Billionaires agree free press essential for democracy

The Global Conference on Media Freedom wrapped today in London. I eagerly searched my Globe and Mail and the CBC, Canada’s pre-eminent news outlets, for the downlow on the state of press freedom in the world.

The Globe has apparently taken Paul Waldie off the press freedom file, as he was tasked with providing a story on the resignation of the UK ambassador to the US. As an aside, the Globe had a brilliant cartoon on view Tuesday addressing that “diplomatic incident.

 
Sometimes the cartoonist is the smartest guy at the paper.

So Waldie was busy and it therefore fell to unpaid intern Jill Lawless to update us on the state of the free press, and by default, the state of democracy itself, because as we all know, without a free press, democracy is a gonner.

But bear in mind that when we’re talking about “free press,” we’re not talking about folks like Manning or Assange, who actually expose the lies and crimes of our governments.

No, that’s got nothing to do with “press freedom.” That’s just treason.

All things considered, Jill did a good job. Lot’s of good stuff about Amal Clooney and Jeremy Hunt calling out Mafia Don on his vile attacks on journalism. Not a mention of Assange, of course, who is cooling his heels at Belmarsh Prison, a mere twelve miles away from this celebration of free media.

Over at the CBC, it fell to Derek Stoffel to give us the latest news from London. Derek tells us it’s all about the money. He tells us that we, the Canadian taxpayers, committed a cool million to the cause of press freedom. He tells us that the main sponsor of the media freedom conference, the “global philanthropic organization” Luminate, wants to see at least $1.3 billion raised to fight for press freedom.

Derek forgot to tell us that Luminate is a vanity project of eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who could easily fork out the entire 1.3 billions without having to skip any meals. As I mentioned yesterday, Pierre has lots of billionaire pals who also are deeply concerned about press freedom and want government money to make it happen.

Here’s Pierre’s pal Richard Branson on Why we should defend media freedom.

And it’s all good! I couldn’t agree more!

But here’s the problem… when billionaires own the world’s media, including the platform that this blog is published on, what’s holding them back from allowing more media freedom?