Government by Media

You can only burst a bubble when you have seen it

A tiny number of mega-corporations and billionaire individuals own and control pretty much all of the information flows on the planet. TV news channels, international newspapers, local newspapers, local TV stations, the scientific publishing process, Hollywood, the social media platforms, the production of educational resources, radio stations, major book publishers. All of it. It doesn’t matter whether it is a local newspaper in small-town America, a local TV station in Brazil, a fashion magazine in Canada, a national news channel in Germany, the materials your kids are studying at school or the results of search that you type into your computer. The same small handful of people control it.

It is easy to verify that this is a fact, and below I shall do so.

But first I’ll start with a story. In the 19th century, a small group of powerful men in Britain came together to form and run ‘The Cecil Rhodes Society’. Those men were Cecil Rhodes himself, Reginald Brett (Lord Esher), Arthur Balfour, and an influential newspaper editor named William Stead.¹ That this group was involved in everything from formulating British policy on Ireland, Palestine and India, and for establishing the Council on Foreign Relations and the League of Nations, we can leave for another day, or another forum. What is I will focus on here is that William Stead was an advocate of what he called ‘government by journalism’. He also travelled to the U.S.A. to teach that principle to media mogul William Randolph Hearst, whose family still control a significant portion of the media today. Historian Carroll Quigley, chronicling the history of the ‘Rhodes Group´ (and even their family predecessors in British power circles) noted that they based their vision and aspirations on “a triple-front penetration into politics, education and journalism… shielded as much as possible from public attention”.² Keep all that in mind as we proceed.

In the early 21st century, we live in a virtual reality created by an unimaginably vast, complex and 'interested' web of communications technologies and organisations. This brings with it one of the great paradoxes of our time: While almost everybody builds their understanding of world events almost entirely on these sources, they simultaneously, and regularly, assert that 'the media is full of lies'. Clearly there is some cognitive dissonance going on. It is time to take a look at some of the facts of the global media machine.

Unprecedented in all of history, it comprises seven big media conglomerates and three big tech. platforms. The reach of the seven media giants³ alone spans every continent and a breath-taking number of the world's newspapers, television stations, radio channels, movie studios, online information sources, publishing houses and education resources. It is not easy to be precise about what they own because are constantly buying and selling their assets. Since they are generally buying and selling their assets to each other however, the overall situation changes little. Below is a just a small sample of the media, online and education assets that these seven own or control or have recently owned or controlled:

TELEVISION AND RADIO. International: CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Sky News, NBC, CBS TV, CBS Radio, Telemundo (U.S., Mexico, Latin America), ABC Television Group, The History Channel, The Discovery Channel (which alone reaches 431 million homes in 170 countries). Radio Television Luxembourg (which operates scores of television channels and radio channels across Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Netherlands and Turkey. In Brazil: a major stake in TV Globo which reaches 98% of the population. In the U.S.: dozens of local and regional TV station and various cable networks. In Australia: Channel 10, Fox 8 and MTV. In New Zealand: Bravo, ThreeNow, The Edge TV and The Breeze TV. In Argentina: Canal 11Buenos Aires, Canal 8 Córdoba, Canal 5 Rosario, Canal 8 Mar del Plata, Canal 9 Bahía Blanca, Canal 7 Neuquén, Canal 11 Salta, Canal 13 Santa Fe, and Canal 8 Tucumán. In the UK: The Smithsonian Channel, Talk Radio, Talkback Television, Thames Television. In Spain: La Sexta, Antena 3, Europa FM. MOVIE INDUSTRY. Cinemax, Warner Brothers, HBO, CastleRock Entertainment Fox Movies, Universal Pictures, Dreamworks, Working Title Pictures, Universal Studios, Touchstone Pictures, Pixar, 20^th Century Studios, Black Rock Studio, Hollywood Pictures, 21^st Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Miramax. TriStar, Sony Picture Classics. NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES. Time Magazine, Time Life Magazine, National Geographic, Watch!, Marvel Comics, The Financial Times, The Daily Mail (UK), The Times (UK), The Economist, FT China, Wall Street Journal, Australian Associated Press, New South Wales Daily Telegraph, South Australia Sunday Mail (as well as literally hundreds of other Australian newspapers) French newspaper Les Echos, Spanish economic journal Recoletos, Discover Magazine, Horse & Hound, Marie Claire, Women's Weekly, and many others. ONLINE INFORMATION SOURCES: Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Ted Talks, About.com, HowStuffWorks.com, Immedia, Disney Internet Channel, and Boing Boing (operating in Africa, Spain, Italy and France as well as across the USA). PUBLISHING HOUSES: Harper Collins, Simon and Schuster, Random House, Penguin, Penguin-Randomhouse India, Penguin-Randomhouse South Africa, Penguin-Randomhouse New Zealand, Ballatine Books, Doubleday, Everyman's Library, Bantam books, Vermillion, Puffin Books, Puffin Canada, Transworld Ireland, C. Bertelsmann Verlag, Pelican Books, Vintage Books, Corgi Books, BBC books, Ebury Publishing, Virgin Books, Avery Publishing, William Heinemann. EDUCATION: Longman, Addison-Wesely, Ladybird Books, Behavoural Science Book Club, Early Childhood Teachers Club, Prentice-Hall, eCollege and global examination and testing giant Edexcel.

Google, Facebook and Twitter /X control to a massive degree what may be talked about and how, and whether it will trend or be buried. (We wait to see how different Twitter/X will be under Elon Musk). Google controls what we find and don't find when we search their platform on the internet, and to a far greater degree than most people have so far realised.⁴ Google also controls YouTube which now routinely deletes the accounts of people who say things they don't like – including for instance medical doctors offering their professional opinions. Facebook controls a large share of information flow, also restricting what can and can't be discussed. These platforms also control how much oxygen the emerging 'alternative' news sources get, and what they may or may not talk about if they don't want to be 'de-platformed'. Even what is left after this big nine have taken their ever-expanding share is substantially controlled by a dozen or so billionaires and giant investment funds: Michael Bloomberg still controls Bloomberg L.P., Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, George Soros has a major (and growing) stake in the New York Times, the Rothschilds are still stake-holders in The Economist. Beyond that, six investment funds and two American power families⁵ control between them The Lancet, Elsevier scientific publishing - which publishes half a million scientific papers every year in more than 2,500 journals world-wide - the Spanish newspaper El Pais, and a string of Spanish radio and T.V. Stations, Die Welt, Politico, Reddit, Netflix, Forbes Magazine, Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, Wired, Teen Vogue, The New Yorker, Conde Nast Portfolio, Architectural Digest, USA Today, Cosmopolitan, Country Living, Elle, Esquire, Seventeen, Town&Country, Men's Health, Women's Health, Harper's Bazaar, Fitch Ratings, Netscape, as well as literally scores of state-level radio and TV stations and newspapers across the USA.

Every big media company in the USA except CBS shares a board director with at least one of the big pharmaceutical companies.⁶ Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia – one of the ten most visited websites in the world – has denounced that organisation's loss of objectivity, saying “what many media sources seem to assume is that there is only one legitimate, defensible version of the truth on any controversial question... if only one version of the facts is allowed then that gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful organisations to seize control of Wikipedia in order to shore up their power – and they do that”.⁷ And in the UK public opinion has even turned decisively against the BBC.⁸

Apparently, most people believe that the information which flows from this handful of giant interests, and the governments which form part of the same infrastructure, is broadly intended to inform them of the situation in which they are living. At least they behave as if they believe that. And if it turns to be a long way from the truth, it is a big deal. Really big. Big enough to call into question everything else which makes up the sense of orientation people have in the world.

1. See ‘The Anglo-American Establishment’, by historian Carroll Quigley, 1981

2. See ‘The Anglo-American Establishment’, by historian Carroll Quigley, 1981

3. AT&T/Time Warner, News Corporation, GE/Comcast, Disney, CBS/Viacom, Pearson, Bertelsmann.

4. See for example Dr. Robert Epstein’s ten-year project to produce conclusive evidence that Google have been involved, as well as in the subtle indoctrination of children, in swinging ‘undecided’ voters, in calculated way, to determine the outcome of elections.

5. Liberty Acquisition Holdings, Vanguard Group, BlackRock, Fortress Investment Group, KKR & Co. Inc., IWM Hong Kong, and the American Newhouse and Hearst Families. Many of media assets listed are under direct control of these entities, but some are indirect: Fortress controls New Media Investment Group, which controls Gannet Media, which owns more than 100 daily newspapers and more than 1000 weekly newspapers in 6 countries. (Vanguard also holds 17% of Gannet). KKR controls German media giant Axel Springer AG, which operates media assets in 40 countries (Politico and Die Welt are among those assets). Liberty Acquistion Holdings controls the Spanish Grupo Prisa, which owns El Pais and a string of Spanish radio and TV stations.

Of major importance, Elsevier scientific publishing, which controls the publication of half a million scientific papers in 2500 journals (including the prestigious 'Lancet') every year, is controlled by RELX, whose biggest shareholders are BlackRock, Bank of America Corporation and Capital Research Global Investors. Bank of America has as its biggest shareholders Vanguard, BlackRock and Berkshire Hathaway. Capital Research Global Investors has as it biggest shareholder Microsoft. Microsoft is controlled by Vanguard and BlackRock. BlackRock and Vanguard are also both significant shareholders in Comcast, TimeWarner and NewsCorp, as well as (with George Soros) the New York Times. Vanguard is likely the top of tree since it is also the biggest shareholder in BlackRock.

6. See report from Republic Broadcasting Network, March 22, 2017. This article references a video report from lawyer, television presenter, radio talk show host and writer Mike Papantonio (a man apparently accomplished enough to have been inducted into the American ‘Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame’). YouTube has now removed the video from its platform. Various other journalistic references to this overlap of board directors have also been removed from internet platforms.

7. See ‘Wikipedia co-founder: I no longer trust the website I created’, an interview with Larry Sanger on UnHerd T.V., July 2021.

8. The expression 'BBC Bias' has become common currency in recent years. Millions of British people have declined to continue paying television license fees which have long brought the organisation billions of pounds of revenue. In May 2021, thousands of people gathered outside the headquarters chanting 'Shame On You'. Large scale protests at the headquarters have continued in 2022 and 2023, though little-reported.