It's hard to trust media owned by billionaires out to appease power, rather than hold power accountable—but here's a strategy to fight the disinformation
Between issues like this (WP isn't alone—for just a couple of examples, Breitbart/Huffpost are both owned by the same folks so they're playing to both extremes while raking in the cash and having zero moral compass, and LA Times owner also ditched having a presidential endorsement in 2024) and Zuck getting rid of fact-checking, the future of vetted, verifiable information is looking pretty bleak.
Turns out I was mistaken—they were both co-founded by Andrew Breitbart, but ownership has changed since his death. But, Vivek Ramaswamy did recently purchase a minority stake in BuzzFeed (around 8%) which was interesting to me. My apologies for any misinformation.
It is quite possible cartooning has been around forever. Maybe some cave paintings are really commentary cartoons?
Early graffiti can be found in archaeology settings. (probably political commentary?)
Medieval monks or the readers of their tomes, amused themselves with scurrilous marginalia. Paper/parchment was a very scarce, expensive commodity. Public expression of one's thoughts hard to come by.
Troubadours made up songs with sly lyrics mostly aimed at the upper crust and their misdeeds. (early versions of hip hop?)
In the early days, with low literacy, people still found ways to express themselves; depictions of erect and wayward penises are ancient and universal.
Suppression of human individuality is hard and costly work. Eventually the oligarchic moneybags run out of steam, or money. Regimes change, empires collapse. Good cartoons, witty graffiti become folklore; arise from their dusty tombs to poke us in the eyes.
This is so true. Think in our lifetime what has happened to other media brokers who are so powerful in one moment, and "not so much" the next: Father Coughlin; William Randolph Hearst; Arthur Godfrey; Walter Winchell, just to name four bastards. I really can't understand why greed and power corrupt so badly when everyone knows power is fleeting and, as for money, you can't take it with you.
What amazes me is that Bezos got the Washington Post for a mere $250 million. While that is way out of my league and most people’s league, I don’t understand why some of our more progressive millionaires or even the staff didn’t organize to buy it.
I don't know much about her politics or whether the Silicon Valley milieu she's worked in rubbed off on her, but Kara Swisher is trying to put together a coalition to buy the WaPo.
Nor to George Soros. Or the Patriotic Millionaires. I just sent them this message: I just sent this message to Patriotic Millionaires (a progressive group): Why don't some of your members team up and buy The Washington Post from Bezos. He got it for only $250 million. Obviously, for most of us, that is far out of reach, but this should be within your collective reach. His capitulation to Trump is dangerous but it is also hitting the value of the WAPO hard right now. His billions come from Amazon. As the cliché goes, make him an offer he can't refuse.
Why would Bezos want to sell at any price? He has an instrument that can influence national politics. Maybe he'll look around for more conservative reporters; there are plenty of journalists out there who need work.
Unrelated to the deference to billionaires, the Post wasn’t alive for the run ups to the WMD and incubator baby false flags, the Guatemalan or East Tumor genocides, and their origins in the School Of The Americas, to create the process of moving companies like Halliburton into the DOW and establish the ladder for building billionaires on barbarity. It’s always been a local neo liberal rag that’s calibrated its coverage to censor the CIA crimes funded by Langley’s black budgets and finds itself in Washington crosshairs as its turns inward with blowback.
What ever happened to anti-trust regulation and when did it not matter that billionaires were buying and owning all of everything, including press, healthcare, food distribution, farms, oil, mail, transportation industries, foreign interests, technology.....
Deregulation, for one. Ronald Reagan started it and President Clinton finished it, but there was a time when one could not own more than a certain number of TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers all in one location. Deregulation, which gave rise to, among other problems, syndicated, and cheaply produced, right wing, talk-hate radio.
Yes- and now we know who the players are and how the system has been abused and manipulated. It is time to stop the abuse and demand accountability. There is so much work and even more organization and effort needed to restore our democracy.
I think maybe so -if not, she is certainly among the last. She is an invaluable asset that Dems should protect and keep in some capacity to help save this nation. She has tremendous insight, raw knowledge about the workings from the inside, fortitude and a moral compass that is pointed in the right direction. No matter what it takes she should be factored into leadership for whatever remains in 4 years. That means protecting and using her now to begin to formulate a plan and be part of whatever team building goes on behind the scene.
Thank you, Mr. Buttar. I read the article you shared with us. While I am not in lockstep agreement with the statements made about America’s “healthcare” (disease-management) system, because they tend to be supposition relating to the so-called “lifesaving care” supposedly being denied our country, whose inhabitants ideally would stop smoking, stop drinking alcohol and toxic carbonated beverages, stop consuming many pounds of sugar yearly and stop feasting like vultures on rotting animal flesh, and stop failing to exercise on a consistent basis, I do agree that any real form of democracy in the United States has not existed for a long time.
This sounds so vile and judgmental. Obviously eating healthy and exercising are important, but it's not as if no one would ever need medical care if they took perfect care of their bodies. Unrestrained capitalism is a big part of why food is so messed up in the United States in terms of what's available and the amounts of sugar and other purposely addictive chemicals in it. Same with the lack of time/energy/space to exercise consistently, have healthy sleep schedules or stress management.
Healthcare workers are always telling patients to eat better, exercise more, quit smoking or drinking (which people are already do less of), but there's a big problem of people having their health concerns ignored or untreated because of body shape discrimination.
There are bigger systems in play here, not some intrinsic quality that makes people in the USA worse at personal care habits. Have some compassion please.
Really? I have NEVER required more than truly minor medical attention my entire life. While an element of luck is involved with one’s good health, science makes it amply evident that a healthful diet and regular exercise are essential for wellbeing, which, as you surely must be aware is not a recent discovery.
While I concur with some of your assertions, others seem to rest mainly in the realm of wishful thinking or opinion. For instance, I have accompanied my mother to many of her medical appointments over the years and NEVER did any of the so-called healthcare workers suggest she alter her diet. In fact, it was SHE who recommended various books by wellness writers with medical credentials to THEM. Moreover, anytime someone told me they had a serious medical condition and/or surgery after a heart attack or stroke I asked them if any of the so-called healthcare workers and MDs ever recommended that person X change their diet. Their replies were always the same - NO. While there is an abundance of excellent health-related information available online and in bookstores, sadly, most seem to live their lives oblivious to all of it.
While systemic issues are indeed a large part of the problem, so is willful ignorance and acting in an irresponsible way. No one is forced to smoke, vape, drink alcohol, sugar water sodas, highly-processed food, vulture food etc. yet this is precisely how most choose to conduct their lives. Subsequently, it can hardly be surprising if one’s health deteriorates in a dismaying way.
I feel sorry for anyone who may fall into ill health as did my late father through a tainted blood transfusion, and wish everyone could be in excellent health as am I. Caring about one’s wellbeing to make the right choices is a prerequisite.
Sorry for that rant but I've been on a special diet for years for my GI health, and I still had to go to the hospital three times this fall despite doing everything right. I'm recovering from having my sigmoid colon surgically removed a few weeks ago. People get sick. Some people will always be fat. It's not a moral failing.
I listen to the Pivot podcast, hosted by Kara Swisher (tech journalist) and Scott Galloway (millionaire investor). They discussed her plan to build a group of investors to buy WaPo. Kara’s wife just quit her WaPo editing job. I dumped WaPo and NYT in the election runup because I hated their obvious bias. I’m feeling hopeful that Kara can pull it off. The discussion included the observation that best practices for investors group is to place the $$ in a trust and stay out of day to day decisions. It would be great if they also took the internet seriously. I don’t think most print newspapers can survive economically. And especially after this election, corporate media in print and tv took a huge well deserved hit.
I'm a wrinkly. I remember our first telephone - we were still asking the operator to connect us to the 4 or 5 digit alpha-numeric number we gave them. I was too small to make calls but I listened to my mother's calls to the local grocer as she placed her weekly grocery order. That's how I knew what we would be eating that week (always interested in food). By the time I was old enough to place calls we were probably on our second version of a dial-up phone. We. had no local paper only a regional one based in our nearest city Newark NJ. (paper no longer exists replaced by a different outfit) By now my home town may have a local news feed - but I bet it is online.. It's a toss-up: razing forests for newsprint, or burning fuel for telecommunication.
None of this matters. Only what kind of information any news organization provides.
Looking back I'm sure the Newark News leaned Republican or my father would not have subscribed. I was reading adult stuff early but mostly headlines. Another branch of my family subscribed to magazines like Life and during the Pacific campaign they published pictures of naval battles and landings like Iwo Jima. One picture I've never been able to forget - an artists rendering of a battle on a Pacific Island with jungle and steep hillsides. The artist showed a scene of dead Japanese soldiers tumbling down the hillside weapons abandoned . I knew they were Japanese by their slits for eyes - the universal depiction of that enemy. Nothing I had seen before so starkly portrayed the truth of death in war.
Now we get vistas of endless bomb destruction and know that most death in war is delivered from a distance; the soldiers cannot actually see their targets . Drones and smart bombs shield them from the bodies, the former people, the mostly non-combatants. Media conspires to sanitize war. No more dead bodies tumbling down hills, just mounds of rags with the odd foot visible. Its hard to relate to mounds of rags - you need an active, informed imagination. and media does not provide the truth to fuel those imaginations.
Censorship, wherever, however delivered robs humanity of truth and turns us into proto slaves and zombies.
I apologize to my granddaughter for leaving her to grapple with these miserable excuses for human beings.
@Qasim, I can second your recommendation for Ground News - very valuable resource for dissecting what's published by the broader media, including international sources, and the bias / factuality flagging is very very helpful. Well worth the subscription cost, and certainly a better use of funding than paying for sanewashing oligarch vomit.
Great post! It is disturbing to watch news outlets undermine their own legitimacy, along with that of whatever passes for democracy. I wrote a post last week exploring similar themes, noting that “Many voices would claim that the source of these nightmares coming to fruition is the right wing, and a president-elect willing to demonize his critics. That might seem like a satisfying analysis, but it is unfortunately inaccurate.” https://open.substack.com/pub/shahidbuttar/p/strap-in?r=97w99&utm_medium=ios
Support your recommendation for Ground News. Good call.
Who hates billionaires?
Between issues like this (WP isn't alone—for just a couple of examples, Breitbart/Huffpost are both owned by the same folks so they're playing to both extremes while raking in the cash and having zero moral compass, and LA Times owner also ditched having a presidential endorsement in 2024) and Zuck getting rid of fact-checking, the future of vetted, verifiable information is looking pretty bleak.
I didn't realize Brietbart and Huffpost have the same owners. That's news to me. And deeply disturbing if true.
Turns out I was mistaken—they were both co-founded by Andrew Breitbart, but ownership has changed since his death. But, Vivek Ramaswamy did recently purchase a minority stake in BuzzFeed (around 8%) which was interesting to me. My apologies for any misinformation.
It is quite possible cartooning has been around forever. Maybe some cave paintings are really commentary cartoons?
Early graffiti can be found in archaeology settings. (probably political commentary?)
Medieval monks or the readers of their tomes, amused themselves with scurrilous marginalia. Paper/parchment was a very scarce, expensive commodity. Public expression of one's thoughts hard to come by.
Troubadours made up songs with sly lyrics mostly aimed at the upper crust and their misdeeds. (early versions of hip hop?)
In the early days, with low literacy, people still found ways to express themselves; depictions of erect and wayward penises are ancient and universal.
Suppression of human individuality is hard and costly work. Eventually the oligarchic moneybags run out of steam, or money. Regimes change, empires collapse. Good cartoons, witty graffiti become folklore; arise from their dusty tombs to poke us in the eyes.
This is so true. Think in our lifetime what has happened to other media brokers who are so powerful in one moment, and "not so much" the next: Father Coughlin; William Randolph Hearst; Arthur Godfrey; Walter Winchell, just to name four bastards. I really can't understand why greed and power corrupt so badly when everyone knows power is fleeting and, as for money, you can't take it with you.
Can't take it with you but one can pass it on to one's spoiled, privileged, misbegotten heirs and maybe fuel a dynasty of corrupt and greedy fools.
True, but it doesn't happen so much in real life as it does in fiction. I can't really point to any rotten media dynasty, can you?
Oh, wait, except the Murdochs, but the old man is still alive and no one really knows what will happen when he dies.
What amazes me is that Bezos got the Washington Post for a mere $250 million. While that is way out of my league and most people’s league, I don’t understand why some of our more progressive millionaires or even the staff didn’t organize to buy it.
I don't know much about her politics or whether the Silicon Valley milieu she's worked in rubbed off on her, but Kara Swisher is trying to put together a coalition to buy the WaPo.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/kara-swisher-on-why-she-wants-to-buy-the-washington-post.html
Thank you!
Yeah in the grand scheme of things, $250M to Bezos is just not that much money.
Nor to George Soros. Or the Patriotic Millionaires. I just sent them this message: I just sent this message to Patriotic Millionaires (a progressive group): Why don't some of your members team up and buy The Washington Post from Bezos. He got it for only $250 million. Obviously, for most of us, that is far out of reach, but this should be within your collective reach. His capitulation to Trump is dangerous but it is also hitting the value of the WAPO hard right now. His billions come from Amazon. As the cliché goes, make him an offer he can't refuse.
Why would Bezos want to sell at any price? He has an instrument that can influence national politics. Maybe he'll look around for more conservative reporters; there are plenty of journalists out there who need work.
I subscribe to Ground News too.
awesomeness.
Ironically, her cartoon, which Bezos suppressed, has likely been seen by far more people than it ever would have been if WaPo had just published it.
Brainy subversion of the status quo oft times goes viral!
Yep. The Streisand Effect in full force.
I can't seem to upgrade to paid. Payment options don't come up. Can anyone help me?
Email me at qasim.rashid@gmail.com and I'll get Substack tech support to help resolve. Sorry about that, and thank you for your support!
Unrelated to the deference to billionaires, the Post wasn’t alive for the run ups to the WMD and incubator baby false flags, the Guatemalan or East Tumor genocides, and their origins in the School Of The Americas, to create the process of moving companies like Halliburton into the DOW and establish the ladder for building billionaires on barbarity. It’s always been a local neo liberal rag that’s calibrated its coverage to censor the CIA crimes funded by Langley’s black budgets and finds itself in Washington crosshairs as its turns inward with blowback.
What ever happened to anti-trust regulation and when did it not matter that billionaires were buying and owning all of everything, including press, healthcare, food distribution, farms, oil, mail, transportation industries, foreign interests, technology.....
What will happen to Lina Kahn and the FTC?
Deregulation, for one. Ronald Reagan started it and President Clinton finished it, but there was a time when one could not own more than a certain number of TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers all in one location. Deregulation, which gave rise to, among other problems, syndicated, and cheaply produced, right wing, talk-hate radio.
Yes- and now we know who the players are and how the system has been abused and manipulated. It is time to stop the abuse and demand accountability. There is so much work and even more organization and effort needed to restore our democracy.
Feels like Lina Khan is the one thread of integrity left in the federal government.
I think maybe so -if not, she is certainly among the last. She is an invaluable asset that Dems should protect and keep in some capacity to help save this nation. She has tremendous insight, raw knowledge about the workings from the inside, fortitude and a moral compass that is pointed in the right direction. No matter what it takes she should be factored into leadership for whatever remains in 4 years. That means protecting and using her now to begin to formulate a plan and be part of whatever team building goes on behind the scene.
Thank you, Mr. Buttar. I read the article you shared with us. While I am not in lockstep agreement with the statements made about America’s “healthcare” (disease-management) system, because they tend to be supposition relating to the so-called “lifesaving care” supposedly being denied our country, whose inhabitants ideally would stop smoking, stop drinking alcohol and toxic carbonated beverages, stop consuming many pounds of sugar yearly and stop feasting like vultures on rotting animal flesh, and stop failing to exercise on a consistent basis, I do agree that any real form of democracy in the United States has not existed for a long time.
This sounds so vile and judgmental. Obviously eating healthy and exercising are important, but it's not as if no one would ever need medical care if they took perfect care of their bodies. Unrestrained capitalism is a big part of why food is so messed up in the United States in terms of what's available and the amounts of sugar and other purposely addictive chemicals in it. Same with the lack of time/energy/space to exercise consistently, have healthy sleep schedules or stress management.
Healthcare workers are always telling patients to eat better, exercise more, quit smoking or drinking (which people are already do less of), but there's a big problem of people having their health concerns ignored or untreated because of body shape discrimination.
There are bigger systems in play here, not some intrinsic quality that makes people in the USA worse at personal care habits. Have some compassion please.
Really? I have NEVER required more than truly minor medical attention my entire life. While an element of luck is involved with one’s good health, science makes it amply evident that a healthful diet and regular exercise are essential for wellbeing, which, as you surely must be aware is not a recent discovery.
While I concur with some of your assertions, others seem to rest mainly in the realm of wishful thinking or opinion. For instance, I have accompanied my mother to many of her medical appointments over the years and NEVER did any of the so-called healthcare workers suggest she alter her diet. In fact, it was SHE who recommended various books by wellness writers with medical credentials to THEM. Moreover, anytime someone told me they had a serious medical condition and/or surgery after a heart attack or stroke I asked them if any of the so-called healthcare workers and MDs ever recommended that person X change their diet. Their replies were always the same - NO. While there is an abundance of excellent health-related information available online and in bookstores, sadly, most seem to live their lives oblivious to all of it.
While systemic issues are indeed a large part of the problem, so is willful ignorance and acting in an irresponsible way. No one is forced to smoke, vape, drink alcohol, sugar water sodas, highly-processed food, vulture food etc. yet this is precisely how most choose to conduct their lives. Subsequently, it can hardly be surprising if one’s health deteriorates in a dismaying way.
I feel sorry for anyone who may fall into ill health as did my late father through a tainted blood transfusion, and wish everyone could be in excellent health as am I. Caring about one’s wellbeing to make the right choices is a prerequisite.
Best wishes…
Sorry for that rant but I've been on a special diet for years for my GI health, and I still had to go to the hospital three times this fall despite doing everything right. I'm recovering from having my sigmoid colon surgically removed a few weeks ago. People get sick. Some people will always be fat. It's not a moral failing.
I listen to the Pivot podcast, hosted by Kara Swisher (tech journalist) and Scott Galloway (millionaire investor). They discussed her plan to build a group of investors to buy WaPo. Kara’s wife just quit her WaPo editing job. I dumped WaPo and NYT in the election runup because I hated their obvious bias. I’m feeling hopeful that Kara can pull it off. The discussion included the observation that best practices for investors group is to place the $$ in a trust and stay out of day to day decisions. It would be great if they also took the internet seriously. I don’t think most print newspapers can survive economically. And especially after this election, corporate media in print and tv took a huge well deserved hit.
I'm a wrinkly. I remember our first telephone - we were still asking the operator to connect us to the 4 or 5 digit alpha-numeric number we gave them. I was too small to make calls but I listened to my mother's calls to the local grocer as she placed her weekly grocery order. That's how I knew what we would be eating that week (always interested in food). By the time I was old enough to place calls we were probably on our second version of a dial-up phone. We. had no local paper only a regional one based in our nearest city Newark NJ. (paper no longer exists replaced by a different outfit) By now my home town may have a local news feed - but I bet it is online.. It's a toss-up: razing forests for newsprint, or burning fuel for telecommunication.
None of this matters. Only what kind of information any news organization provides.
Looking back I'm sure the Newark News leaned Republican or my father would not have subscribed. I was reading adult stuff early but mostly headlines. Another branch of my family subscribed to magazines like Life and during the Pacific campaign they published pictures of naval battles and landings like Iwo Jima. One picture I've never been able to forget - an artists rendering of a battle on a Pacific Island with jungle and steep hillsides. The artist showed a scene of dead Japanese soldiers tumbling down the hillside weapons abandoned . I knew they were Japanese by their slits for eyes - the universal depiction of that enemy. Nothing I had seen before so starkly portrayed the truth of death in war.
Now we get vistas of endless bomb destruction and know that most death in war is delivered from a distance; the soldiers cannot actually see their targets . Drones and smart bombs shield them from the bodies, the former people, the mostly non-combatants. Media conspires to sanitize war. No more dead bodies tumbling down hills, just mounds of rags with the odd foot visible. Its hard to relate to mounds of rags - you need an active, informed imagination. and media does not provide the truth to fuel those imaginations.
Censorship, wherever, however delivered robs humanity of truth and turns us into proto slaves and zombies.
I apologize to my granddaughter for leaving her to grapple with these miserable excuses for human beings.
Print newspapers are especially important on the local level, but they're struggling hard.
@Qasim, I can second your recommendation for Ground News - very valuable resource for dissecting what's published by the broader media, including international sources, and the bias / factuality flagging is very very helpful. Well worth the subscription cost, and certainly a better use of funding than paying for sanewashing oligarch vomit.
Always encouraging to see user testimony! It's been a valuable asset for sure.
Great post! It is disturbing to watch news outlets undermine their own legitimacy, along with that of whatever passes for democracy. I wrote a post last week exploring similar themes, noting that “Many voices would claim that the source of these nightmares coming to fruition is the right wing, and a president-elect willing to demonize his critics. That might seem like a satisfying analysis, but it is unfortunately inaccurate.” https://open.substack.com/pub/shahidbuttar/p/strap-in?r=97w99&utm_medium=ios
Thanks for sharing, Shahid.
Anyone else think that cartoon is … boring?
I think it is now officially the Streisand effect. More people have seen it now than ever would have seen it if it were published as normal.
Absolutely! I saw this 2 days ago,and felt repulsed. Thank you for spreading the truth.
Thanks for your support!