Before I get into a few deep-dive examinations of three of the most dangerous purveyors of weaponized fake news in the American media landscape (the New York Times, MSNBC, and Bloomberg News), I believe it’s important to focus on a few individuals who control the American news landscape, to one degree or another. These are the people who fund, publish, edit, report, or anchor the news broadcasts you and your fellow citizens consume on a daily basis. They are not neutral automatons or merely “liberal-leaning.” No, these individuals brazenly advance the agenda of the corporate media apparatuses and the Democrat Party, and meeting a few of them will give you a sense of how they make decisions that benefit already powerful establishment insiders and disenfranchise the individual and the outsider.
There are many examples that are well known. The fact that George Stephanopoulos, who hosts ABC’s Good Morning America, was Bill Clinton’s White House communications director is so often repeated in articles and books on media bias that it is a running joke in the Breitbart newsroom.
It’s also fairly well known that CNN’s Jake Tapper is married to a former Planned Parenthood field organizer.1
CNN’s Jim Sciutto joined the network from a gig in the Barack Obama administration.2
CNN’s Chris Cuomo, or as he is known at Breitbart News, “Fredo,” is the younger brother of Democrat New York governor Andrew Cuomo and the son of former Democrat New York governor Mario Cuomo. “Fredo” is a reference to the dumb brother in the Godfather movies who ended up in a media job. I credit Breitbart writer, and my actual godfather, John Nolte with popularizing the nickname. CNN’s Fredo was humiliated in August 2019 when he melted down at a heckler who called him “Fredo” to his face in New York City; Fredo responded by saying the word “Fredo” is the equivalent of the N-word, but for Italians. (It isn’t.)3
CNN head Jeff Zucker chose Fredo to anchor the prime-time 9 p.m. hour over Tapper.4 Since then, Fredo has made a fool of himself on a number of occasions. He has defended the radicals of Antifa multiple times, calling the group a “good cause”; he once compared the violent far-leftists to Allied troops storming the beaches of Normandy, France, in World War II.5 Cuomo has said Black Lives Matter protests need not be peaceful (which directly contradicts the language of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution).6 “Now too many see the protests as the problem,” he opined on his CNN show, referring to the violent uprisings after George Floyd’s death in the summer of 2020. “No, the problem is what forced your fellow citizens to take to the streets: persistent, poisonous inequities and injustice.” So, the Black Lives Matter looters were victims of the system and were not actually part of the problem. Cuomo also had a hoax “quarantine” after being diagnosed with coronavirus (more on this later) and was busted in blatant mask hypocrisy, ignoring the advice he had given to his television audience—and the threats from his more powerful brother.7 Technically, the elder Cuomo should have fined his younger brother.8
CNN seemingly doesn’t care about conflicts of interest.9 After all, network president Jeff Zucker let his then-fifteen-year-old son Andrew join Democrat senator Cory Booker’s Internet start-up as a “millennial adviser.” The Zucker spawn was even given stock. It was a stupid move by Zucker, especially since the teenage son of a media mogul didn’t need the money. Jeff famously threw young Andrew a lavish bar mitzvah just two years prior at the Four Seasons hotel featuring superstar rapper Drake. Drake’s fee for the evening was reportedly $250,000 (Zucker purportedly cheapo-ed out when Kanye West, Andrew’s first choice, asked for a cool million for one night’s work, according to Elle magazine).10
The list goes on.
Behind-the-scenes decision makers at outlets like CNN are also literally in bed with the Biden/Democrat establishment. Take CNN senior vice president of newsgathering Virginia Moseley, for example.11 Her husband, Tom Nides, served as deputy secretary of state under Hillary Clinton. He is currently managing director and vice chairman of the super-national investment bank Morgan Stanley. Nides was a top bundler for Biden’s 2020 campaign and is on the advisory board of the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware.12 It appears as though Nides and Moseley shamelessly feed each other information: WikiLeaks released an email showing Nides tipping off Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta to a favorable CNN poll that was soon to be released. Biden secretary of state Tony Blinken was a CNN analyst.13
Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s deputy press secretary, is married to CNN anchor Suzanne Malveaux.14
Big business cash. Democrat politics. Corporate media influence. These are the ingredients that create a culture of corruption among America’s ruling class.
While the revolving door of CNN employees and Democrat Party power players spins in a seemingly endless loop, other media companies are just as bad.
(Though several Breitbart employees joined the Trump administration, we openly state our biases.)
Over at MSNBC, presidential historian Jon Meacham, legal analyst Barbara McQuade, political analyst Richard Stengel, and health expert Ezekiel Emanuel all ditched the peacock network for Biden World.15
As with CNN, MSNBC’s less-public influencers are dedicated establishment Democrats. NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell was a major bundler for the Obama campaign.16 In 2013, President Obama appointed him chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Asia. Shell’s wife, Laura, was a heavyweight bundler for Biden.17 His sister is Dana Shell Smith, whom Barack Obama appointed ambassador to Qatar; she was held over into the early months of the Trump administration, only leaving after she had trashed the American president while she was overseas.18
Jeff Shell is one of the most powerful people at NBCUniversal, and his family is passionately dedicated to the Democrat political establishment, yet we’re expected to believe they will preside over responsible news coverage. This isn’t mere bias; this is potential corruption.
One of the more shameless stars of NBC News is none other than Chuck Todd. Todd’s wife, Kristian Denny, is a major Democratic campaign consultant.19 According to OpenSecrets, Denny’s firm, Maverick Strategies, was paid over $900,000 by the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2020 and over $1.5 million from Sanders in 2016, among many examples.20
In 2008, soon after she had become a U.S. senator, Amy Klobuchar and her husband, John Bessler, began renting a house in Arlington, Virginia, from Todd. She and her husband paid the Todds $3,200 a month.21 This relationship went undisclosed for years in interviews and debates, even when Todd was the moderator.
Print media has the same incestuousness issues as TV news.
New York Times media correspondent and former BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith has maintained his stock in BuzzFeed, an outlet he is tasked with covering. He claimed that he intended to sell his shares—as of March 2021, this hasn’t happened yet (more on Smith later). NBCUniversal is one of BuzzFeed’s largest shareholders and is a “strategic partner.” Smith seems to have an especially close relationship with NBC; NBC media correspondent Dylan Byers was given the scoop that Smith was moving over to the Times.22 Smith also famously (and embarrassingly) defended NBC and attacked Ronan Farrow after NBC had passed on Farrow’s Pulitzer-winning #MeToo reporting.23 NBC has pumped in $400 million to BuzzFeed; observers have speculated in the past that NBC will one day take over BuzzFeed outright.24
But maybe this is all just coincidental and not at all evidence that the media elite are easily capable of widespread corruption and are on a collective mission to maintain the status quo.
The single fakest fake news story of the 2020 election news cycle—and there was a lot of competition—was a report published in the Atlantic by editor in chief Jeffery Goldberg.25 On September 3, 2020, Goldberg posted an article with the bombshell headline “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.’ ” Notice there are no caveats or legalese in this headline. There is no wiggle room. The way this is written, Goldberg knows Trump said these horrible things. The subheadline was equally emphatic: “The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades, multiple sources tell The Atlantic.”
Explosive, if true. Appalling, really. No one should vote for Donald Trump if he actually said these things and meant them. And the EIC of the Atlantic was gambling his name on the headline being accurate.
And the timing of this story was literally too good to be true. These accounts of a saga that played out in 2018 somehow surfaced mere weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
And not just that. The story was released (coincidentally, so we’re to believe) right as terrific jobs data was released and promising news was breaking in the Middle East, where relations between Israel and the Muslim world were normalizing by the day. In other words, it interrupted a precious favorable news moment for President Trump.26 All of this was placed on the back burner, while we dealt with yet another anti-Trump hysteria du jour.
A summary of the Atlantic’s story: Goldberg reported that Trump canceled an appearance at a commemoration ceremony for fallen American Marines at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery outside of Paris in 2018. Why did he bail on the visit? Because he allegedly “feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain,” according to this super-serious news report. “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” Trump allegedly said. Trump then reportedly referred to 1,800+ Marines who perished at Belleau Wood as “suckers.”
The story exploded across international media. It was everywhere. You couldn’t avoid it. It was the perfect Rorschach test. If you were on the left, you’re thinking that with exactly two months to go until election day, the vaunted Atlantic had finally gotten the Bad Orange Man dead to rights. And they had four(!) sources backing up their headline. But, if you were a Trump backer, every word of the article read like satire, a left-wing fantasy, or maybe one of Adam Schiff’s stupid dramatizations.
In a massive yet entirely predictable breach of journalistic ethics, it’s also possible that the Atlantic coordinated the article launch with the Biden campaign. The piece ran on a Thursday evening, and by the following morning a left-wing group called VoteVets already had cut an anti-Trump ad around it, which aired on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. The rapid nature of this timeline is suspicious.
That morning, the Biden campaign held a press call featuring Democrat senator and Purple Heart recipient Tammy Duckworth (IL), Democrat congressman and Marine Conor Lamb (PA), and Gold Star dad and 2016 DNC star Khizr Khan.27 The duration of the call was spent explaining that Donald Trump is a particularly horrible person.
Joe Biden held a press conference later that day.28 He opened with a statement in which he invoked his late son, Beau, who was a veteran, in order to trash Trump as unfit for office. “When my son volunteered and joined the United States military, and went to Iraq for a year, won the Bronze Star and other commendations, he was not a sucker,” he said, treating the Atlantic’s bogus story as if it were a papal bull.29
The first question at the presser went to a reporter from—brace yourself for shocking information—the Atlantic! The question, asked by reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere,30 was what you would have expected, only more absurd: “When you hear these remarks—‘suckers,’ ‘losers,’ recoiling from amputees—what does it tell you about President Trump’s soul, and the life he leads?”
What does a fake news smear tell you about President Trump’s soul!? This was a preview of the type of questions I’m sure we’ll see asked of Joe Biden throughout his administration.
Other media moved quickly to boost the Atlantic’s Trump attack.
Even the tech platforms seemed to be all in on hyping the story. It soared across the social web without any of the notes of caution or fact-checks that became increasingly commonplace throughout 2020.
NBC News White House correspondent Peter Alexander did his part to try to legitimize the story by asking President Trump if he needed to apologize.31
Even some Fox News personalities got in on the fake news bonanza. Reporter Jennifer Griffin claimed that she had confirmed some of the details of the Atlantic story, citing two—brace yourself for shocking information—unnamed “senior” administration officials.32
Were they the same “sources”? How would we ever know? Everyone is anonymous. And what makes them “senior” anyway? Does anyone really know? But it didn’t matter, so long as the story harmed Trump.
President Trump called for Griffin to be fired, at which point several of her Fox colleagues jumped in to defend her.
There was one glaring hole in the Atlantic’s reporting, though: all four sources were anonymous. There wasn’t a single on-record witness cited who backed up the article’s central claims.
Trump World maintained that the president couldn’t make the helicopter trip to the cemetery that day due to inclement weather around Paris; FOIA’d documents suggest weather was indeed the reason for the cancellation.33
A flood of on-record sources who were on the trip with President Trump denied Goldberg’s anonymous accounts. The U.S. ambassador to France and Monaco, Jaime McCourt, threw heavy shade at the Atlantic, telling Breitbart exclusively, “I never spoke to the Atlantic, and I can’t imagine who would.” “POTUS has NEVER denigrated any member of the U.S. military or anyone in service to our country,” she continued.34
More and more on-record witnesses weighed in:
Former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders called the story “total BS.”
Actual senior adviser Stephen Miller called it a “despicable lie.”
Presidential counselor Johnny DeStefano said the story “is not true. Period.”
Deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley said the piece contained “disgusting, grotesque, reprehensible lies.”
The president’s former body man Jordan Karem said, “This is not even close to being factually accurate. Plain and simple, it just never happened.” “Again,” he tweeted, “this is 100 percent false.”35
And finally, the pièces de résistance, anti-Trump forces with firsthand knowledge of the trip and the conversations in question began disputing the Atlantic and Jeffrey Goldberg. Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, who had turned on Trump in highly dramatic and public fashion, flat out denied both the Goldberg report and the Jen Griffin report during an interview on Fox News. “That was false and I recounted that in my book, Room Where It Happened,” said Bolton. Here’s what he said occurred:
The people I recall being there were John Kelly, one of his aides, Mike Pompeo, myself, Jamie McCourt, our ambassador to France. We had this discussion, it was mostly John Kelly presenting the logistical reasons why the trip couldn’t take place and the president assented to the recommendations that he not go. He didn’t protest that he really needed to go. He just sort of took the facts as they were, a very straight weather call.36
This account is devastating to the Atlantic’s credibility because not only did Jeffrey Goldberg allege that Trump said horrible things about dead troops, but Trump also allegedly refused to commemorate them because it would have messed up his coif. Bolton, a Trump hater, says he can’t confirm the former charge and flat out rejects the latter.
Former deputy White House chief of staff Zach Fuentes put the final dagger in the Atlantic’s report via an exclusive comment to Breitbart News.
Remember, all roads lead to Breitbart.
Fuentes, a close ally of then–White House chief of staff John Kelly, had briefed President Trump on the weather that day. Here’s what he told our Washington political editor Matthew Boyle:
You can put me on record denying that I spoke with The Atlantic. I don’t know who the sources are. I did not hear POTUS call anyone losers when I told him about the weather. Honestly, do you think General Kelly would have stood by and let ANYONE call fallen Marines losers?
The last point is critical, and something that the Atlantic probably didn’t consider. John Kelly might have had a strained relationship with President Trump, both while serving as chief of staff and afterward, but he is a four-star general and Gold Star father.37 His son Robert M. Kelly was killed on November 9, 2010, by an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan while serving his nation as a Marine.38 The Atlantic’s report implies that General Kelly stood idly by as Donald Trump trashed dead troops, like his own son.
This was unthinkable, if not impossible.
The fake news story had officially collapsed.
If you think that this would be a setback for Jeffrey Goldberg or the Atlantic, you’re misunderstanding what is important in establishment American media circles. Credibility, integrity, accuracy, even breaking big stories are no longer what is rewarded by our media. Weaponizing your platform to attack Donald Trump and his supporters on behalf of the corporate establishment is the apotheosis of journalism in these modern times.
Yes, Goldberg and the Atlantic had served their purpose. What would have been a terrific news cycle for President Trump was wiped off the front pages for a few days while the media debated this hoax.
The Atlantic reportedly saw a big influx in subscriptions after the fake news article grabbed international media attention. (The Atlantic never retracted the story, and editor Goldberg says he stands by his reporting.) Instead of condemning the Atlantic for their shoddy and clearly partisan journalism, the media was in a congratulatory mood.39 “The Atlantic gained 20,000 subscribers after Trump dismissed it as a ‘dying’ magazine,” CNN enthusiastically reported.40
Weeks later, long after the Atlantic story had been debunked, Barack Obama repeated the “suckers” and “losers” lie while on the stump for Joe Biden. Said Obama, “I can tell you this, Joe Biden would never call the men and women of our military ‘suckers or losers.’ Who does that?”41
As Orwell warned, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” The truth isn’t necessarily the truth. The truth is what the fake news media and the Democrat establishment decide is the truth. If the Atlantic and Joe Biden and MSNBC all agree to push an obvious lie, does that lie over time become the truth?
I shudder to think how history will remember this event.
As a news outlet, the Atlantic is abominable. They once had to massively overhaul an anti-science article that claimed fetal heartbeats are “imaginary”; the author was lamenting that advances in sonograms and other technologies used to monitor pregnancies (and save lives) were leading to fewer abortions.42 The magazine routinely uses solo anonymous sources to trash Donald Trump and his allies.43 They attempted to hire a single conservative columnist, a Never Trump troll from the National Review named Kevin Williamson, who made it exactly one column before getting fired, canceled by the woke mob. The essence of his one column for the Atlantic was—you guessed it—criticizing others in the conservative movement, including the venerable Victor Davis Hanson, also of National Review. It must have been incredibly awkward when Williamson slinked back to NR after trashing his colleague.
The Atlanatic ran a major piece legitimizing more censorship by Big Tech oligarchs and praised China’s Internet authoritarianism.44 From an article by Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor, and Andrew Keane Woods, a professor of law at the University of Arizona:
In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.
According to Freedom House, China ranks among the worst countries on earth when it comes to Internet freedom.45
Horrible journalists, often horrible people. But they do all these horrible things with the patina of sophistication. The magazine is very old and very glossy and lots of important people used to write there and some still do. That means something to certain people.
But it really only needs to mean something to one person. And that person is Laurene Powell Jobs. Jobs, whom Vox describes as “one of the world’s most important philanthropists,” is the widow of Apple founder and billionaire computer guru Steve Jobs. She has become a secret superpower behind a vast network of left-wing media outlets, organizations, and politicians.
Laurene Powell Jobs topped Business Insider’s list of world’s richest women in tech in 2019, even though she’s not really “in tech.”46 She’s in the philanthropy/being an heiress business. What Jobs does is leverage her incredible wealth, infinite Rolodex, and relatively secretive public persona to wield unfathomable amounts of influence on the American culture. If there’s a well-known persona comparable to Laurene Powell Jobs, it’s Hungarian billionaire George Soros. Soros is known for his philanthropy, but also for being a one-man piggy bank for the far left. (Recently, Soros-connected groups have spent big pushing the Green New Deal, taxpayer-funded health care for illegal aliens, and the expansion of mail-in voting.)47
A good share of Laurene Powell Jobs’s power is through the Emerson Collective (EC), which she founded; she currently serves as its president.48 The Emerson Collective, according to Forbes, is “a hybrid philanthropic and investing limited liability company.” That’s a pretty murky description (which is probably the point), but it seems like the EC has devised a clever and convenient structure where they can claim they are “investing” when the business has a chance to succeed and they are doing “philanthropy” when they fund entities for purely ideological reasons with little or no hope of making money. I’m not sure which of the two categories it falls under, but the Emerson Collective owns the Atlantic.49
Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan and general services administrator Dan Tangherlini are part of EC.50 Emerson Collective employees give almost exclusively to Democrats.51
The Emerson Collective funds Democratic causes that most nonprofits wouldn’t be able to touch. For example, in 2016, EC gave $2.5 million to DNC super-PAC Priorities Action USA. Nonprofits are normally restricted from engaging in overt political activity, but EC’s unique structure has thus far kept them legally protected. EC also hosted a dozen DNC-aligned voter registration groups for a fund-raiser in 2020.
Forbes lists Jobs as one of the ten richest women on earth, with a net worth of around $16 billion, mostly from her family stakes in two of the world’s biggest companies: Apple and Disney.52 The revenue from a print magazine with a mediocre digital presence like the Atlantic in a given year probably isn’t enough to pay for the crew and annual maintenance on her yacht. So why does EC invest in this brand? It’s possibly because Laurene Powell Jobs has an agenda and sees sleekly packaged fake news as a way to advance it.
In a New York Times puff piece on Jobs and the Emerson Collective, EC managing director of media and former New York Times reporter Peter Lattman (again, the media is incestuous) said that “we invest in and support super high-quality journalism.”53
Who doesn’t love “super high-quality journalism”?
So, which outlets are supplying this journalism?
The EC funds the Atlantic and Axios, both prestige brands. They also fund Mother Jones, which is far left but does get some good scoops. ProPublica, which is part of the activist left but also does solid reporting, is also EC funded.54 The Emerson Collective has also partnered with NowThis, a hyperpartisan left-wing viral news video operation targeted at millennials; NowThis champions woke causes and makes heroes out of Democrat politicians and leftist celebrities. Axios broke the news of the partnership (again, so incestuous!) between the Emerson Collective and NowThis.55
(Axios routinely breaks news about businesses that share the same investors; I found well over a dozen examples of this while researching this book. Of the examples I encountered, Axios only disclosed the business relationships about half the time.)
The synergy between Jobs’s media empire and her political agenda is not exactly subtle. The Emerson Collective has partnered with Stacey Abrams’s Fair Fight voting effort, which has been touted at Emerson Collective outlets, including Axios, the Atlantic, and NowThis.56
Laurene Powell Jobs and the Emerson Collective’s business model is simple, fairly genius, ethically suspect, and potentially corrupt. Fund the activists, organizations, and politicians that share her ideology, and fund the media outlets that are supposed to cover them neutrally. This not only ensures a degree of positive coverage, it makes it far less likely any nosey journalists will snoop around—after all, many of them are literally on the payroll. The EC media outlets are providing incalculable amounts of what is the equivalent of soft money contributions to their favorite causes and candidates.
Jobs is more than just a major Democrat donor; she is said to have a “tight” personal relationship with Kamala Harris, who was a California senator before becoming vice president.57 Naturally, the Atlantic has lavished praise on Harris, barely stopping short of endorsing her during the 2019–20 Democrat primaries.58 Here is how the Atlantic described the scene when Kamala ordered a pulled pork sandwich at a humble South Carolina barbecue joint: “[T]he patrons are dazzled by Harris, whose star quality drew 20,000 people to her kickoff rally in Oakland. The dynamism she displayed there made the event feel like a cause, or a concert—Kamalapalooza—and gave her campaign significant momentum.”
Evan Ryan, who previously worked as an aide to Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Kerry, was tapped as Joe Biden’s White House cabinet secretary.59 In 2016, she was recruited by Axios in what Vanity Fair called an “unconventional hire.”60 She helped spearhead the Washington-insider website’s marketing and branding. She stepped down in May 2020, exercising over $350,000 in stock options, before joining Team Biden.61 Her husband, Tony Blinken, is the U.S. secretary of state.
This is a massive network of Washington insiders, all conveniently placed throughout Laurene Powell Jobs’s empire.
Some of Jobs’s political efforts are much more brazen. She has funded ACRONYM, a Democratic technology venture, which has “invested” $25 million into Courier Newsroom.62 Courier Newsroom claims to fund independent local newsrooms across the country. In actuality, Courier has avoided restrictions on online political advertising by couching pro-DNC content as news. For example, Courier produces laudatory pieces and videos on Democrat causes and candidates with factory-like regularity.
Bloomberg’s Joshua Green described Courier as “the Left’s plan to slip vote-swaying news into facebook” under the guise of “hypertargeted hometown news.”63 Left-of-center media watchdog NewsGuard was even more cynical: “Courier and Acronym are exploiting the widespread loss of local journalism to create and disseminate something we really don’t need: hyperlocal partisan propaganda.”64
This is all dirty. Perhaps this doesn’t violate the letter of the law, but it appears to me that it violates the spirit of it. It’s certainly unethical not to disclose these clandestine partnerships—it’s arguably fraudulent not to. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) should be all over this; they are aware of what ACRONYM is doing.65 And Laurene Powell Jobs is the connective tissue for all of these causes and outlets.
Interestingly, ACRONYM also launched Shadow Inc., the software developer behind the app that bungled the reporting of the results of the 2020 Iowa caucuses.66
According to an auditor commissioned by the Iowa Democratic Party,67 the DNC’s efforts to meddle with Shadow’s software led to massive delays in reporting the caucus’s results. “Without the DNC’s intervention in that process, the IDP may have reported results in real-time as it intended,” according to the report.
After app failures caused massive delays in the reporting of the results, Shadow Inc. came under fire for ties to the Democrat establishment. David Plouffe, President Obama’s campaign architect, is on ACRONYM’s board, and several top Shadow Inc. execs worked for Hillary Clinton.68 Shadow’s website also is far from transparent in terms of who owns it and runs it.
FEC records revealed that Pete Buttigieg’s campaign paid at least $21,250 to Shadow for “software rights and subscriptions.” When Buttigieg, the thirty-eight-year-old small-town mayor from Indiana, arguably won the caucuses, #MayorCheat trended on social media.69 I guess Pete wasn’t Twitter’s preferred candidate!
Laurene Powell Jobs is a leviathan and her tentacles are seemingly everywhere in America’s liberal landscape. She funds the prestigious, supposedly neutral liberal press; she funds the muckraker left-wing press. She funds Democrat candidates; she funds Democrat activists. She is well connected with the Democrat establishment and with the biggest international businesses. All of these entities work together, and Jobs is often the most important person in the various hierarchies. Yet she remains mysterious and far from a household name. Perhaps that’s why Inside Philanthropy named her 2019’s “Least Transparent Mega-giver.” (Inside Philanthropy isn’t exactly a right-wing group; they named George Soros “Philanthropist of the Year” that year.)
Much of her philanthropy is shielded from public view, and much of it isn’t clearly philanthropic. Emerson Collective is billed as a “social change organization” (emersoncollective.com/social-justice/ is a festival of woke). But EC functions primarily as a private business owned by Jobs’s personal trust. This shields it from IRS disclosure rules and allows it to more freely engage in political activity.
It’s sly and devious, but considering how many media outlets are aligned with Jobs either financially or ideologically, it’s no surprise that little reporting has been done on what appears to be a shadowy influence operation.
After all, if you’re in media, she might be your boss one day. Maybe she already is.
Laurene Powell Jobs went to the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford, she worked for Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, she married well and inherited a lot of money, and her wealth is tied up in some of world’s biggest companies. She is the establishment.
Her most prestigious publication, the Atlantic, was founded by Emerson Collective namesake Ralph Waldo Emerson; it had the founding motto “of no party or clique.” That sentiment is laughable today under Jobs’s leadership. It is one of the corporate Democrat establishment’s favorite weapons. The Emerson Collective office features a mural inspired by Malcolm X’s famed “Ballot or the Bullet” speech; the speech, largely about civil rights and black nationalism, is highly critical of the Democrat Party and powerful whites. What would these men think of a plutocrat tech heiress appropriating their names and legacies as part of a tenebrous political power play?
No one knows, and Laurene Powell Jobs certainly doesn’t care.