A Disapproval Matrix of Billionaires Ruining the Media

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A Disapproval Matrix of Billionaires Ruining the Media

NEVER PICK A fight, the saying used to go, with anyone who buys ink by the barrel. That was the press, back when journalism used actual, you know, presses. Can you imagine?!

Then, nobody needed ink anymore. We use bandwidth now—like, right now, if you are reading this, which you are, for now—and compete furiously for eyeballs, which would have been a disgusting thing to say 15 years ago.

But all the way back to the barrels-full-of-ink days, one thing was true: If you were a wealthy person, you could buy your own press and influence your own news. For just about every example of a rich dude—really, it’s almost always dudes—who decides it’d be fun to run a news organization, another one is running one into the ground. The Thiel Disruption is a new wrinkle: how a venture capitalist discovered that he could nuisance-sue a news organization into oblivion. Innovative!

The worst part is the sad emptiness of the northwest quadrant of our carefully researched (ahem) chart. Why can’t a billionovative disruptonnaire figure out how to save the press by leaving it the hell alone?

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https://www.wired.com/2016/06/disapprov ... ing-media/

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