“This is a moment of real definition for the press,” Folkenflik states. The swelling music indicates that these are the Davids who will bring down the Goliaths that stride across the American media landscape. In the end, Nobody Speak devolves into a kitschy paean to journalistic heroism. These countries also have a much lower Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality) than the United States. The World Press Freedom index lists Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark as countries with the freest press, while the United States is ranked at an embarrassing 43. It should be no surprise, then, that income inequality is strongly correlated with freedom of the press. Trump rode his way to the presidency in part by taking the “dishonest media” to task. What he did in financing the suits against Gawker was a kind of adversarial stance and attack that was sheathed from public view.” And all of this comes amidst a historic rise in distrust of and hostility toward the press on the part of the American public itself.
As NPR’s David Folkenflik states in the documentary, “Peter Thiel’s decision to get involved was of a different order. It’s hard to escape the sense that empowered members of the one percent are spending their buckets of money to remake the media in their preferred image. The very idea of media as a public service has long been in decline, with television news networks bowing before the demands of advertisers and Donald Trump threatening to eliminate funding for public broadcasting. A billionaire Republican donor, Frank VanderSloot, nearly bankrupted Mother Jones. Fancy sportswear mogul Peter Barbey bought the Village Voice in 2015, whose union he is now reportedly in the process of destroying. Jared Kushner, son of a wealthy New Jersey developer and son-in-law to a wealthy New York developer-turned-president of the United States, owns the New York Observer. The Wall Street Journal is in the grips of Rupert Murdoch. He suggests that our new Gilded Age has seen the return not only of monopolization and astronomic inequality, but also outsized oligarchical influence over the media, whether it’s an envelope-pushing website, a storied newspaper, or something in between.Īmazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post-and while he has promised not to interfere with the paper’s coverage, that promise is, of course, dependent on the whims of Jeff Bezos. After the purchase, it was reported that Adelson barred reporters from writing stories about him and that stories about Adelson’s business deals were either killed or heavily edited.īy linking these two seemingly disparate cases, Knappenberger argues that the media story of our time isn’t about the destruction of a single news organization (Gawker) or the takeover of another ( Review-Journal).
It was Review-Journal reporters themselves who uncovered their new owner: the billionaire casino magnate and Republican heavyweight donor Sheldon Adelson.
The film viscerally illustrates the division between billionaires like Thiel and the rest of us. Audio shows Michael Schroeder, the man who helped facilitate the deal, being pressed by the staff to reveal the new owner, to which he fumblingly responds, “We really don’t think … they want you to focus on your job.” In January 2016, the paper was mysteriously bought by an anonymous entity-even Review-Journal staffers were kept in the dark. Knappenberger underscores this idea by dedicating the final third of his documentary not to Gawker, but to another media company: the Las Vegas Review-Journal. This can be corporations.” By opening with the comically enormous hold on Daulerio’s bank account, the film viscerally illustrates the division between billionaires like Thiel and the rest of us. As Floyd Abrams, a lawyer specializing in the First Amendment, says in the documentary, what Thiel has done is to “potentially imperil entities who upset large, rich, powerful people and institutions. The story of Gawker’s murder boils down to the fact that a very, very rich man was able to destroy a publication he disliked with impunity. But as Nobody Speak points out, these are mere details.
0 kommentar(er)
