A new book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, examines how new wealth has drawn into its orbit some formerly progressive journalists. Owned looks at the cases of Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald––once idealistic-sounding, left-leaning voices who have shifted right.
EOIN HIGGINS; eoinhiggins@gmail.com, @EoinHiggins
Higgins is a tech reporter. He is the author of Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left.
Higgins told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “I’m trying to present a critique of this shift to the right, not by attacking these men [like Greenwald and Taibbi] from a liberal position but to critique them from the left. This is a media and messaging problem for the left. This [book] isn’t a hit piece. These guys are symptomatic of a larger problem in media and they explain how right-wing tech influence has shifted the media landscape. …
“Greenwald and Taibbi have pitched themselves to the right. They have taken a really clear move to the right, and locked in with industry interests, with the same people whose money is funding their careers.”
These journalists have been bought by the right, Higgins contends. He said it is “hard to disentangle the financial and ideological connections… In May 2021, Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance made a funding route for Rumble and injected a ton of cash into the platform. They hired people to do content on their platforms, and Glenn [Greenwald] was one of those people. He has moved all of his production and writing to that platform. For Taibbi, the correlation is less one-to-one. Musk picked him for the so-called Twitter Files, and that exploded Taibbi’s Substack. These guys also operate within a conference circuit. Events are sponsored and paid for by the general group of right-wing tech billionaires who are funding their work. They’re also making money off of speaking fees and conference fees. But these guys are not always particularly ideologically consistent.
Such journalists “don’t feel it’s reasonable for people to challenge them at all. They feel like their language is being policed. That’s something they share with the tech guys. They also share a desire for ‘being in the discourse.’ They become radicalized by getting attention in the attention economy, and then realizing that the best way to get attention is to say crazier and crazier stuff. Rather than that having adverse consequences, it gets you into a position of power and wealth. That can’t be underestimated as a motivator.
“The control of information by incredibly wealthy people is not very new, but this is a new attempt to destabilize information in a way that benefits the wealthy. This is a full spectrum act. Elon Musk is basically running the government at this point. The tech industry, which has been powerful for a long time, now has unprecedented power. As journalists, we need to be confronting and looking into that power, rather than trying to leverage it for short-term material gain. What is happening is going to affect everything.”