The worldwide rolling takeover of traditional media by the global billionaire class took another lurching step over the weekend, with India’s richest petro-billionaire Mukesh Ambani adding Disney’s Indian assets to his family portfolio to create a nationally dominant $13 billion TV and streaming arm.
It comes as hedge fund billionaire and right-wing activist Sir Paul Marshall has been lining up fellow billionaires to battle a United Arab Emirates-backed group to take over the Conservative’s voice of choice, The Telegraph (aka, The Torygraph). Here in Australia, meanwhile, our own billionaire Stokes family has entrenched its hold on West Australian media with the launch of the mining industry-friendly The Nightly.
Once upon a time, rising men full of ambition would buy into the media to make themselves unimaginably rich. Now, it’s the other way around: it’s the already profoundly rich that are buying up media — not to make money but to protect the money they already have.
It’s all part of a global push by the billionaire class — particularly the fossil-fuel-reliant wing — to build a new political movement for their 21st-century needs through a mix of right-wing media, think tanks and astroturfed campaign groups.
Wannabe Telegraph-owner Marshall is deeply active across the range, being an early investor of UK’s Fox equivalent GB News, a Brexiteer Tory donor, and a co-founder of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. (ARC is the who’s who of the global political right, with an Australian weighting on its advisory board that includes John Howard, Tony Abbott, Andrew Hastie, Amanda Stoker and John Anderson.)
In Australia over the weekend, voters in Dunkley faced down the “campaigning” front of the Advance hysteria to vote pretty much as they did in 2022 — and as almost two years of polling have suggested they intend to do in next year’s federal election (despite efforts by the News Corp-led Canberra gallery to pump up the Albo-in-decline narrative).
We’re so inured though to old billionaire ownership of our media — the US-based Murdochs and Redstones, the much-mourned (in some quarters, at least) Fairfaxes and Packers – that we’re missing what the new caste of billionaires is doing to both global and Australia’s traditional media.
It’s part an ideological project, part a crucial tool in the government-reliant crony capitalism that is replacing the market-driven neo-capitalism that collapsed in the 2007-08 global financial crisis. Through ownership of media, billionaire activists have discovered they can pair the ideology of a “free media” with their corporate, cultural and political interests.
The two sides were on proud display on the front page of the billionaire-controlled The Australian this weekend: “Tech tyrant goes to war with Australia” screamed the US-owned masthead’s campaign manifesto dressed up as journalism, powered by the urgency of protecting the multimillion-dollar payoff Australia’s commercial media were able to wangle out of big tech back in 2021 (thanks to the intervention of then treasurer Josh Frydenberg).
It’s a sharp reminder that patrician media suddenly find itself exchanging the power that independence gave them for a friendlier regulation along with government funding. In Murdoch family media, it took a generational shift — from Rupert to Lachlan — for their companies to accept the hard fact that power has changed, demanding a renewed enthusiasm for Donald Trump, the likely future US president (based on a recent New York Times poll, at least).
The role of media when fossil-fuelled crony capitalism meets the cultural demands of populist nationalism is probably best understood in India. The Disney takeover is just the latest of the media buyouts by the country’s rich list pair, Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani (best known in Australia for his company’s involvement in Queensland coal). It’s included taming critical voices like NDTV with what Hinglish rhyming slang calls Godi (literally lap-sitting) media.
As Pamela Philipose, the ombudsperson of India’s digital voice, The Wire, wrote on the weekend: “The mainstream media’s affection for the ruling party is a many-layered thing — and certainly one of the layers is the financial reward that flows seamlessly to the proprietors of media houses.”
Meanwhile, the very “tech tyrant” Australia’s old media are urging the Australian government to take on — Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg — was in India, sharing toasts with the country’s latest media baron as a guest at the celebration of the all-billionaire wedding of the younger Ambani son, Anant, to the Merchant family’s Radhika.
It’s a small world when you’re a billionaire: also at the party were Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, along with the other big tech signer of the cheques to Australia’s old media, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai.
Wonder whether Australia came up in conversation.
