In recent years, a number of alpha legacy media outlets have been bought — and decapitated — by some of the wealthiest men in America. These media outlets were once part of a vibrant news and information landscape, breaking investigative stories that have become part of the cultural fabric of America: Watergate, Pentagon Papers, Trump’s Hollywood Access tape, Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, the Edward Snowden exposé about NSA surveillance, exposing McCarthyism, Harvey Weinstein #MeToo coverage, all of these stories and more were launched by some of the prized media companies that are now being brought to heel by their wealthy “media plantation” owners.

Beyond the legacy media defenestration, as the news and information ecosystem has morphed with the rise of the so-called “social” media, the original dream of “internet liberation” has been replaced by the nightmare of surveillance capitalism, personal data grabs and privacy violations, and viral disinformation campaigns resulting in an increasingly toxic politics. Large chunks of the US media landscape have turned into a cesspool that violates long cherished norms of a free and responsible press. Not that the American media-scape ever fully lived up to the highest norms and ideals, but the “great free press” standard was crucial toward some measure of accountability, both at home and abroad.

Now that media standard is in freefall, and the downward slide has been abetted by a disturbing trend: the purchase of media flagships by wealthy American aristocrats. “Freedom of the press” is being rapidly replaced by “freedom of oligarchs to publish—or not—whatever they damn well please.”