Have not the wealthy always owned large parts of the media?

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/business/media/the-return...

This isn't a new trend. Rich people have always purchased news media, often to help their other businesses. It's been going on for the longest time.

Indeed, in the US many of the newspapers were started by political parties who used the papers to push their candidates.

The US did used to have rules preventing too much concentration of media ownership.

Then the telecommunication act of 1996 happened and jettisoned a bunch of those rules “to foster competition”, which in fact predictably reduced competition. Later action prompted by the act (2003) made it even worse.

It has always been the case that rich & powerful folks tend to own media, but for a while we had pretty effective rules preventing any one entity from controlling too much of a given media market, which tempered that tendency. We got rid of much of that, with predictable results.

Who do you think owned mass media before this?

won't someone think of the multimillionaires who were outbid when trying to buy mass media?

Billionaires are in a separate category. It's not good that one person has enough money to control so much.

The problem is the concentration. One person majority owning a platform as influential as Twitter or an expansive media empire (Murdochs) is not good for democracy. If the empire was split up to ten different multimillionaires we'd be better off.

In the UK we have the BBC where every word is considered to be a fact. They have TV channels and radio shows where 'today's curated and extremely edited sound-bites' are broadcast every 30 minutes, 24/7.

At least with billionaire owners it's taken as read there is going to be some nuance.