Total billionaire wealth in the EU reached €2.4 trillion by late November, exceeding Italy's entire GDP of €2.2 trillion and approaching France's €2.9 trillion economy, a new Oxfam report found.
  • fort_burp@feddit.nlEnglish
    45·
    8 hours ago

    Recent high-profile acquisitions include Jeff Bezos purchasing the Washington Post, Elon Musk buying Twitter (now X), and Patrick Soon-Shiong acquiring the Los Angeles Times. A billionaire consortium also bought significant stakes in The Economist.

    In France, far-right billionaire Vincent Bolloré has transformed CNews into what critics call the French equivalent of Fox News. In the United Kingdom, three-quarters of newspaper circulation is controlled by just four wealthy families.

    This is amazing. News and communication in the internet age was supposed to be democratised publication and agency to the voice of the average person, and it is to a small extent, but for the most part society was just like

    • StinkyFingerItchyBum@lemmy.caEnglish
      19·
      5 hours ago

      I was a longtime reader of The Economist, but over time as I grew older and presumably wiser, I found it was not what it pretended to be.

      It loves to cloak itself in the legitimacy of rigorous economic research and neutral data driven positions, but it is really thinly veiled opinion pieces driving ideological neo-liberal economics. It’s a mouthpiece for billionaires to persuade educated laymen on a particular brand of **politics under the guise of the certainty of rigorous economics, while practicing ideological pseudo-economics.

      I cancelled my subscription a decade ago. I still read Public Library copies from time to time, but I find it obnoxiously disingenuous and dangerously lopsided with terrible conclusions. On rare occasion I find something ellucidating, I’m left to wonder if I can trust the source, or was it ideologically driven data fabrication or just a rare tossing the dog a bone for credibility.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        10·
        6 hours ago

        I couldn’t agree more and had exact the same experience.

        In my case I was actually in the Finance Industry when the 2008 Crash happenned and seeing what was done (the state unconditional saving Asset Owners by sacrificing the rest, in constrast with the whole Free Market stuff I had been reading on The Economist for almost a decade) and their take on it, really opened my eyes to the complete total self-serving bullshit of not just The Economist but also the whole edifice of Free Market Economics (a skepticism further boosted by me actually starting to learn Economics - especially Behavioral Economics since it’s the only “Mainly Science rather than Politics” part of it and my background is party in Physics - and deepening my understanding of the Finance Industry as I tried to figure out the Why and How of the Crash).

        That shit is Politics hidden behind a veil of Mathematics purposelly misused in a way eerily similar to how I saw pricing for over the counter derivatives being done in Finance: designing models so that they yield the desired results under certain conditions and further controlling their output by feeding them with cherry picked inputs and then presenting the output of the models as “Mathematical proof” that things are as as you say they are, so basically circular logic with some complex Mathematics in the middle to hide their true nature as unsupported claims.

        It’s pretty insidious Fake Science stuff if you don’t have a strong background in Science and access to the right information to pierce through it.