Billionaire Bullies

The first day I walked into the newsroom of The Des Moines Register, I got an assignment most reporter’s dread. A group of high school kids had gone to a drive-in movie when snow began to fall, so hard that it covered their car’s tailpipe. Deadly carbon monoxide seeped into the car and killed the teenagers. My assignment: Go interview the dead kids’ parents.

As a rookie reporter on my first day working for a daily newspaper, the assignment mortified me. The city editor, the late Gene Raffensperger, sensed my dread. Raff, as he was known in the newsroom, sat me down at one of the Register’s old gray metal desks and bluntly asked: “You ever done anything like this?”

photo by Tim Mossholder

He knew the answer from the shocked look in my eyes. Our exchange went something like this: “You probably think those parents will say, ‘Who do you think you are, coming here and bothering us at a time like this, right?”
”Yes,” I replied.
“Well, you’re wrong. Go there and tell the parents you regret bothering them as such a tragic time, but The Register wants to make sure that the information we put in the newspaper about their kids is accurate. Believe me, they’ll want to talk to you. It’s their kids. They want us to get it right.”

As I drove off on a snowy night o streets of a city I didn’t know, I was uncertain about Raff’s advice. I soon found the house of one of the teenagers and knocked on the door. A man with one of those “who in the hell are you” looks let me enter. I discovered the grieving parents had all gathered in the living room. I looked into their bloodshot eyes. I could see the footprints of tears. They looked at me suspiciously.

I followed Raff’s advice and told them why I had intruded on their grief. Sure enough, the parents talked. And they talked and they talked. They lent me copies of the kids’ high school yearbooks and they told me stories. They even thanked me for coming.  I went back to the newsroom relieved that I had done my job. I got accurate information from the best sources possible, the parents.   

I relate this story because it demonstrates the journalistic values instilled in me by the journalists who worked at The Des Moines Register, an Iowa newspaper currently a prime target of President-elect Donald Trump’s war on the media.

It’s easy to make “the media” a whipping post for the public. Newspapers like the Register and broadcasters make mistakes, get things wrong, sensationalize the news and devote too much attention to political grandstanders.

President-elect Trump filed suit against the Register because the newspaper published a poll on the eve of the last election that predicted he would lose the presidential race in Iowa. In fact, he won the state by thirteen points. The Register got it wrong, prompting the paper’s highly regarded pollster, Ann Selzer, to resign.

Trump says the flawed poll amounted to election interference; a legally dubious claim given the press protections that our Founding Fathers and the courts ironed into the Constitution under the First Amendment. The amendment and the courts cut the press some slack, rationalizing  that it’s more important for the press to hold power to account than to punish it for an occasional mistake.

The Register says Trump’s suit lacks merit. 

The legal sparring obscures issues vital to the public interest. Although the poll was wrong, Trump’s allegations about its intent were off mark. The Register deserved criticism for the poll’s poor results, but it merited even more reproach for relying too heavily on public opinion polling in covering elections.

It’s as if the Register prioritizes trying to predict the winner of an election instead of covering it with reporters who talk to voters. The paper needs more Raff’s, who passed away in 2018, and fewer Selzer’s. Raff was known as the guy who taught journalists how to be reporters. The same criticism about obsessive polling could be applied to most news organizations,

Far more consequential are the motives of the President-elect in filing the suit. Trump and his acolytes, such as Elon Musk, are engaged in a self-professed war of revenge on independent media for simply doing their jobs. They are the billionaire bullies kicking an opponent when he’s down. Newspapers such as the Register are just one target.

The daily newspaper industry I joined on that snowy night in Des Moines more than five decades ago now struggles to survive challenges posed by a revolutionary upheaval in advertising thanks to Musk’s friends in Silicon Valley. Income from advertising, once the newspaper industry’s main source of revenue, is nearly non-existent thanks to companies like Facebook. The social media platform, now called Meta, used journalism it expropriated from newspapers to lure advertisers away from them and on to the digital platforms where huge audiences were needed to thrive in an economy dominated by technologists.

The Register will likely prevail on the legal merits of Trump’s suit. To defend itself in court, though, the paper will have to devote precious resources that otherwise might fund journalism, increasing the financial distress that has driven more than 500 American newspapers out of business in the last four years. The Register is not immune to those financial pressures.

That’s the goal of Trump’s lawsuit and the criticisms routinely leveled by Musk: “Kick ‘em when they’re down,” a classic tactic used by bullies. The suit is part of their self-declared war against independent media of all stripes.

The media has itself to blame for most of its problems. It reacted too defensively to the rise of the internet; invested too little in news gathering, tried to cut its way out of its problems and routinely sensationalized the news. But even at its worst, it’s far better than the world envisioned by Trump and Musk. 

Each of the billionaires control their own internet platforms poised to capitalize on the media problems that they have helped create. Trump has Truth Social and Musk has X, formerly known as Twitter. Both profess to be advocates of free speech, but they are really freeloaders on the First Amendment who rely on its press guarantees to spread propaganda, lies, misinformation, and hate speech that no self-respecting news organization would publish. The platforms exist to enhance their power with little regard for values like accuracy.

They are not alone, either. NewsGuard, an internet trust-rating company run by journalists, has exposed 1,113 unreliable websites generated by Artificial Intelligence and 1,265 “pink slime” fake local news sites, plus 250 sites that spread Russia Ukraine disinformation.

The goal of these operations is to maneuver around solid independent journalism, enabling Trump, Musk, and their acolytes to avoid the tough questioning that makes independent journalists unpopular but necessary. The proliferation of fake news sites has been underway since the presidential contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and it’s getting more sophisticated and dangerous as time passes. It pollutes the nation’s media scene.

The Cowles family of Minneapolis owned the Register when Raff sent me off on that snowy night in Des Moines for my baptism of fire as a newspaperman. I and many others didn’t agree with everything the owners did, and they, like most past media barons, were no angels.

Overall, though, the Cowles were honorable media owners. Family members and the executives they appointed to run their empire showed that they cared deeply about the First Amendment and journalism. They were newspapermen and women who often made decisions that would anger advertisers and hurt their bottom lines.

The same can’t be said about the current billionaire bullies and their devotees in the financial world. Through words and actions, they use their platforms to increase their power and influence. They display little concern over damaging the independent media that America has relied upon to serve as a check on power for more than two centuries.

The bullies want a compliant press like ABC News, which just settled a suit on favorable terms with Trump rather than further alienate a man about to become president. They are fine with the actions of fellow billionaires calling the shots at The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.

The owners of both papers spiked editorials that endorsed Trump’s opponent just as it became likely that Trump would be elected. Owners of news organizations have a right to decline making political endorsements. Jeff Bezos, who owns the Post, and Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Times, said they took their actions because endorsements enhance the appearance of bias that undermines public faith in the media.

Bezos and Soon-Shiong also have significant business interests with the federal government that President Trump will soon lead. They have conflicts of interest between the public interests of the news organizations they lead and their profit-maximizing obligations to shareholder and investors in their enterprises.

As the nation enters a new year, it’s worth remembering that an independent press, warts and all, nourishes democracy. Yes, the media makes mistakes and engages in conduct that earns public skepticism. But remember that America is the only country in the world that has a First Amendment designed to protect an independent press for the public good. That’s why the Founding Fathers of this nation made it the FIRST amendment to the U.S, Constitution.

President-elect Trump isn’t just attacking a newspaper that published a bad poll. He is attacking the journalistic values embraced by newspapermen like Gene Raffensperger.

Happy 2025 everyone.

—James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Substack, Five W’s + H here.