Mother Jones illustration; ZUMA (4)
When the US targeted Russia’s oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine, the trail of assets kept leading to our own backyard. Not only had our nation become a haven for shady foreign money, but we were also incubating a familiar class of yacht-owning, industry-dominating, resource-extracting billionaires. In the January + February 2024 issue of our magazine, we investigate the rise of American Oligarchy—and what it means for the rest of us. You can read all the pieces here.
Back in 1983, journalist Ben Bagdikian published a book called The Media Monopoly. Fifty companies, he reported, owned the majority of US newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. It made quite a stir: So few entities had such control of the news Americans relied on?
Like so many things that once were shocking, his critique now seems quaint. Fifty major media companies? We could only hope for such diversified ownership. By 2004, Bagdikian released an updated edition showing that the number of mega–media companies had shrunk to five. Another 20 years later, descendants of those five—Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney, News Corp (a.k.a. Rupert Murdoch), Paramount, and Bertelsmann—still hold a lot of sway. But there’s a new Big Five that shape our information ecosystem in ways more powerful than any publisher or broadcaster ever did. Apple, Amazon, Google/Alphabet, Facebook/Meta, and Microsoft can and do change our news diet with the flip of a switch. When Mark Zuckerberg decided to throttle news on Facebook, 3 billion users suddenly saw a fraction of the articles that had shown up in their feeds before.
A few years ago, seemingly every article about how to save journalism began by recounting how platforms had sucked all the ad revenue from publishers and ended with some gallows humor along the lines of “the business model is: get bought by a billionaire.” It was said in envy of the news organizations—the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Atlantic—that had found a Medici. But also in despair of the fact that the only other option seemed to involve getting stripped for parts by a hedge fund. (Or, for that matter, finding a billionaire Medici and then being gutted or sold to a hedge fund.)
When a handful of players dominate a marketplace, that’s an oligopoly. When a handful of players dominate political power, that’s oligarchy. In the media industry both are converging: Control of media is political control, because media shapes how people experience the issues that dominate politics. If you see nonstop headlines about how trans people are a danger to your children, or how a strong economy is actually terrible—or if you simply never see any trustworthy news at all, but your feeds are swamped with conspiracies—that has a dramatic impact on society.
Corporate hegemony among the companies that produce news is bad enough—it’s how the spectrum of acceptable debate is reduced to “MSNBC on the left to Fox News on the right.” But now we also depend on a tiny number of players to distribute our news. Tech oligarchs might manipulate your feed to serve you more ads, to avoid political backlash, or (in the case of Elon Musk) to actively reward disinformation and extremism. The effect is the same: You don’t see what they don’t choose to show you.
One thing that oligarch-curated feeds almost never show you is news about oligarchy itself. Or rather, it’s reduced to paparazzi-style coverage of gazillionaires’ megayachts, palaces, weddings, and cage-match challenges. That’s because oligarchs have a vested interest in keeping the levels of (and the levers of) their power hidden from public view. Americans are generally sour about income inequality and “elites” for sure. But that ire is often shapeless at best, and weaponized into racist conspiracies at worst.
American oligarchy, Tim Murphy writes in this issue’s lead essay, “offers a twist on the pilfering of the commons that produced Russia’s. It is built on a different kind of resource, not nickel or potash, but you—your data, your attention, your money, your public square…This world ropes you in with its yachts and private jets, but the story of American oligarchy is not just about the spoils. It’s about what everyone else is losing in the process.”
Perhaps no one else demonstrated this equation better than Jeff Bezos, who—upon disembarking from the tumescent craft that took him up to the stratosphere—thanked Amazon workers and customers because “you guys paid for all of this.” It was the appreciation that a timber baron has for redwoods, the inert resource whose exploitation he perfected.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the Biden administration started sanctioning oligarchs who helped Putin fleece the Russian economy. But despite some schadenfreude-inducing yacht seizures, these efforts have had limited success, for a grimly simple reason: The financial instruments oligarchs use to stash their riches are no longer only found “offshore” in places like the Cayman Islands or Switzerland, but in Sioux Falls and Dover. Our banks, our law firms, our real estate companies, our legislators are all complicit.
“We talk all the time about Putin and his oligarchic friends,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders told Tim in an interview. “But for obvious reasons we don’t talk about oligarchy in the United States.” The time has come to talk about it, which is why we chose to create a special Mother Jones issue 100 percent dedicated to exactly this: how American oligarchy operates, and the toll it takes on everybody else. Literally everyone in our newsroom participated—reporting stories, digging up data, creating an entirely new magazine design to tie it all together. And in a larger sense, this project involved every one of you, our readers, who sustain our independent, fearless journalism with your subscriptions and donations. The reason Mother Jones can shine a light on oligarchs is that we are not owned by one.
Top image: Mother Jones illustration; Imago via ZUMA; Cecilia Fabiano/LaPresse/ZUMA; Niall Carson/PA Wire/ZUMA; Sarah Silbiger/CNP/ZUMA
