How a powerful billionaire is trying to influence the media
January 10, 2024
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2:47Now PlayingHow a powerful billionaire is trying to influence the media
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as posted by the channelBillionaires are working overtime to shape our media environment and there’s no better example of this than what happened with Harvard’s first Black female president.
Claudine Gay was forced to resign recently after billionaire financier Bill Ackman and far right trolls waged a Gamergate style attack against her.
Gay was the 1st black and 2nd woman president in Harvard’s history. But after she appeared to be too soft on antisemitism in a congressional hearing, far right extremists including Chris Rufo along with billionaire Bill Ackman decided she needed to be ousted. They began accusing her of plagiarism and claimed she wasn’t fastidious enough in citing sources in decades old academic work.
The truth is, she had already been selected as a target for a coordinated right-wing campaign aimed at driving her out of power, the likes in which we have been seeing more and more often.
Now, after Business Insider exposed Ackman’s own wife (also a famous academic) for engaging in the same type of sloppy citations that he’d accused Gay of and used to call for her resignation, Ackman is trying to attack the press.
It’s crucial that news organizations recognize these types of coordinated campaigns for what they are: attempts to silence journalists and remove women, POC, and members of other marginalized groups from positions of power by weaponizing the media through manufactured outrage cycles.
As my colleague Will Sommer reported in The Washington Post:
Business Insider has a history of reporting aggressively on the wealthy and powerful, including a 2022 story alleging that Elon Musk exposed himself to a flight attendant, which Musk called a “politically motivated hit piece.”
At least publicly, that reputation hasn’t been an issue for Axel Springer, which purchased the site in 2015 for $450M. But the dispute over the Oxman stories appears to touch upon an issue of major importance to Axel Springer and its CEO: Israel.
While Ackman hasn’t raised factual issues with the articles, he has claimed that the outlet didn’t give him and his wife enough time to comment.
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