Instead of it kind of being like a natural evolution, the net effect of this was always to weaken

the entire institution of journalism, whether it was like independent or mainstream.

Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Owen Higgins.

Owen is a journalist and the author of Owned, how Tech Billionaires on the right bought the loudest voices on the left.

Now, before we get into this week's episode,

I just wanted to say you might be wondering why there haven't been many episodes on recent developments like Deep Seek and everything that's happening with Elon Musk, the tech

billionaires in the U.S. government. Well, that's because I was on vacation the past couple

weeks while many of these things were happening. So if you have been waiting for episodes

on those sorts of issues, you can be sure that over the next few weeks, I will be covering those

things. You know, we will be talking about what Elon Musk is doing. We will be talking about

the state of AI. We will be talking about what's happening in the U.S. government and the wider

consequences of that. I just needed a little break

before we get into it all. Now, this episode I recorded before I went on vacation, but I still think

it very much relates to what is happening in this moment. For people who are really into, you know,

the politics of media, they might be really up on the stories of Glenn Greenwald, the Matt Taibi, and they're

changing political orientations over the past number of years. And that forms a big part of

Owen's book tracking the trajectories of these particular people. And while they do come up in

this interview, I wanted to talk about the more structural factors with Owen that get discussed

in the book as well, but how this transformation in the media ecosystem and in the funding

of media, including how they have funded particular media ventures, has affected and shaped

the types of media and the types of coverage that we now receive, especially as there is

...