There have been rumblings in Congress about making hedge funds and private equity more transparent, but to date there’s been little headway. Now, before there’s no one left to report on it, it’s time to ask whether private equity and hedge funds should be allowed in the news business at all.
If hedge funds remain in the news business, they need to be fully transparent. Stakeholders—employees, readers, and the general public—need to know their investors, their managers, and their corporate governance. Likewise, if hedge funds remain in news, they need to be located in the United States. There is a good reason campaign finance laws prohibit donations from foreign nationals. The same should be applied to news.
Can’t allow any foreign capitalists to tell us the baseball scores after all.
At this point, the US media is so toxic that I question whether Americans should be allowed in the news business. A media industry staffed by Papuan headhunters and those African guys who make the clicking noises would be far better than what we have.
Very true, JerryC.
‘fully transparent’ They need to know their investors’ street addresses, so antifa can visit them.
ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox are owned by multinational corporations. For most (if not all) of these corporations have significant business interests outside of the USA. That’s how you end up with Disney allowing the Chinese Communist Party to censor its movies prior to release. Disney owns ABC, which in turn owns ABC News.
So why is it OK for multinationals own news outlets but not OK for hedge funds to own them?
Is it OK for Carlos Slim to have a significant ownership interest in the New York Times?
I would point out that a good reason to not restrict any sort of ‘news’ agency to only operating out of the country they’re reporting on are the laws in the UK (and elsewhere) that allow prior restraint to be applied to reporting.
Those big celebrity cases where the local papers were forbidden from reporting the accused’s name but American papers were not so constrained – and global access to reporting routing around such censorship.
OR, we could try freedom.
So, failing institutions should be allowed to fail faster for lack of foreign investment? Sounds like the cutting edge of raw capitalism *snark*
The claim is utter madness.
But then, quelle surprise.
But to rephrase
“**I** should be in charge of all this”
Isn’t this just another excuse to attack Fox News because it is owned by Murdoch? [Yes, I know that Rupert has registered as an US citizen but he’s 89 so won’t be around for too long].
I agree that Hedge Funds should not be allowed to influence news media because the conflict of interest on choosing what to publish are obvious to the average Rabbit (or even Pooh, a bear of very little brain) but the nationality of the Hedge Fund is irrelevant.
The Left has gone into hysterics over foreign influence in politics and it has been imported into the UK.
Well OK, why should a Mexican own a chunk of the NYT? Naturally they will take a certain view on immigration.
But if we are concerned about Russian influence, why should a Russian own the Independent? If we are concerned about foreign influence why should we allow a shadowy off shore entity in a notorious tax haven to run the Guardian?
Normally I would be all for letting anyone run a paper but I am seeing an upside to this. Perhaps we should ban all newspapers except the Telegraph. The Barclay Brothers may live in Guernsey or wherever but at least they are British.
Mind you, not a lot of difference between the Tellie and the Guardian these days.
Why should the government own media outlets like the BBC, which is the elephant in the room in all of this?
We have, here, the First Amendment. Which Julie seems not to have heard of.
No Economist USA. No Spectator USA. No Financial Times USA.
No Guardian USA. No CNN Europe. (No great loss those last two)
john77 said:
“I agree that Hedge Funds should not be allowed to influence news media because the conflict of interest on choosing what to publish are obvious to the average Rabbit”
Why does that apply to hedgies more than anyone else?