Infamous Elon vs. the Good Billionaires

Tim Graham on Feb 19, 2025

On the PBS show "Washington Week with The Atlantic" on Feb. 7, host Jeffrey Goldberg began: "Elon Musk, the unelected, unconfirmed, unofficial, but extremely powerful prime minister of the United States, is carrying out his plan to purge thousands of employees from the federal government."

A few minutes later, NPR reporter Asma Khalid talked about Musk "increasing starvation rates." Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum wondered, "are Americans willing to accept a high level of cruelty and death just, you know, on the president's whim, on Elon Musk's whim?"

There are several ironies here. First, no one elected anyone at PBS as they punish any limit on government. Second, an unelected billionaire named Laurene Powell Jobs owns The Atlantic, which completed a friendly takeover of the "Washington Week" show in August 2023.

Laurene, one of Kamala Harris' biggest bankrollers and confidantes, isn't alone. David Rubenstein has bought himself several chat shows on PBS. As long as you're a progressive billionaire, no one in "public" broadcasting objects -- and nobody inside their bubble cares about conservative taxpayers if and when they object to funding this ideological boondoggle.

Maxwell Tani at Semafor reported Mrs. Jobs recently hosted a Democrat strategy session at the D.C. headquarters of her Emerson Collective. He began: "After months of licking their wounds and reflecting on how they lost the internet, Democratic strategists and politically-aligned digital creators are privately planning their next steps."

How interesting it is that an unelected billionaire who bought a show on PBS is right at the center of "fixing" Democrat Party messaging. PBS and the Democrats are hand in glove.

Tani added, "The summit was also an opportunity to connect several of the party's prominent financial supporters with some of the liberal media organizations that are positioning themselves as vessels to help liberals regain digital ground they've lost to the right in recent years."

Musk even drew a mention in Tani's dispatch: "The initial shock of the presidential loss has been heightened by other frustrations among Democrats at their party's superficially slow and unsatisfying response to Trump and Musk's shock-and awe-changes to the federal government."

Unlike the infamous Elon, you can't really find much mention on PBS for Laurene Powell Jobs in this decade. On the Jan. 19, 2024, "PBS News Hour," David Brooks mentioned he wrote opinions for wealthy owners of The Atlantic and The New York Times. Jonathan Capehart noted he writes for the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post.

The leftist take on billionaires came as PBS lamented the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun were insufficiently liberal. Capehart explained, "What the Post, the Times and The Atlantic have in common is that they are mission-driven. And it seems to me that The Baltimore Sun and The L.A. Times ... that the owners are status-driven. And when you have mission-driven owners, they let the journalists do the journalism."

That's odd. If anyone thinks journalists like Capehart aren't "status-driven," they haven't seen them on the D.C. social scene, energetically circling to get a mention on the Politico Playbook or other gossip columns.

Hence, the natural order of things is that billionaires buy media properties and let the unelected left-wing journalists dictate what they want the "news" to be, which is whatever helps Democrats "regain ground" in the opinion battles.

This is the nature of what they call "the swamp." If you get along and go along with the progressives, you can be a respectable citizen. Try to reduce the swamp and you're an ignorant troglodyte pushing "cruelty and death."

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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.