The Sun: Owned by Billionaire Rupert Murdoch 🇺🇸 🇦🇺

The Times and The Sunday Times: Owned by Billionaire Rupert Murdoch 🇺🇸 🇦🇺

The Daily Telegraph: Owned by Red Bird, a US Investment firm. 🇺🇸

GB News: Owned by Paul Marshall, a London financier.

The Spectator: Owned by Paul Marshall, a London financier.

The Daily Mail: Owned by Lord Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere. He is a member of the House of Lords .

The Observer: Owned by James Harding and by the billionaire Thomson family which owns Thomson Reuters 🇨🇦

Byline Times: It’s owned by JTC Trustees (58%), Peter Jukes (18.6%) and Stephen Colegrave (18.5%)

Prospect: It’s a non-profit newsroom owned by the Resolution Trust

The Independent: Owned by Evgeny Lebedev 🇷🇺 and Muhammad Abuljadayel 🇸🇦

Private Eye: Privately owned by a company named Pressdram. The owner seem to be Ian Hislop, Sheila Ann Molnar and Geoff Michael Elwell

The Economist: Owned by the Billionaire Agnelli family 🇮🇹. The Cadburry family and the Rothschild family are major shareholders.

The Guardian: It’s a non-profit newspaper owned by the Scott Trust.

The Financial Times: Owned by Nikkei 🇯🇵

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As a non-brit, here are my observations.

• I think the 3 best papers in Britain are the Financial Times, The Guardian (which I financially support!) and Private Eye.

• The FT is the most expensive newspaper in the world. The quality of the foreign, political and business reporting is absolutely outstanding. The articles are short, useful and full of insight. You really understand why rich businessmen love this paper. However, their environment coverage and labor-rights coverage is often substandard. I also don’t always agree with some of the right-wing tone.

• The Guardian gets a lot of unfair criticism because people don’t like some silly opinion pieces. I find this ridiculous. Most UK papers have published very silly pieces. Most opinion pieces in the Guardian are actually quiet interesting. The Guardian investigative journalism is a jewel. Their editorial independence allows them to pursue stories other UK papers don’t have the guts to publish.

• Private Eye is absolutely lovely

• The Byline Times is a small and wonderful newspaper. But it’s also strange. They do a lot of great journalism, they keep exposing water companies, corrupt lobbying, scandals. Yet they are owned by… a financial firm based in Jersey?! It just doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why would a financial firm support a newspaper against the establishment…?

• I really hate The Economist 😡. The current chairman of The Economist is a House of Lords member named Paul Deighton. A former Goldman Sachs banker, friend of David Cameron, he was in charge of PPE contracts during Covid 19.

From the New York Times:

To shine a light on one of the greatest spending sprees in Britain’s postwar era, The New York Times analyzed a large segment of it, the roughly 1,200 central government contracts that have been made public, together worth nearly $22 billion. Of that, about $11 billion went to companies either run by friends and associates of politicians in the Conservative Party, or with no prior experience or a history of controversy. Meanwhile, smaller firms without political clout got nowhere.

The procurement system was cobbled together during a meeting of anxious bureaucrats in late March, and a wealthy former investment banker and Conservative Party grandee, Paul Deighton, who sits in the House of Lords, was later tapped to act as the government’s czar for personal protective equipment.

Lord Deighton helped the government award billions of dollars in contracts –– including hundreds of millions to several companies where he has financial interests or personal connections.

Dozens of companies that won a total of $3.6 billion in contracts had poor credit, and several had declared assets of just $2 or $3 each. Others had histories of fraud, human rights abuses, tax evasion or other serious controversies. A few were set up on the spur of the moment or had no relevant experience — and still won contracts.

Lord Deighton, who was once a Goldman Sachs executive, remains involved in business and has financial or personal connections to at least seven companies that were awarded lucrative government contracts totalling nearly $300 million, the Times has learned.

Many companies and business people, often better qualified to produce P.P.E. but lacking political connections, had no access.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/17/world/europe/britain-covid-contracts.html

Why is Lord Paul Deighton still chairman of The Economist?!!!

https://www.economistgroup.com/esg/board

Fuck the corrupt Economist.

• A lot of quality small local newspapers doing an amazing job are financially struggling. It’s very sad.

• Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, actively encouraged Tony Blair to bomb Iraq. He spread climate change denial in Australia. He once told John Major to change British Foreign Policy.

• It’s just bonkers that the owner of the Daily Mail (Jonathan Harmsworth) is also a House of Lords member.

• I don’t often read Prospect, but when I do, I find the articles pretty damn good. The editor (Alan Rustbridger) won many awards for breaking the Edward Snowden NSA leaks.

• The new rising media figure is Paul Marshall. He created GB News to push Trump-style politics. I think a lot of people on the UK-right will cosy up him.