This New York Times column by Thomas Edsall on the tech oligarchs is more than a but infuriating. The piece discusses both the philosophy (if we can call it that) and the power of the current generation of tech oligarchs. Their “philosophy” is that democracy doesn’t work, and we need them to run the country and world.

We could dismiss this as just craziness, except people like Elon Musk have the money and power to bring about this reality. Part of this story is that they can effectively spend infinite money on election campaigns to get their people elected.

But part of the story is their control of the means of communication. For some reason progressives have given this remarkably little attention. While they all recognize that campaign spending can affect election outcomes, there is little appreciation of the fact that the media people consume, both between and during elections, affects how they vote.

The right has been smart enough to recognize this fact. They of course have Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and the New York Post, but also a big hand in setting the agenda for more mainstream news outlets, which are also controlled by rich people.

That fact has become painfully clear in the last year with billionaire owners nixing Harris endorsements at the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. We also have seen ABC and Meta hand over millions of dollars to Donald Trump to settle absurd lawsuits. CBS seems set to do the same. The reality is that while news outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, and others do have good reporters doing solid work, they cannot be relied upon, because at the end of the day, the people who control them are on Team Rich.

I, and others, have long advocated for an alternative funding mechanism for journalism based on individual tax credits. These would be mechanically similar to the charitable contribution tax deduction but would give every person the same amount of money (e.g. $100) to support the media outlet of their choice.

This would create a large pool of funding outside the control of the rich. There also is the advantage that this system could be put in place at the state or local level, since nothing like this is about to pass at the national level any time soon.

Anyhow, the other part of this picture that is at least as infuriating is the discovery that controlling huge social media platforms, like Facebook or Twitter, conveys enormous political power. This seemingly obvious point prompted little concern among progressives until Elon Musk took over Twitter and began using it to push his right-wing, racist, and anti-Semitic political views.

Edsall makes the point about this power in his piece, but it’s kind of late in the game. Some of us had noticed the problem years ago, but news outlets like the New York Times had no space for people making such warnings and even progressives seem little concerned about it.

My focus was restructuring the protections in Section 230, both because I don’t think Elon Musk should be able to wholesale defamatory material to hundreds of millions of people with impunity, and also because we could use a restructured Section 230 to downsize the social media giants.

In prior years it might have been possible to get a restructuring through Congress since even many right-wing representatives opposed Section 230 protections. That doesn’t seem likely today with Elon Musk calling in the shots, but it still can’t hurt to give these issues a bit of thought in case we can preserve democracy through the Musk-Trump presidency.