are, in important and fundamental ways, in thrall to the whims of a few mega-rich people. Our cities promise to remake themselves to please Bezos. A few GOP donors threaten to close their checkbooks, and the entire federal tax code is sloppily rewritten. Chris Hughes sneezes, and The New Republic catches a cold.

This is the first I heard that David Koch is a Megadonor to PBS:

Even if you don’t directly work for the billionaire, the billionaire can determine what you work on. David Koch is a major sponsor of America’s misnomered, largely privately financed “public broadcasting,” and NOVA, PBS’s flagship science series, has been notorious for not covering climate change. Sometimes he exerts his will more directly: A few years ago, The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported that plans to air a documentary on PBS stations about the Koch brothers’ purchasing of great political influence were squashed to avoid offending such major public television donors.

A couple more examples. I got a kick out of the phrase "ostensibly liberal publishers":

Oddly, in their spending habits, which frequently fly in the face of traditional economic theory on rational self-interest, right-wing media investors seem to show a more sincere belief in the power of the press than many ostensibly liberal publishers.

Why buy alt-weeklies in this environment—as a secretive cabal of apparently conservative investors did to LA Weekly—unless you believe that alt-weeklies, and the stories they publish, fundamentally matter? Why did casino mogul and Trump mega-donor Sheldon Adelson buy the Las Vegas Review-Journal—anonymously, at first—unless he believed that controlling a newspaper in his hometown was important to his business and political interests?

The bastards are everywhere. The dreary conclusion:

When a billionaire buys a journalism outlet to shut down the critical reporting they do on politicians and businesses, or pays a dirty tricks specialist to “sting” your publication, it is an endorsement of the idea that journalism matters.

That might sound like a rallying cry, but in the absence of any plan to save the industry from the 0.01 percent, it can only be an observation.

The days of America's Free Press are over. More examples and analysis at CJR:

Billionaires Gone Wild