What a wondrous new era of free speech!
A muttering about the US media market - one that we think is really rather joyous:
On Thursday, the completion of the $8bn buyout of Paramount by Hollywood minnow Skydance Media marked a seismic shift in the US media landscape. Power is draining from old studios and legacy news networks to streamers and Substackers, and money for journalism is controlled by a new class of billionaires who have made it very clear that profit matters most.
How super. Someone interested in money will do what it takes to make money. When we’re talking about media that means they’ll provide the media they think we, the people, desire. If they’re not so providing they’ll keep experimenting until they are. Such are the dictates of profit maximisation - give the customer what they want.
We would also note that general truth which is that - in a market of course - media outlets chase what they perceive are the interests, opinions and prejudices of their target audience.
As opposed to what happened before in this description by The Observer:
Ellison has committed CBS News to reflecting “the varied ideological perspectives of American viewers”. With that in mind, he spent time last month at a media retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho, with Bari Weiss, a former New York Times writer who quit in 2020 to write a conservative Substack that morphed into the Free Press platform.
Only a generation ago, the Sun Valley retreat was a magnet for New York money and LA studio chiefs of broadly similar – and progressive – views, reliably offset by the maverick Rupert Murdoch.
How excellent this is, no? Greedy capitalists hungry only for the next buck will bring us a free media curated to our own desires. As opposed to that former more controlled one that stuffed political orthodoxies down our throats.
‘Mazin’ what simple greed can produce, no?
Tim Worstall