Billionaire bullies vs. a free press
President Trump is not the only billionaire to exert his wealth and power to try to suppress media coverage. He just may be one of the most obvious and least effective at his attempt at retaliation and vindication. But his instincts and his ruthlessness reflect a familiar pattern of billionaires hellbent on silencing their real and perceived adversaries in the press.
A new Netflix documentary, “Nobody Speak,” explores the extent to which two billionaires who have had their grievances with news coverage — tech titan Peter Thiel and casino mogul Sheldon Adelson — try to muzzle their watchdogs with resources their heretofore media scrutinizers could not hope to match. In Thiel’s case, he secretly financed a lawsuit against an online gossip operation in which he had no direct stake. In Adelson’s case, he secretly bought a newspaper that otherwise would have been the leading independent overseer of his gaming empire.
Interspersed throughout the documentary is Trump.
It shows candidate Trump denouncing journalists as “the world’s most dishonest people.” It shows the unsettling campaign scenes of crowds, incited by Trump’s rhetoric, venting their anger at reporters at the rallies, individually and collectively. It shows Trump joking about the killing of journalists — no laughing matter in myriad authoritarian countries, past and present — and expressing his desire to loosen up libel law to make it easier to sue the news media. Lawsuits. Yes, billionaires know how to use the legal system to intimidate and even squish their irritants of lesser means.
“Nobody Speak” offers its viewers two case studies of how freedom of the press, that revered tenet of the First Amendment, can be chilled by rich men determined to get their way. The facts and the targets — and the ability to care about the ultimate plight — of the two targets could hardly be different. Yet as the renowned constitutional scholar Floyd Abrams said on camera, “we don’t pick and choose” which publications deserve First Amendment protection. Otherwise, he rightly noted, the government is allowed to make that decision — which is not a good thing.
So the genuine concern about the lawsuit by pro wrestler Hulk Hogan against the gossip site Gawker over its release of a sex tape featuring him and the wife of his radio-host buddy “Bubba the Love Sponge” has nothing to do with its definition of this as news. I would not begin to defend it. Nor would it relate to its news-gathering practices, which I found despicable (Gawker was known to have routinely paid for scoops).
The mystery and the consequence was how the wrestler was able to finance such a thorough and deep-pocketed case against Gawker. It turned out the secret benefactor was Thiel, whose grudge against Gawker dated back to a 2007 article in its Silicon Valley gossip site, Valleywag, that dealt with the not-soclandestine fact that he was gay. Again, I would not try to justify the outing of anyone against his or her will, but the documentary makes a compelling case that anyone who cares about a free press should pause at the notion that money can buy the extinction of a news organization.
Faced with the $140 million verdict in the Hulk Hogan case, Gawker filed for bankruptcy protection in 2016.
A more uplifting resistance — albeit with a still-ambiguous conclusion — was highlighted in Las Vegas. Adelson bought the state’s dominant newspaper, the Review-Journal, in late 2015 without revealing his role as owner. It was one of the more bizarre newspaper-sale scenarios in modern times. As surely as night follows day, the R-J reporters were determined to pursue the story, wherever it led. Of course it led to Adelson, whose pique with critical coverage included a lawsuit against one of the paper’s marquee columnists, John L. Smith, for passages in a 2005 book, “Sharks in the Desert,” about the evolution of the nation’s gambling mecca.
James G. Wright, the editor supervising the coverage, said “I probably would have had to have shot” his team of reporters to keep them from pursuing the truth about who bought their paper. The R-J’s top editor, Mike Hengel, a capital-j Journalist whom I’ve had the pleasure of occasionally having crossed paths with in our nearly four decades in the business, let the story run without ownership permission knowing it was “probably a career-ending decision.”
I wish I could say it had a happy ending. It wasn’t. Hengel resigned the day the story of the sale ran. Smith resigned soon after being told he could not write a word about Adelson, an undeniable force in town who should have been fair game for a metro columnist.
In one of the more poignant moments of the documentary, Hengel pulls out a photo of the staffers who were involved in the story about the sale. All but one left the R-J.
They did their jobs, honorably and courageously, at high personal cost. Unlike Gawker, the Review-Journal endures, however neutered and compromised. The documentary ends with a screen shot of a Thomas Jefferson quote from 1786: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press; and that cannot be limited without being lost.”
The pressures to limit from a billionaire with a sense of entitlement are coming well beyond Silicon Valley and Las Vegas. They are unrelenting from the current occupant of the highest office in the land.