![]() ![]() She owns The Atlantic, could still be the largest shareholder of Disney/ABC and funds many digital news nonprofits through the American Journalism Project, which her Emerson Collective helped to create. ►Laurene Powell Jobs donated over $2 million. ►George Soros, a major donor to Wikipedia who funds many new digital media outlets through his Open Society Foundation (see our nonprofit U.S. ![]() Is this newly minted class of wealth really absent from politics and political influence? Where do they give money for political gain around regulation and governance? To figure this out, we are in desperate need of a real-time database for super PAC spending, along with transparency on which media and platform owners fund lobbyists. Susan Wojcicki, a major donor to Wikipedia and CEO of YouTube, donated only $8,000 through Google Netpac. Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, gave but $15,000 over the past 20 months through his PACs Blue Origin and Amazon while his net worth grew to near $200 billion. Did Elon Musk, one of the biggest donors to Wikipedia, really give only $40,000 to political leaders and causes in 2020-21? Marc Benioff, the current owner of Time who's, active in homelessness issues in San Francisco, gave only $5,000 to his PAC. USA TODAY's opinion newsletter: Get the best insights and analysis delivered to your inboxīut here is where it fell short. Only 60 people in media leadership had donated more than $2,000 to a political candidate since 2019. Super PACs have the freedom to report only twice a year, so there may be more to come. Only 14.5% of the 412 owners, executives, board members and investors had given to individual candidates, traditional PACs or super PACs from January 2020 to August 2021, as tracked by the FEC. Using the original ownership index, we tracked the political donations at 90 of the top U.S. This summer, students from Tufts and Harvard universities spent time digging through the Federal Election Commission database with me. We now live in a much less transparent time. Media mogul William Randolph Hearst famously declared, “This is my newspaper, these are my views, take or leave it.” Hearst boldly placed his editorials on the front page, with his picture, signed “for God’s sake.” There was no subterfuge. I wrote about why I got a COVID shot: Then I was fired from my job. Even his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, herself a Republican member of Congress, chastised him publicly for his relentless coverage in Time of Barry Goldwater’s GOP nomination for president. His well-documented views were not secret. Sure, Henry Luce, the iconic publisher of Time, Fortune and Life magazines, put his thumb on the scale. It is intended to be the backbone of our civilization and functioning governance. Journalism is not meant to be public relations for political parties. Transparency is what journalists and journalism have long been about. The index was more popular than anticipated. In May, I published an ownership index of the top 176 U.S. Spurred by the rapid proliferation of social media platforms, with questionable content, and a former president who pummeled our free press repeatedly, it’s no wonder Americans are left wary and our information ecosystem is in shambles.Īdd to that the billions of dollars from super PACs used to fund political content pushed by new digital channels and influencers. It’s a mess. Something we can likely all agree on is that trust in media is at an all-time low and Americans want reliable, nonpartisan news. Watch Video: Super PACs explained: How big money is affecting US elections
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