About the Guest:
Eoin Higgins is a journalist based in New England. He is the author of Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voice on the Left.
Episode Transcript:
CORY BARKER: In 2021, a well-known journalist left a major national outlet to join a new media venture. It promised editorial freedom, big reach, and deep pocketed backers committed to truth. Within months, their bylines were showing up across multiple platforms with stories that, while seemingly neutral, all leaned in a very particular direction, pro-billionaire, antiregulation, and fiercely critical of higher Ed labor and public institutions. It wasn't a coincidence. Behind the scenes, right wing think tanks and mega-donors have been quietly investing in the news business, not by launching propaganda sites, but by funding established journalists and respected outlets to push friendly narratives. The result, news that looks legitimate but subtly reinforces an antidemocratic worldview. These aren't just fringe voices, these are the names that show up on your news app, your social feed, and even the front page, and the influence is growing.
Matt Jordan: We're going to dig into this topic by talking with Eoin Higgins, a journalist at IT Brew and a sharp observer of the intersection between tech, media, and power. His reporting tracks how money shapes narratives and how these forces are using familiar journalistic faces to build trust while spreading spin. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Intercept, Washington Post, and New Statesman, among others. Eoin is the author of the book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, and he's been following this trend from the inside out.
Cory Barker: Eoin Higgins, thanks for joining us.
Eoin Higgins: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Cory Barker: So, your book is subtitled, How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. So, let's start there. Who were the titular tech billionaires and who were the voices on the left that you were writing about?
Eoin Higgins: The tech billionaires that I talk about in the book primarily are the billionaires Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and I think to a lesser extent, David Sacks, although he really only comes in later in the book. And they are all long-standing right wing Silicon Valley figures. Peter Thiel, back in the '90s in Stanford, when he was a student, founded The Stanford Review, which was this right-wing student newspaper. He founded that because he felt that Stanford itself was too liberal. David Sacks met him at the time, or maybe he was in law school, but in the '90s wrote for The Stanford Review as well. The two of them co-authored a book called The Diversity Myth, also in the '90s. Then Thiel would go on to co-found PayPal, and he would combine his company, Confinity, which had the PayPal product with X, a company run by Elon Musk. And the two of them would become very wealthy and powerful from this founding of the company and their equity especially once they sold it to eBay. David Sacks would come on as well as COO before the company was sold, so the connection there was well-established.
Later on, Musk, of course, would go on to invest in Tesla and SpaceX and then claimed that he had founded them, although he just invested in them early on. And would then eventually buy Twitter and then rename it to X and then become the figure he is now publicly. Thiel went on from there to co-found Palantir, which is a data collection and surveillance company that operated essentially at the largesse of the federal government during the early years of the war on terror during the Bush administration. He also invested in Facebook early on, although he cashed out the investment before it was quite what it would end up being in value. He got into politics a little bit later on and has been a mover and shaker in right wing politics, both in Silicon Valley and in Washington ever since. Marc Andreessen created Netscape Navigator. He's one of the creators of Netscape Navigator back in the '90s. That was taken out, I guess, by Microsoft, including Internet Explorer in Windows that triggered the antitrust litigation that Andreessen was a part of pushing forward. After that, he became a VC. He wasn't particularly successful until he hit on Facebook. Ever since then, he's been chasing the next big thing. I mean, he's certainly fabulously wealthy. He's done very well for himself. I don't want to give the impression that, other than Facebook, all of his investments didn't pan out. That's definitely not true. And then the voices on the left, I think these are voices who were aligned with the left certainly. This is Glenn Greenwald, the famous journalist who helped to break the Edward Snowden NSA spying scandal story. And Matt Taibbi, famously of Rolling Stone, who did a lot of work and writing on the financial crisis back in the 2000, as well as US politics. And his work took a pretty sharp right turn, especially about five years ago, Glenn did at the same time. And if you trace back their political changes and the opportunities, I think that they've been given by media platforms and other forms of financial support from this group of billionaires and their friends, I think you can draw a pretty close line there.
Matt Jordan: So, one of the things we try to do is to think about the function of the press. And this is a pretty big challenge to what our normative assumption is about the function of the free press in a democracy. So how does this challenge the free press in democracy to have these folks writing and influencing the media ecosystem in the way they do?
Eoin Higgins: I think the real threat is not so much from Matt and Glenn writing whatever they want to write or appearing on TV and doing what they want to do. I mean, I think that in and of itself is not a threat. I think that the problem is that the money that's being put into these specific aspects of the media is where the problem is coming from. So let me pull back a little bit and try and break down what I'm saying here. So, in the mid-2010s, a lot of conservative voices in Silicon Valley decided that they didn't like the way that they were being covered. So, for 10 or 15 years before this, maybe even 20, they've been covered pretty favorably especially by the tech press and certainly by the mainstream press. And I think that in a lot of respects that makes sense. This is an industry that's on the West Coast, so it's not near Washington or New York. It's an industry that keeps on pumping out these world changing, innovative products, whether hardware or software. And so, for a long time, that was the way the tech industry was treated, period. Like over there in California, they're making really cool stuff. It's changing the world and we're just going to cover them favorably. And from the tech industry standpoint, they were like, OK, well, we cover favorably, and we'll invite them to conferences and we'll give them cool products and we'll give them access to this stuff. And that was like the quote unquote "deal" that existed for a long time. But in the mid-2000s, Gawker Media started this blog called Valleywag, which was actually quite critical of the tech industry and treated it like Us Weekly treats like Hollywood. It was treated like gossip and didn't take these people very seriously, made a lot of them angry, including Peter Thiel, who would get his revenge like 10 years later when he killed Gawker for Valleywag, outing him. But the overall tenor of the coverage was pretty positive, and that started to change in the early 2010s. And by the time the 2016 election rolled around, especially Democrats were very upset with the election of Donald Trump understandably. And so, they were like looking around for a reason that this happened that didn't involve the Democratic Party. And what they found was that the tech industry was one of the reasons that they could point to, both them and their allies in the, I wouldn't say Democratic-controlled media, but Democratic Party aligned media. Figures that are more partisan than maybe just objective. And this, I guess, pundit coverage coincided with a more aggressive coverage from publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. And the reaction to this from the tech industry was to say, hey, you know what, this isn't fair. These guys shouldn't be treated like this else like this, they have no right to treat us like this. There must be a problem here. The media is not being fair to us. The media is not treating us with the appropriate amount of deference and respect that they should, considering all the wonderful things that we are providing for the people of this country. And so therefore, we are going to do is we're going to fix the media. And the way that they decided to do that, in my view, is to do this disrupt thing where they wanted to decentralize the idea of the media completely and to basically take institutional media and independent critical media and defang them by diluting their power. And one of the ways that they did this was to create all of these different alternative platforms, to invest in all of these different alternative platforms, and in investing in them, in putting their money into it, and putting their weight behind it. What they did was they managed to decentralize it to the point that all these prolific writers and prolific creators that were involved in the news media before then all moved over to these platforms. Now, I want to be really, really clear here, that I didn't go to journalism school, I had no background in journalism. I started this work 10 years ago, pretty much by accident. If it wasn't for these platforms, if it wasn't for the decentralized internet media sphere that existed at that time, I would not have the career that I have. So, I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing, but what I'm saying is that as much as it may have shaken up media in good ways, it also did that in bad ways, and that the reason that it was done, the reason that these investments were made was that and I'm not being conspiratorial here. They weren't all gathered together in a room and saying, hey, you know what, we're going to make this happen together. We're going to plot to kill media. But I think that it was just an overall aim to change the way that media worked in their favor so that they could have what Balaji Srinivasan, this is one of these tech guys who's very influential, and he has called for recently like this idea of a parallel media structure where this media structure basically exists to. I imagine, give Silicon Valley business news and some political news and then otherwise just toe the line with them.
Matt Jordan: So essentially to thwart the power of journalists who were holding powerful accountable, which functionally is the function of the free press, is to hold the powerful accountable and to bring light to issues that impact the citizenry. You have essentially a group of, let's call them content creators instead of journalists who are pumping their pro Silicon Valley product into the media ecosystem to dilute the influence of journalists.
Eoin Higgins: I think that was probably like the overall intention. I think the way that it played out was a little bit different though. The way that it played out is that you have people who take a lot of positions that these guys probably don't particularly care for, but they also take positions that they do like, which is attack the people who are the enemies of Silicon Valley.
And they present a reality to their audience that reflects this faux libertarian Silicon Valley view of the world, where free speech is truly impacted by people being mean to you online. If you say something that they don't like and that's what censorship really is, interspersed with some real critiques, obviously, I'm not saying that everything that they say is garbage. And I would say as well that there is some self-censoring going on here with these guys because I think they realize that if you say what these guys want you to say, then you're going to end up continuing to benefit from their largesse. And they are pushing forward an ideology that is, if not exactly like everything that these guys would agree with, it's something that they can work with. It's not something that is antithetical to their interests.
Cory Barker: And what you were saying there, it made me think about how some of their behavior online and the way in which they often, at least how they reply to people on social media and attack people who may critique their work or bring up some of the issues you're bringing up, you can tell that, that criticism really makes them mad. How do you see that as far as the way in which they take in public feedback, or the way in which they navigate their past audience with their existing audience, and maybe even exploit that to disseminate this right-wing ideology?
Eoin Higgins: I mean, that's a good question. I think that all of these guys are pretty thin-skinned. I think that part of it is like online, that self-radicalizing problem of being on. But I think that it's also that they're just no longer really used to being challenged. These guys are very successful. From Andreessen, Sacks, Musk, Thiel, Greenwald, and Taibbi, I think they're all in their 50s. I don't think any one of them is 60 and none of them are in their 40s. So, I think they're all within that decade. So, they're at the peaks of their careers. And I think that there is a feeling among them that they really shouldn't be criticized in the way that they're being criticized. It's not fair for people to come at them and tell them that they're wrong or that their ideas are bad, you know what I mean. I think there is a lot of that. And I certainly think that in a few of the cases, you can trace back their radicalization to someone telling them to shut up on the internet. And usually, I think when these guys talk about free speech and stuff, that's what they mean. They want to be able to say whatever they want without people telling them to shut up.
Cory Barker: If you're just joining us, this is News Over Noise. I'm Cory Barker.
Matt Jordan: And I'm Matt Jordan.
Cory Barker: We're talking with journalist Eoin Higgins about how billionaires and think tanks are quietly reshaping journalism by funding trusted outlets and known reporters to push elite, friendly narratives. I was curious what you thought about the Semafor story that came out in late April, about how many of these folks have been essentially self-radicalizing in riling each other up in single group chats, essentially reinforcing a lot of the things that you've been writing about. But was there anything in that story that surprised you?
Eoin Higgins: Yeah, I mean, it was quite vindicating. In some ways, obviously, I think that—so a lot of the genesis for me being so interested in this is that I was like looking at how people were making a lot of money on Substack and looking at how people were getting their stuff amplified by different kind of algorithms online, just seeing who was being kind of uplifted, whether it was like front page on Substack or whose stuff is getting boosted on Twitter. And I have been interested in this a long time. And I remember thinking to myself—I was like, it would be very interesting if these guys were all talking to each other and talking to journalists and putting together these messages. I want to be clear here. I don't think that they are putting together messaging in these group chats and then putting—I think it's happening organically. I mean, that's what the reporting says. It's just happening organically. But I think that these group chats and the radicalization that happens within them—I mean, most people at this point, I think, are in one group chat or another, whether it's like a work Slack or a friend Slack or a Discord. And yeah, certainly, if you are in a group discussion with a large amount of people, you're going to find your opinions challenged and perhaps your opinions changed. I think that's totally natural and totally normal. In this case, we're talking about some of the richest, most powerful people in the world, some of the most influential journalists in the world. And they're all like amping each other up to this far right ideology. And again, I don't see this as conspiratorial. They're just all together in this situation where you have access to these people with power. And that comes with certain benefits. And you want to probably stay in that circle. So, you start to parrot some of their lines, some of the things that are priorities for them.
Matt Jordan: In a way, this story of the influence of money and power on the press is an old one. But they had a fundamental respect, I think, for the institutions of democracy. And the people that you write about, these are people with deep antagonism toward liberal democracy. They think it is broken. They think that empathy is a weakness. They think that everything that would be about supporting the poor is part of the woke ideology. I mean, these are people with deep antagonism toward the foundations of our democracy as we see it. I mean, is that the big difference in this as a kind of a way of poisoning the well of the media ecosystem than the older version of this?
Eoin Higgins: I think someone like Thiel or Curtis Yarvin or Marc Andreessen or any of these guys who are kind of anti-democratic, their ideology is separate from the traditional Republican Party. And what that has meant has been that for up until, I would say, even 10 years ago, even during Trump's first term, what they were expressing was still kind of on the outside of at least what the Republican Party wanted to think that it was. But I think that it's important to look at this and to also understand, at the same time, that these guys are ascendant. And like their ideology is ascendant, that we're now entering the third or fourth generation of the white backlash, Republican, coming from the Civil Rights movement and just continually radicalizing to the right—the evangelical white Protestant movement radicalizing to the right endlessly.
But for a long time, I agree. The Republican Party presented itself as still interested in democracy, at least publicly. But their reaction to, for example, like Nixon getting impeached and stepping down was not to say, oh, democracy worked. It was to say, that's not fair. When the president does it, it's not illegal. For Nixon to say that he was not outside of the bounds of his party or, increasingly, both parties. But by the time that Trump came around, he represented the kind of natural outgrowth of this. I mean, arguably, Sarah Palin and Bush really supercharged this. But I think that Trump really is like the nadir of this. And you have people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz. These are third or fourth generation Republicans in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and their anger about the Civil Rights movement, the anger that that exists in the first place. And their politics have moved in this extreme right-wing way so that where they are now is essentially, I would argue, right next to Peter Thiel and his anti-empathy, anti-democracy. They agree. They're also anti-democracy. You can't say, I don't think—I think we would both agree that this is Peter Thiel's party in many ways. But I don't think that you can also look at the extreme Republican Party that exists right now and say that that's all because of Peter Thiel or even that that's all because of Donald Trump. It's the culmination of all of these different right wing, radicalized nations that have been going on for a long time. So, I think, in many ways, that they just happen to be there right at the right time. So, when they're funding different media and they are trying to push forward this idea of anti-democracy, which I think is—and I think that you're getting at this—I think is a real problem that is happening right now. We are at a really dangerous moment in American history as far as democratic institutions. And the current situation is one where even like the pretense of caring about democracy or caring about other people is completely out the window. And that's, I think, also why you do see sometimes these think tanks kind of pushing back a little bit because I think you are right in that somewhat of their ideology is kind of based on at least being like, OK, hold on. We don't want to completely change this stuff. I would argue that they're not really in favor of liberal democracy. But they're also not in favor of the careening wagon going off the cliff that we're on right now. You know what I mean? It's like Calvin Hobbes going faster and faster and faster. I don't think that they're on board with that.
Cory Barker: You've written a lot about some of these figures who have been more publicly libertarian or right wing for a while. But I think one of the interesting things happening on the journalism side is that we see wealthy newspaper owners who were maybe previously more sinner or even more explicitly liberal or voting for Democrats, like at The Washington Post and at the LA Times, now publicly and privately cuddling up to the second Trump administration. From your vantage point, what's behind that shift? And what do you think that means for journalists trying to work within those institutions?
Eoin Higgins: Yeah. So, let's start with Bezos. Now, Bezos makes the calculation during the last few weeks of the election that he is not going to have to paper endorse Harris, which it was going to. We all know that now. He pulled it. And the reason that he makes that calculation is that he knows that if he endorses Harris and Trump wins, there will be consequences. And he knows that if he does this and Harris wins, there will be zero consequences ever because the Democrats will never hold them accountable. And I think that that calculation, which I think, again, is accurate, is one that kind of determines how these guys are approaching this in general because they all have billions of dollars in contracts with the federal government that their businesses rely on for money. And they don't want to disrupt that when it comes to someone like Trump. I really think that the calculation is just that simple, that they are just as simple as just saying, you know what, this is a very easy calculation for me to make. I will be on Trump's side publicly for however long he's in office, for however long this goes. And we'll reap the benefits. And then once he's out of office, I'll just make nice with the Democrats. And they won't say anything. And I don't really see that ever not being true. And I find myself going back and forth on whether or not that's a good thing or not. And the reason I find myself going back and forth on whether it's a good thing or not is because I would like to see the Democrats show more spine and to push back against these guys a lot more on the one hand. But on the other hand, the kind of graft and pay to play kind of stuff that we see from Trump I don't think is something that should be emulated by other political parties. But unfortunately, what happens is that if you don't make it so there are political consequences for backing this kind of politics, then there aren't consequences for backing this kind of politics. You see what I mean? It's a circular logic. I don't really know where I come down on it. But I think that's why these guys have taken these positions because they know that they can just do whatever. And there won't be like a massive consequences for them. And their businesses really do rely on the federal government. I mean, I think that that is the thing. I mean, all of these guys are—I quote Professor Olivier Jutel, who's a professor in New Zealand. And he said, "Behind every Silicon Valley libertarian, there's a big fat government contract." And he's right. It's true. All of these companies rely on the federal government for their funding and for their money. So yeah, I think that they are in a situation where they feel this is the most good faith interpretation, where they feel that this is what they have to do to weather the next four years and that unless he does something so egregious, they don't really care. I mean, they didn't really care during the first term either. They didn't care about the things that he did that hurt people. I think when you are the CEO of a multi-billion globe spanning corporation, how much are you going to care about individual people who aren't within your circle? So, I think that's just kind of a natural reaction there. And so, I think that for the people who are like that and who own these newspapers, I just don't think that it really comes into the calculation. You have some who are. You have some institutions like The New York Times and Harvard who are basically telling them to kick rocks because they are powerful institutions and because they can do that. But I think for the most part, I think that unless you have a real ideological reason to push back slash you think that if you don't, the consequences might be worse, you're probably just going to go along to get along.
Matt Jordan: I just wanted to thank you so much for stopping by and talking about this. It's something for us to be aware of. It's something for all of us to think about as we think about the function of the free press. And really appreciate you being here.
Eoin Higgins: Absolutely. Let me just finish here, though, because that's a really cynical note to leave it on, what I just said. So, I do just want to say that as far as the broader general media goes, we are definitely at a point where there's a lot of change still going on. And there's a lot of disruption still going on. But I am optimistic about the future of media. I think this is a blip. I don't think that this is the end of the story. And I don't think that this is the death knell for news media and journalism. So, I think we're just getting through this. And I don't think that people with power don't spend this much money and political capital on a fight that they're winning. So that'll be kind of what I would like to leave us on there, just to say, I don't think it's quite the end of the world. Thank you for having me.
Matt Jordan: Well, with that, thanks, again, for coming by. That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Eoin Higgins, a journalist with IT Brew, whose work explores how money and power influences the media landscape. To hear the full interview, including extended content, listen wherever you get your podcasts or at newsovernoise.org. I'm Matt Jordan.
Cory Barker: And I'm Cory Barker.
Matt Jordan: Until next time, stay well and well informed. News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and WPSU. This program has been funded by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
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Episode Credits:
Producer: Lindsey Whissel Fenton
Audio Engineers: Mickey Klein, Scott Gros, Clint Yoder
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications. This program has been funded by the office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
