News for Hire: How Billionaires Are Rewriting the Narrative

Cory Barker: In 2021, a well-known journalist left a major national outlet to join a new media venture. It promised editorial freedom, big reach, and deep-pocketed backers committed to truth. Within months, their bylines were showing up across multiple platforms with stories that, while seemingly neutral, all leaned in a very particular direction, pro-billionaire, anti-regulation, and fiercely critical of higher ed, labor, and public institutions. It wasn't a coincidence. Behind the scenes, right wing think tanks and mega-donors have been quietly investing in the news business, not by launching propaganda sites, but by funding established journalists and respected outlets to push friendly narratives. The result, news that looks legitimate but subtly reinforces an anti-democratic worldview. These aren't just fringe voices. These are the names that show up on your news app, your social feed, and even the front page. And the influence is growing.

Matt Jordan: We're going to dig into this topic by talking with Eoin Higgins, a journalist at IT Brew and a sharp observer of the intersection between tech, media, and power. His reporting tracks how money shapes narratives and how these forces are using familiar journalistic faces to build trust while spreading spin. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Intercept, Washington Post, and New Statesman, among others. Eoin's the author of the book Owned—How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. And he's been following this trend from the inside out.

Cory Barker: Eoin Higgins, thanks for joining us.

Eoin Higgins: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Matt Jordan: So, your book is subtitled How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. So, let's start there. Who are the titular tech billionaires? And who were the voices on the left that you're writing about?

Eoin Higgins: Yeah, the tech billionaires that I talk about in the book primarily are the billionaires Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and I think to a lesser extent, David Sacks. Although he really only comes in later in the book. And they are all long-standing right-wing Silicon Valley figures. Peter Thiel back in the '90s in Stanford, when he was a student, founded the Stanford Review, which was this right-wing student newspaper. He founded that because he felt that Stanford itself was too liberal. David Sacks met him at the time, or maybe he was in law school, but in the '90s wrote for the Stanford Review as well. The two of them co-authored a book called The Diversity Myth, also in the '90s. Then Thiel would go on to co-found PayPal, and he would combine his company, Confinity, which had the PayPal product with X, a company run by Elon Musk. And the two of them would become very wealthy and powerful from this founding of the company and their equity from it, especially once they sold it to eBay. David Saks would come on as well as CEO before the company was sold. So, the connection there was well established. Later on, Musk, of course, would go on to invest in Tesla and SpaceX and then claimed that he had founded them, although he just invested in them early on, and would then eventually buy X or buy Twitter and then rename it to X and then become the figure he is now publicly. Thiel went on from there to co-found Palantir, which is a data collection and surveillance company that operated essentially at the largesse of the federal government during the early years of the war on terror during the Bush administration. He also invested in Facebook early on, although he sold the investment before or he cashed out the investment before it was quite what it would end up being in value. He got into politics a little bit later on and has been a mover and shaker in right wing politics, both in Silicon Valley and in Washington ever since. Marc Andreessen created Netscape Navigator. He's one of the creators of Netscape Navigator back in the '90s. That was taken out, I guess, by Microsoft, including Internet Explorer in Windows that triggered the antitrust litigation that Andreessen was a part of pushing forward. After that, he became a VC. He wasn't particularly successful until he hit on Facebook. Ever since then, he's been chasing the next big thing. I mean, he's certainly fabulously wealthy. He's done very well for himself. I don't want to give the impression that, other than Facebook, all of his investments didn't pan out. That's definitely not true. But he has been throwing his money into a whole bunch of different things ever since. He has a lot of money in crypto and AI now. So, he's one of these guys in Silicon Valley, I think more than the others, who just is always in the mix. And then the voices on the left, I think these are voices who were aligned with the left. Certainly, this is Glenn Greenwald, the famous journalist who helped to break the Edward Snowden NSA spying scandal story. And Matt Taibbi, famously, of Rolling Stone, who did a lot of work and writing on the financial crisis back in the 2000 as well as US politics. And his work took a pretty sharp right turn, especially about five years ago. Glenn's did at the same time. And if you trace back their political changes and the opportunities, I think, that they've been given by media platforms and other forms of financial support from this group of billionaires and their friends, I think you can draw a pretty close line there.

Matt Jordan: So, one of the things we try to do is to think about the function of the press. And this is a pretty big challenge to what our normative assumption is about the function of the free press in a democracy. So how does this challenge the free press in the democracy to have these folks writing and influencing the media ecosystem in the way they do?

Eoin Higgins: I think the real threat is not so much from Matt and Glenn writing whatever they want to write or appearing on TV and doing what they want to do. I mean, I think that in and of itself is not a threat. I think that the problem is that the money that's being put into these specific aspects of the media is where the problem is coming from. So let me pull back a little bit and try and break down what I'm saying here. So, in the mid-2010s, a lot of conservative voices in Silicon Valley decided that they didn't like the way that they are being covered. So, for 10 or 15 years before this, maybe even 20, they've been covered pretty favorably, but especially by the tech press and certainly by the mainstream press. And I think that in a lot of respects that makes sense. This is an industry that's on the West Coast. So, it's not near Washington or New York. It's an industry that keeps on pumping out these world-changing innovative products, whether hardware or software. The internet has completely changed the way that we communicate. I mean, we're having a conversation right now on Zoom. We're in three different rooms. This is something that wouldn't be possible 30 years ago, really, or not in the same way. We wouldn't be able to do it on video screens from our own homes. The technology has been spread to the point where you're able to do that. And I'm just using that as an example to say that the tech industry has produced a lot of things that have changed the way that we interact with each other. And so that's my long-winded way of saying that for a long time, that was the way the tech industry was treated, period. It's just like over there in California, they're making really cool stuff. It's changing the world, and we're just going to cover them favorably. And from the tech industry standpoint, they were like, OK, well, we cover favorably, and we'll invite them to conferences, and we'll give them cool products, and we'll give them access to this stuff. And that was like the, quote unquote, "deal" that existed for a long time. But in the mid-2000s, Gawker Media started this blog called Valleywag, which was actually quite critical of the tech industry and treated it like us weekly treats like Hollywood. It was treated like gossip and didn't take these people very seriously. Made a lot of them angry, including Peter Thiel, who would get his revenge like 10 years later when he killed Gawker for Valleywag outing him. But the overall tenor of the coverage was pretty positive. And that started to change in the early 2010s. And by the time the 2016 election rolled around, especially, Democrats were very upset with the election of Donald Trump, understandably. And so, they were looking around for a reason that this happened that didn't involve the Democratic Party. And what they found was that the tech industry was like one of the reasons that they could point to, that both them and their allies in the—I wouldn't say Democratic-controlled media, but Democratic Party aligned media, figures that are more partisan than maybe just objective. And this, I guess, pundit coverage coincided with a more aggressive coverage from publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. And the reaction to this from the tech industry was to say, hey, you know what? This isn't fair. These guys shouldn't be treated like this, else like this. They have no right to treat us like this. There must be a problem here. The problem is that the media is not being fair to us, that the media is not treating us with the appropriate amount of deference and respect that they should, considering all the wonderful things that we are providing for the people of this country. And so therefore, what we are going to do is we're going to fix the media. And the way that they decided to do that, in my view, is to do this disruptive thing where they wanted to decentralize the idea of the media completely and to basically take institutional media and independent critical media and defang them by diluting their power. And one of the ways that they did this was to create all of these different alternative platforms, to invest in all these different alternative platforms. And in investing in them and in putting their money into it and putting their weight behind it, what they did was they managed to decentralize it to the point that all these prolific writers and prolific creators that were involved in the news media before, then all moved over to these platforms. Now, I want to be really, really clear here, that I didn't go to journalism school. I had no background in journalism. I started this work 10 years ago, pretty much by accident. If it wasn't for these platforms, if it wasn't for the decentralized internet media sphere that existed at that time, I would not have the career that I have. So, I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing. But what I'm saying is that as much as it may have shaken up media in good ways, it also did that in bad ways, and that the reason that it was done, the reason that these investments were made was that—and I'm not being conspiratorial here. They weren't all gathered together in a room and saying, hey, you know what? We're going to make this happen together. We're going to plot to kill media. But I think that it was just an overall aim to change the way the media worked in their favor so that they could have what, Balaji Srinivasan. This is one of these tech guys who's very influential, and he has called for recently this idea of a parallel media structure where this media structure basically exists to—I imagine like give Silicon Valley business news and some political news and then otherwise just toe the line with them. And so that's the kind of long, but overview of what I see as what these guys are doing and what the danger is here. And with the caveat, of course, that as someone who has benefited from this, I'm not saying that it's necessarily all bad. But I'm saying that you just have to understand the motivations of the people who are funding it.

Matt Jordan: So essentially, to thwart the power of journalists who were holding powerful accountable, which is the function of the free press, is to hold the powerful accountable and to bring light to issues that impact the citizenry, you have essentially a group of, let's call them, content creators instead of journalists who are pumping their pro Silicon Valley product into the media ecosystem to dilute the influence of journalists.

Eoin Higgins: I think that was probably like the overall intention. I think the way that it played out was a little bit different, though. The way that it played out is that you have people like the aforementioned Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, people them and people like them who take a lot of positions that these guys probably don't particularly care for, but they also take positions that they do like, which is the kind of attack the people who are the enemies of Silicon Valley. They go after the political enemies of Silicon Valley, and they present a reality to their audience that reflects this kind of faux libertarian Silicon Valley view of the world, where free speech is truly impacted by people being mean to you online if you say something that they don't. And that's what censorship really is and interspersed with some real critiques, obviously. I'm not saying that everything that they say is garbage. But I'm saying that overall, their approach has been to present a view of the world that's very friendly to this libertarian Silicon Valley outlook. And I would say as well that there is some self-censoring going on here with these guys, because I think they realize that if you say what these guys want you to say, then you're going to end up continuing to benefit from their largesse. So, you have Glenn and Matt both appearing at the All In conference. This is David Sax's podcast, the All-In conference, which they were paid to do that.

Balaji Srinivasan net worth state conference. I talked to Glenn about that for the book. He said he just took it to get a vacation to Amsterdam. But you're not going to get that kind of opportunity if you're saying, we should break up big tech. They're not making that argument. They're not taking that position.

They're not taking positions that are detrimental to the tech industry's bottom line. And in the meantime, what they're doing is they're disrupting and diluting what we consider to be maybe truth or our idea of what news coverage should be. And they are pushing forward an ideology that is, if not exactly like everything that these guys would agree with. It's something that they can work with. They can work with that. It's not something that is antithetical to their interests.

Matt Jordan: And what you were saying there. it made me think about how Taibbi and Greenwald are very similar to some of the tech billionaires you've talked about, especially in their behavior online and the way in which they often at least how they reply to people on social media and attack people who may critique their work or bring up some of the issues you're bringing up. You can tell that criticism or potential feedback really makes them mad. And it feels like, at least just anecdotally that some of their turn, if you will, is wrapped up in this idea, or they continue to go this route because people ask questions or push back on them. In observing their behavior and in talking to them, like, how do you see that as far as the way in which they take in public feedback or the way in which they navigate their past audience with their existing audience, and maybe even exploit that to disseminate this right-wing ideology?

Eoin Higgins: Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I think that all of these guys are pretty thin skinned. Certainly, Glenn has a well-earned reputation for being pretty mean online, which—and I will say, one interesting thing is that I've been following Glenn for longer than I've been doing this. I've been following him for almost 20 years at this point. And he has been pretty consistent in saying, I'm not really the person that I am. This argument…this really brings out something in me that isn't who I really am. And I have to say that when I talked to him for the book, it was a pretty cordial conversation between two people who probably have a bit of that impulse in—I do as well. So that's my way of saying. I think part of it is like online. I think part of it is like that self-radicalizing problem of being on. But I think that it's also that they are just no longer really used to being challenged. These guys are very successful. From Andreessen, Sacks, Musk, Thiel, Greenwald, and Taibbi, I think they're all in their 50s. I don't think any one of them is 60, and none of them are in their 40s. So, I think they're all within that decade. So, they're at the peaks of their careers. And I think that there is a feeling among them that they really shouldn't be criticized in the way that they're being criticized, that it's not fair for people to come at them and tell them that they're wrong or that their ideas are bad. You know what I mean? I think there is a lot of that. And I certainly think that in a few of the cases, you can trace back their radicalization to someone telling them to shut up on the internet. Specifically with Andreessen, you can directly tie it to that. In 2014, he makes comments about India. The Indian government basically rejected a Facebook initiative based on part of the country's internal regulations and legislation related to the internet. I can't remember exactly the details of it, but they basically said no. And Andreessen said something to the general effect of colonialism was good. And this is why colonialism is good because they don't know how to manage themselves or whatever. And he posted this on Twitter, and predictably, he got raked over the coals about it. And even Mark Zuckerberg, his protege posted on Facebook, that's not who we are. That's not the kind of thing that we would say. But I think that he went dark after that—Andreessen did online. And I've always had the impression—and I've been covering Andreessen for longer than I have Thiel or Musk or Sacks. I've always had the impression that that moment was really like a trigger point for him. He was so angry that this happened, that the little people were daring to talk to him, that he basically just went off the deep end. And he essentially didn't tweet, I think, for years after that. But what he did do, and this is what I reported on back in 2018, what he did do is he would use the—this is back when Twitter would show, like, likes and faves, and he would basically create a timeline out of that. And if you went on to that, you could see what he was reading and who he was supporting. And so, because he wasn't doing retweets or anything, just doing the little fave button. And what it showed was just this guy who was just spiraling self-radicalizing his way into the right to the point that by the time that he came back out of his shell, which was around a little bit before or during COVID when he debuted his Clubhouse app, which was this live podcasting, closed rooms kind of app that at that point he was almost like full on, like, far to the right. And of course, this year he endorsed Trump. He said that it was based on business interests. And I think largely it probably was, but I think it doesn't hurt that him and Trump seem to share a lot of opinions on race and class and ideology. And so, I think that this is all like a long way of saying, this is a concrete example of somebody becoming radicalized because people were mean to them on the internet. And usually, I think when these guys talk about free speech and stuff, like, that's what they mean. They want to be able to say whatever they want without people telling them to shut up.

Matt Jordan: Yeah, so it seems like Twitter or X now, in particular, plays a pretty central role in the media ecosystem, as you describe it, that it's more the bevy of content creators and influencers that are either directly on the dole. I don't know if you have evidence of that or at least getting algorithmic boosting and essentially have their career through the monetization of cloud chasing and clickbait outrage stuff on that. So how has this media ecosystem risen and fallen with the fate of Twitter?

Eoin Higgins: Yeah. I think Twitter has been an indispensable tool for writers for years at this point. I mean, well over a decade. Again, just to go back to myself, one of the reasons that I managed to build a career in the first place is that my friend Gaby told me back, I think before I started really using Twitter, she just said, you should just go on to Twitter. And that way, you can argue with people and actually argue with the people who are writing the articles that you're talking about. Or arguing with the politicians. You don't realize how much access you have here where you're just able to address people directly. And she was right. And I think that also Twitter's micro-blogging platform style, at least for someone like me, was really helpful in learning how to write, because you have to get across complex thoughts and concepts in a very short—it's like 280 words now. I think when I started, it was like 220 maybe. It was not much. So, Twitter has been indispensable, as I said, for media for a long time. And I think that over the years, especially once Trump got elected, then it was like indispensable for politics. Because he was using it essentially as another press room. So, everyone was using it, and careers were being made. It was a driver of discourse and a driver of news in general. And what happened is that once Biden was elected, I think that, in part, so much like the Democrats blamed Twitter and Facebook for Trump getting elected in 2016, so too did the Republicans blame Twitter and Facebook for Biden getting elected in 2020. But I think that more than that, people on the right were chronically upset and angry that their content didn't do quite as well as left-leaning content on Twitter. Now, my belief about that is that happened for a pretty simple reason, which is that there's a lot more people who are left leaning in this country in reality than there are people who are right leaning. And when it really comes down to something like this, when you can actually see the, quote unquote, "marketplace" of ideas like acting itself in reality, this is what happens. It's just not quite that popular these ideas. But either way, once this happened, once Trump lost, and the Biden administration came in and the Republicans were—and the right, in general, were just very angry, they turned to someone who they thought would help them, who was Elon Musk. And Elon Musk is just really—should be understood as a creature of terminal insecurity. And he watched as he had been very popular, I think, with liberals for a long time. It was like, he's built up this brand that I want to emphasize is really mythologizing. It's not reality but builds up this brand as being like this technical genius, a really smart guy, someone who's going to change the world. And over time, those promises just stopped really landing. And also, his behavior during COVID and the stuff that he started to say as he got radicalized by that turned a lot of people on the left against him.

And I think he pushed himself to the right because of that. And then he bought Twitter because he genuinely got convinced—again, I don't really think he's a particularly smart guy, and I'm being totally honest here, but I think that he was genuinely convinced that there was a problem with Twitter censorship and that Twitter was censoring left-leaning voices and that they were changing politics and all this stuff that he's been saying for years at this point. And so, he made this joking attempt to buy Twitter that then he tried to walk back. But because he had done enough legally to be on the hook for it, Twitter basically forced him to buy it from them for just a massively inflated price, which he did, and then immediately started to run it exactly the kind of way that you would expect him to, just using it as his personal playground and using it to attack people he didn't like and to promote people he did like. There's some really great reporting out about all the weird, creepy stuff he does to women on there and how he meets women on there. Going back to your original question, which I've digressed from quite a bit, but the idea of monetization that right now you can get paid off of Twitter, presumably. Those payments seem to ebb and flow depending on whether or not Elon Musk likes you or likes what you have to say. There have been cases where this—I can't remember what her name is. One of the women got a big payout of $20,000 and then rejected Musk. And her next payout was like to $5,000 or $10,000.

So, it's become a vehicle for his insecurity. And its monetization now, I mean, what has become of it at this point, it is just basically straight-up propaganda, a propaganda machine for Musk and for Trump by extension and the right-wing politics that they represent. And now it's really no longer like what it was even five years ago when it was still like a discourse driver and news driver. Now it's just, I mean, yeah, you can go on there, especially if you're looking at what's going on in Palestine. Most journalists in Palestine are on there. So, you're going to find they're going to be doing live reporting there. You still can find breaking news on there. But by and large, it's a relatively useless platform at this point.

Matt Jordan: To talk about another platform and the self-radicalization, I was curious what you thought about the Semafor story that came out in late April, about how many of these folks have been essentially self-radicalizing and riling each other up in signal group chats, essentially reinforcing a lot of the things that you've been writing about. But was there anything in that story if you had a chance to look at it—I'm sure you've seen the discourse about it—that surprised you about what they were talking about or the ways in which they were organizing in these spaces, given that so much of what they were talking about privately, you've been writing about pretty publicly?

Eoin Higgins: Yeah, I mean, it was quite vindicating in some ways, obviously. So, a lot of the Genesis for me being so interested in this is that I was looking at how people were making a lot of money on Substack and looking at how people were getting their stuff amplified by different kind of algorithms online. Just seeing who was being uplifted, whether it was front page on Substack or whose stuff is getting boosted on, like, Twitter or—And I've been interested in this a long time. And I was thinking, and I remember thinking to myself, like, I was like, it would be very interesting if these guys were all talking to each other and talking to each other and talking to journalists and putting together these messages that they're not even—I want to be clear here. I don't think that they are putting together messaging in these group chats and then putting. I think it's happening organically. I mean, that's what the reporting says. It's just happening organically. But it's not surprising to me that these guys would all self-radicalize together. You have someone like Marc Andreessen who's already shifting pretty far to the right, who's now in a group chat with this guy, Richard Hanania, who is just an open white nationalist. He's expressed support for Curtis Yarvin. I think Yarvin was in one or two of these chats. Matt Yglesias has certainly shifted right, in my opinion, over the past few years. Same with this guy, Noah Smith, if you're familiar with him. I mean, these guys are, I think—they are better known for the online left. I think a lot of them, because they're kind of—how can I be diplomatic here? I think that they present their ideas in ways that are not always conducive to reaching left and more conducive to punching left and trying to find something on the right to align themselves with, which is there's absolutely nothing new about that in media. But for these guys, the right wing that they're trying to find common cause with is this extremist far right ideology that someone like Andreessen is fast becoming radicalized too. And certainly, something that we've seen Musk and Thiel and Sacks espouse at different times. It's probably not coincidental that Sacks and Musk are both from South Africa, and then Thiel spent time there as a child. I think there's something to that, apartheid South Africa, I should add. But I think that these group chats and the radicalization that happens within them, I think I mean, most people at this point, I think are in one group chat or another, whether it's like a work Slack or a friend Slack or a Discord. One of the great things about Twitter before Musk took over was the group chat on Twitter. You could meet up with a whole bunch of different people from all over the country, all over the world, who all shared your interests and just plug them all together in a way that platforms like Facebook didn't quite allow for in the same way. So, it's a continuation of that. And yeah, you're going to certainly, if you are in a group discussion with a large amount of people, you're going to find your opinions challenged and perhaps your opinions changed. I think that's totally natural and totally normal. In this case, what we're talking about is we're talking about some of the richest, most powerful people in the world, some of the most influential journalists in the world. And they're all amping each other up to this far right ideology.

And the results of that—and I think this is something that Ben Smith hints at but doesn't quite directly say. And I think that's representative of what I consider both Smith's strength and weakness as a reporter. But is that the logical next step, understanding that these group chats were there, for me would have been like, OK, well, why don't we look at what these guys have been saying over this time and see what's changed? That's not something he wanted to do. Again, I'm not totally faulting him here. He did get the story. So that's great. But I think that if you did do that, though—I think someone probably will do that at some point—I think that you would find that as these guys were all talking to each other that certainly things that Iglesias and Smith were saying, just to pick on them because they're the two that I'm remembering here, you would have seen their politics on certain issues align with what Andreessen was pushing. And again, I don't see this as conspiratorial. I don't see this as they weren't paying them to do it. They're just all together in this situation where they're—like you have access to these people with power, and that comes with certain benefits. And you want to probably stay in that circle. So, you start to parrot some of their lines, some of the things that are priorities for them.

Matt Jordan: So, I mean, in a way, this story of the influence of money and power on the press is an old one. There's the famous 1971 Lewis Powell memo. But at that point in time, they just founded a bunch think tanks—the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Liberty. And they use those to seed the media ecosystem with their talking points. And they got their editorialists lined up in every friendly newspaper, and they just kept feeding this stuff in. But they had a fundamental respect, I think, for the institutions of democracy and the people that you write about, Peter Thiel, especially who you say is that essentially the GOP is Peter Thiel's party. These are people with deep antagonism toward liberal democracy. They think it is broken. They think that empathy is a weakness. They think that everything that would be about supporting the poor is part of the woke ideology. I mean, these are people with deep antagonism toward the foundations of our democracy as we see it. I mean, is that the big difference in this as a kind of a way of infecting or poisoning the well of the media ecosystem than the older version of this?

Eoin Higgins: I think that someone like Thiel or Curtis Yarvin or Marc Andreessen or any of these guys who are anti-democratic, their ideology is separate from the traditional Republican Party. And what that has meant has been that for up until, I would say, even 10 years ago, even during Trump's first term, what they were expressing was still on the outside of at least what the Republican Party wanted to think that it was. But I think that it's important to look at this and to also understand that at the same time that these guys are ascendant. And their ideology is ascendant, that we're now entering the third or fourth generation of the white backlash Republican, like, coming from the Civil Rights movement and just continually radicalizing to the right, the evangelical white Protestant movement, radicalizing to the right, radicalizing to the right endlessly. And I think that it expresses itself through—but for a long time, I agree, the Republican Party presented itself as still interested in democracy, at least publicly. But their reaction to, for example, like Nixon getting impeached and stepping down was not to say, oh, democracy worked. It was to say, that's not fair. When the president does it, it's not illegal for Nixon to say that he was not outside of the bounds of his party or increasingly both parties. But by the time that Trump came around, he represented the natural outgrowth of this. I mean, arguably, Sarah Palin was, and Bush really supercharged this. But I think that Trump really is like the nadir of this. And you have people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, all of these guys. These are third or fourth generation Republicans in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and their anger about the Civil Rights movement, the anger that exists in the first place. And their politics have moved in this extreme right-wing way, so that where they are now is essentially, I would argue, right next to Peter Thiel and his anti-empathy, anti-democracy. They agree they're also anti-democracy. I mean, if you look at what—you can't say I don't think. I think we would both agree that this is Peter Thiel's party in many ways. But I don't think that you can also look at the extreme Republican Party that exists right now and say that that's all because of Peter Thiel or even that that's all because of Donald Trump. It's part, it's the culmination of all of these different right-wing radicalization that have been going on for a long time. So, I think it's kind of in many ways is that they just happen to be there right at the right time. So, when they're funding different media and they are trying to push forward this idea of anti-democracy, which I think is—and I think that you're getting at this, I think is a real problem that is happening right now. We are at a really dangerous moment in American history as far as Democratic institutions. And the current situation is one where even the pretense of caring about democracy or caring about other people is completely out the window. And I think also why you do see sometimes these think tanks pushing back a little bit because I think you are right in that there is somewhat of their ideology is based on at least being like, OK, hold on. We don't want to completely change this stuff. I would argue that they're not really in favor of liberal democracy, but I would say they're not—but they're also not in favor of the careening, like, wagon going off the cliff that we're on right now. You know what I mean? It's like Calvina and Hobbes going faster and faster and faster. I don't think that they're on board with that.

Matt Jordan: Well, they certainly seem to be against the good faith communication that we would associate with a free press. I think one of the guys you write about, Matt Taibbi, today and just as I was coming here, I just wrote a hit piece against NPR, which he said was a groupthink. And all the research suggests that NPR is the most factually based journalism that's out there. It is the most trusted journalism that's out there, and the people that take it in are the most informed people that are out there. So, this seems part and parcel with a push against good faith journalism in our media ecosystem toward one that is owned entirely by the people who benefit from it. These just seem to be part and parcel of a wholesale attack on the free press as we know it.

Eoin Higgins: I agree. I saw that as well from Matt, and I thought it was ridiculous. I mean, I think his justification was essentially they promote groupthink, and so therefore they must be destroyed. And the subtext of what he's saying is that they promote liberal groupthink. And really, if you've ever listened to NPR, as far as ideology goes, I find that they bend over backwards often to have the conservative voice in there, even as the conservative voice is increasingly out of touch with reality, but they still do. So, I mean, I try to. The thing with Taibbi these days is I tried to read, and I just couldn't. I couldn't really understand what he was really getting at. But really, it doesn't matter what the text of what he's saying is. The headline is what he's saying. He's saying that it's OK that Trump is destroying another institution of small l liberal values in this country that's based on the idea of liberal democracy and these values. It doesn't matter that he's doing that for this reason, because it's actually good that he's doing it for this other reason that, of course, nobody is thinking about, nobody cares about whatsoever. And I do certainly find that to be, I guess, amusing isn't really the right word, but I find it to be interesting, I suppose. I find as well his—he wrote something about Howard Zinn. I mentioned it in the book. He wrote this back during the Biden administration. Just like, America is awesome. Thanksgiving is awesome. And Howard Zinn is bad for trying to bring some historical context here. And setting aside the wannabe edgy GenX subtext here, it also, it's just lazy to me, I think. And I find you're going to attack Howard Zinn because he was critical of the United States of America? That seems to be just boring to me. That's not a very interesting line to take. And I think that that's my problem with everything that Matt does now, is I just find it boring. I just don't find what he says to be particularly interesting. Glenn, I still find a lot of what Glenn says to be interesting, even though I disagree with a lot of it. But at least he has a point of view. And same thing with Bari Weiss, I would actually say as well. I disagree with their points of view, because I find them to be hacky and conservative, but at least they are putting forward a point of view that has a coherence and also has a forward vision. I don't think that Matt really does that anymore. It seems very lazy, and it doesn't seem like he is particularly invested in presenting a vision of his politics or media that has much to do with anything other than it's very much like see object, hit object, done. And I think that he's done well. Obviously, he's promoting a lot of the stuff that Elon Musk wants him to promote and has over the years. But it just seems like—I guess I would say that it's hard for me to see how these think tanks that you mentioned are necessarily supporters of liberal democracy. But I'll certainly agree that they are invested in a way that the modern Republican Party is not. But when it comes to someone like Matt, he says free speech when he just means don't yell at me online. And everything that he puts forward is just some kind of backdoor excuse for what Trump is—like, the worst excesses of what Trump is doing. And I find that really distasteful, honestly.

Matt Jordan: You've written a lot about some of these figures who have been more publicly libertarian or right wing for a while. But I think one of the interesting things happening on the journalism side is that we see wealthy newspaper owners who were maybe previously more sinner or even more explicitly liberal or voting for Democrats at the Washington Post, now at the LA Times, now publicly and privately cuddling up to the second Trump administration. From your vantage point, what's behind that shift? And what do you think that means for journalists trying to work within those institutions?

Eoin Higgins: Yeah. So, let's start with Bezos. Now, Bezos makes the calculation during the last few weeks of the election that he is not going to have the paper endorse Harris, which it was going to. That we all know that now they were going to—he pulled it. And the reason that he makes that calculation is that he knows that if he endorses Harris and Trump wins, there will be consequences. And he knows that if he does this and Harris wins, there will be zero consequences ever, because the Democrats will never hold him accountable. And I think that calculation, which I think again, is accurate, is one that determines how these guys are approaching this in general, because they all have billions of dollars in contracts with the federal government that their businesses rely on for money. And they don't want to disrupt that when it comes to someone like Trump. I really think that the calculation is just that simple, that they are just as simple as just saying, you know what, this is a very easy calculation for me to make. I will be on Trump's side publicly for however long he's in office for however long this goes, and we'll reap the benefits. And then once he's out of office, I'll just make nice with the Democrats, and they won't say anything. And I don't really see that ever not being true. And I find myself going back and forth on whether or not that's a good thing or not. And the reason I find myself going back and forth on whether it's a good thing or not is because I would like to see the Democrats show more spine and to push back against these guys a lot more on the one hand. But on the other hand, the kind of graft and pay to play, the kind of stuff that we see from Trump, I don't think is something that should be emulated by other political parties. But unfortunately, what happens is that if you don't make it so, there are political consequences for backing this kind of politics, then there aren't consequences for backing this kind of politics. See what I mean? It's a circular logic, but it does—I don't really know where I come down on it. But I think that's why these guys have taken these positions, because they know that they can just do whatever and there won't be massive consequences for them. And their businesses really do rely on the federal government. I mean, I think that is the thing. I mean, all of these guys are—I quote the Professor Olivier Jutel, who's a professor in New Zealand. And he said, behind every Silicon Valley libertarian, there's a big fat government contract. And he's right. It's true. All of these companies rely on the federal government for their funding and for their money. So yeah, I think that they are in a situation where they feel—this is the most good faith interpretation—where they feel that this is what they have to do to weather the next four years and that they don't—that unless he does something so egregious, they don't really care. I mean, they didn't really care during the first term either. They didn't care about the things that he did that hurt people. That's just, I think, when you are the CEO of a multi-billion globe spanning corporation, how much are you going to care about individual people who aren't within your circle? So, I think that's just a natural reaction there. And so, I think that for the people who are like that and who own these newspapers, I just don't think that it really comes into the calculation.

You have some who are. You have some institutions like The New York Times and Harvard, who are basically telling them to kick rocks because they are powerful institutions and because they can do that. But I think for the most part, I think that unless you have a real ideological reason to push back, slash, you think that if you don't, the consequences might be worse, you're probably just going to go along to get along.

Matt Jordan: Well, Eoin, I just wanted to thank you so much for stopping by and talking about this. It's something for us to be aware of. It's something us, for all of us to think about as we think about the function of the free press and really appreciate you being here.

Eoin Higgins: Absolutely. Let me just finish here, though, because that's a really cynical note to leave it on what I just said.

Matt Jordan: OK.

Eoin Higgins: So, I do just want to say that as far as the broader general media goes, we are definitely at a point where there's a lot of change still going on, and there's a lot of disruption still going on. But I am optimistic about the future of media. I think this is a blip. I don't think that this is the end of the story, and I don't think that this is the death knell for news media and journalism. So, I think we're just getting through this. And I don't think that people with power don't spend this much money and political capital on a fight that they're winning. So, I think that that'll be what I would like to lead us on there, just to say, I don't think it's quite the end of the world. Thank you for having me.

Matt Jordan: Well, with that, thanks again for coming by.

Cory Barker: Well, Matt, really great conversation with Eoin Higgins. What are your key takeaways?

Matt Jordan: Well, I am glad that he sees some parting of the clouds and some potential light on the horizon. I think what he describes is a system that is antithetical to the free press as we understand it. I mean, one understanding of freedom is that it's where you can act without coercion. And what we're increasingly seeing in a media system that is increasingly owned, both in terms of the content production and in terms of the means of distribution by oligarchs, is a system that is entirely based on coercion, the threat of loss of your business, the threat of things going away. And the importance of the free press in that, I think, has never been more important.

Cory Barker: Yeah, it seems to me that his point at the very end about this optimistic viewpoint of where this could go, some of the tools or the spaces that these folks have maybe been using to their benefit are also potential tools of resistance or better forms of journalism, whether that's social platforms or more independent spaces like Substack or similar newsletter platforms. I think those tools, while acknowledging the potential investment from folks who may be antithetical to these ideas, are going to be, I think, really useful for folks who want a freer and better press and a more informed public moving forward.

Matt Jordan: That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Eoin Higgins, a journalist with IT Brew, whose work explores how money and power influences the media landscape. To learn more, visit newsovernoise.org. I'm Matt Jordan.

Cory Barker: And I'm Cory Barker.

Matt Jordan: Until next time, stay well and well informed. News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and WPSU. This program has been funded by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]