After urging land reform I now know the brute power of our billionaire press | George Monbiot

A report I helped publish has led to attacks and flat-out falsehoods in the rightwing media. It's clear whose interests they serveAll billionaires want the same thing - a world that works for them. For many, this means a world in which they are scarcely taxed and scarcely regulated; where labour is cheap and the planet can be used as a dustbin; where they can flit between tax havens and secrecy regimes, using the Earth's surface as a speculative gaming board, extracting profits and dumping costs. The world that works for them works against us.So how, in nominal democracies, do they get what they want? They fund political parties and lobby groups, set up fake grassroots (Astroturf) campaigns and finance social media ads. But above all, they buy newspapers and television stations. The widespread hope and expectation a few years ago was that, in the internet age, news controlled by billionaires would be replaced by news controlled by the people: social media would break their grip. But social media is instead dominated by stories the billionaire press generates. As their crucial role in promoting Nigel Farage, Brexit and Boris Johnson suggests, the newspapers are as powerful as ever. Continue reading...