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Though often mistaken for one because it doesn’t toe any single ideological line, Byline Times has never been a ‘centrist’ paper – and this year of elections, which have shown the vulnerability of liberal democracies in Europe and the US, have also exposed the weakness of centrism.
If your principles are just an average of the political and social sentiment of the day, then you’re always going to be prey to normalisation – narratives that make extremes seem central. That’s why we are committed to the opposite: pluralism – which highlights the non-average and tries to explore issues and amplify voices that others ignore.
The idea of pluralism affects everything we publish – whether it’s untold scandals, the variety within an individual’s identity, grassroots movements, or fact-based investigation – because we believe it provides us with a better, more accurate, picture of the world. Pluralism permits us to remain sceptical but not cynical; to change our minds when events demand change. Like the fable of the reed and the oak, it allows us to survive the storms when more rigid structures break.
The political culture of America since the re-election of Donald Trump is an abject object lesson in the media’s capitulation to extremes. We saw this before the 5 November vote, when the owner of The Washington Post – which coined the motto ‘democracy dies in darkness’ during Trump’s first term – spiked an editorial endorsing Kamala Haris. Since then, billionaire Jeff Bezos has spoken warmly of Trump and is reportedly intending to donate $1 million to his inaugural fund.
Likewise, the owner of the LA Times, billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, also spiked the paper’s normal endorsement of a presidential candidate. Since Trump’s election victory, Soon-Shiong has taken a “number of previously unreported steps” designed to reduce Trump-related commentary and “required” the editorial board to email him “the text of every editorial and the name of its writer”.
The fear rife among American commentators and journalists is not without reason. Trump and his acolytes have made it clear that they intend to harry and punish any media organisation that covers them critically. The ABC network backed down on a weak libel case and paid Trump’s campaign $15 million. Even pollsters, who deal with data rather than defamation, are in the firing line, with Trump planning to sue Iowan pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register newspaper for publishing a poll days before the election that projected Kamala Harris had a 3% lead in the state, which Trump went on to win by 13%.
Even without any mention of ‘Musk’, there could be few better illustrations of the dangers of oligarch-owned media, and its imperative – for commercial reasons – to ‘obey in advance’.
As Marc Elias had observed in Democracy Docket, “not… all legacy media has given in to Trump. But enough have, including too many owners, that it affects the overall effectiveness of the industry… Trump is a master at leveraging the legacy media’s need for news with his ability to provide access to it… A weakened legacy media, with greater pressures on it, is simply no match for an emboldened Trump”.
Cosy Connections and Corporate Comms
The British press was already much more partisan than the US newspaper market and, with hedge fund owner and GB News backer Sir Paul Marshall’s takeover of The Spectator this year, it has shifted significantly to the right. As Hardeep Matharu notes in the editorial of the January Byline Times print edition, the worrying sight of Labour politicians and ‘liberal democrat’ journalists attending the Spectator’s recent annual parliamentarian awards, raises the issue of how “truly living one’s values and doing what is comfortable are different decisions”.
Meanwhile, the sale by the Guardian’s Scott Trust of its 253-year-old Sunday newspaper, the Observer to the small and relatively unknown company, Tortoise Media, is another worrying sign that the centre cannot hold against the onslaught of right-wing populism. The deal was rushed through by the trust, despite protests from nearly all its previous editors and strike action by Observer and Guardian staff.
James Harding, the new Editor-in-chief – and formerly Editor of The Times and Director of BBC News – has a reputation as a liberal centrist. But when challenged about how he would maintain the Observer beyond his initial investment, Harding told staff “There’s money behind money”.
And herein lies the problem. Ever since tech giants such as Google and Facebook hoovered up the ad revenues which made independent journalism viable, the reliance on funding of high net-worth individuals and big corporations has compromised journalism’s ability to hold them to account.
The commercial realities of media mean, as Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr has exposed in these pages, that his existing media operation, Tortoise, which lost £4 million last year, seems to be overly reliant on corporate partnerships – especially with connections to fossil fuels and international business.
We are in danger of returning to a form of captive concierge media, which has more in common with paid-for lobbying or public relations, laundering reputation and policy through its pages – seeking to influence readers rather than represent them.
A Mega Murdoch: Musk Marks a Turning Point
I came into journalism 12 years ago by writing about dangers of the Rupert Murdoch, how he used his overbearing position in British media to change legislation in his favour, and how his ‘free market’ ideology masked a captive, uncompetitive approach of ‘gaming the ref’ and using his media might to further his business not by holding politicians to account, but by holding them hostage.
However, in my 2012 book The Fall of the House of Murdoch, I warned that the looming tech monopolies of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple would make Murdoch’s monopolies look like small fry: “The News Corp story is a historic object lesson in the combined abuse of economic and political power. As new media monopolies – from Facebook and Google to Amazon – form before our eyes, the lesson it provides is even more salutary for the future.”
And so it came to pass.
A decade or more on and Murdoch’s Newscorp is valued at $16 billion while Elon Musk burned at least double that amount by purchasing Twitter – the foremost journalist social media platform in the world – and turning it into a propaganda weapon to help re-elect Donald Trump, secure a major place in his administration, and turn his focus to Europe where he promotes the activities of the far-right in the UK and Germany. Musk has already recouped that outlay with a $100 billion rise in the value of his shares and could buy-out many Murdochs.
Musk, unlike Murdoch, doesn’t even pretend to believe in Thatcherite competition or free markets. He’s a self-declared monopolist, a ‘broligarch’ who happily inserts himself into government contracts and solicits state support to further both his commercial and ideological interests.
The impact of this new political-media system has already crossed the Atlantic. Musk’s X was a major vehicle of the disinformation that fomented the anti-refugee and Islamophobic violence which exploded in our cities this summer and has claimed that civil war is “inevitable” in the UK because of its tolerance towards migrants and different religious backgrounds.
Now Musk seeks to institutionalise his threat to our multicultural society by extending his funding directly to a political party. Reform UK’s Leader Nigel Farage recently met with Musk, and according to the Financial Times, its treasurer Nick Candy said that the Tesla and X owner is among several billionaires ready to raise more funds than “any other political party” to create “political disruption like we have never seen before”.
If the events of this summer are anything to go by, that ‘disruption’ could be violent, racist, and deeply corrosive to the safety of British citizens, and our precious-won tolerance of difference in one of the most successful multi-ethnic societies in Europe.
Faced with this threat, what has the Labour Government doing? According to The Observer, nothing. Ministers have said they won’t tighten up the electoral laws to prevent Musk from donating hundreds of millions to the Reform Party because it might “backfire and hand Farage the chance to claim that Reform UK was being sabotaged by the establishment.”
The cornerstone of any democracy is that politicians are held accountable by the people who vote for them. Farage is actively soliciting money from an even more powerful establishment – a coterie of foreign billionaires and global elites. He is sabotaging the UK by proving his party is accountable to oligarchs who don’t even live here.
Throughout his Leave EU and Brexit Party PayPal funding, Farage has constantly broken the spirit and sometimes the letter of our electoral law. Reform UK is actually a limited company controlled by Nigel Farage — in both form and content it is an authoritarian vehicle — and Labour is bestowing on it the same privileges as normal democratic parties. By doing so, it is according legitimacy to a party that delegitimises our laws.
Thus we end the year with liberal democracies across the world under threat through the continuing march of the oligarchs, and our institutions bamboozled into tolerating intolerance.
If the centrists cannot hold, what’s the hope for the rest of us?