You Provide the Pictures and I'll Provide the War
September 17, 2018·0 comments·In Brief
When a billionaire buys a major media property, the financial press calls it a business acquisition. What if it's actually a defensive weapon? As political pressure on mega-billionaires intensifies, the logic of owning the machinery that shapes public opinion becomes inescapable. The question isn't whether they'll use it, but how soon the pressure gets bad enough that they have to.
- Bezos didn't buy the Washington Post to publish great journalism. He bought it because Amazon faces escalating political attacks from both parties, and a megaphone matters more than a printing press when your empire is under siege.
- Benioff's acquisition of Time follows the same logic, even though Salesforce hasn't faced the same congressional pressure yet. The smart oligarch buys the narrative machinery before the political fire arrives, not after.
- The evidence is hiding in plain sight: Benioff sold thousands of his company's shares every single day for six straight years. That's not diversification. That's the behavior of someone who knows something about his business model is unsustainable.
- Fiat News isn't propaganda or outright lies. It's opinion presented as objective reporting. The distinction matters because it's legal, defensible, and infinitely more powerful than anything crude.
- If the richest people in the world are now buying media to protect their fortunes from political attack, what happens to the information the rest of us rely on to understand what's actually happening?
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