![]() But when its founder seriously contemplated a run for president, Bloomberg News editors steered their reporters away from covering it. Michael Bloomberg has built Bloomberg News into a formidable organisation. In other instances, once wealthy individuals are involved, those interests can appear to take over. Their newsrooms have praised them for delivering badly needed resources and, in Henry's case, starting a whole new life sciences news outlet, Stat, while staying out of the way of the journalism, including The Globe's coverage of the Red Sox, which Henry also owns.īut billionaires do not become billionaires by being passive about their own interests. Paul Huntsman has pledged to protect the newspaper's independence, and if he keeps his promise he could be more akin to the relatively new billionaire owners of The Washington Post (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos) and The Boston Globe (investor John Henry). His father, Jon Sr, the chief generator of the family fortune has had a prominent role with the Mormon church.Īs The Associated Press reported, this worries some civic leaders, given that The Tribune stands as an independent counterbalance to the church-owned Deseret News. Huntsman's brother, Jon, is a former Utah governor who ran for president in 2012. ![]() Some in Utah voiced concern when a member of the wealthy and influential Huntsman family, Paul Huntsman, moved to buy one of the state's two major dailies, the struggling Salt Lake Tribune. Should the $140 million verdict stand up to appeal, Gawker Media will most likely cease to exist as we know it.Īnd the sale was followed by reports of editors suddenly altering articles about Adelson's business dealings to put them in a more flattering light, or holding from publication articles about him altogether.īut, as my colleague Sydney Ember wrote Monday, Adelson who denies meddling, also brought welcome financial muscle to the newsroom, allowing it to make new hires and equipment upgrades. His verdict rendered, Thiel had the resources to swap his judge's gavel for an executioner's sword. If too much of Gawker survives, Thiel, with an estimated net worth of $2.7 billion, indicates he will keep financing anti-Gawker lawsuits to kill off whatever is left. Speaking with Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times on Wednesday, Thiel said he had financed the Hogan lawsuit, which resulted in a $140 million verdict against Gawker, not only because Gawker Media wrote in 2007, against his wishes, that he was gay, but also because he had determined the gossip site had too often operated with "no connection to the public interest". At first blush, the secret support that the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel provided for Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker is a salacious yarn about money, power, gossip and revenge.īut it is also about something more important: an aggressive bid by the very wealthy to control the US news media at a time when it is in a financially weakened state, struggling to maintain its footing on the electronic frontier's unstable terrain.
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