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The AI Sector’s Crass Bid for Media Domination

When you’re a galactically rich tech mogul upset with adverse press coverage, you just buy yourself more flattering media outlets.

A ChatGPT assistant display on a laptop

“Freedom of the press,” A.J. Liebling famously wrote, “is guaranteed only to those who own one.” This pithy observation from one of Liebling’s 1960 “Wayward Press” columns in The New Yorker sums up a great deal about how journalism is transacted under the pressures of American capitalism. But the gist of it has to hit different if you have several hundred million dollars sitting around and a reputation that could use a bit of burnishing.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced last week that it was buying Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN), a daily Internet talk show known for its puffball interviews with Silicon Valley execs and hopeful tech entrepreneurs, hosted by two former start-up founders, Jordi Hays and John Coogan. OpenAI shelled out something in the “low hundreds of millions” for the show, according to the Financial Times—a figure likely in the same range as the $250 million that Jeff Bezos spent buying The Washington Post in 2013. The then-venerable-if-troubled paper had a weekday circulation around 450,000 at the time. TBPN, only about a year-and-a-half old, reaches somewhere on the order of 70,000 viewers per show, mostly on X and Youtube. It does, however, have a huge gong, which the six-foot-eight Coogan, the taller of the two hosts, will bang upon to mark any good news guests bring with them to the show. (Hays, for his part, has a soundboard.)

Given that OpenAI just took in $110 billion in new funding (GONG!), valuing the company at some $840 billion, a couple hundred million dollars is more or less a rounding error. But what does an AI lab hope to get from ownership of a tech podcast? The company insists that it’s going to respect TBPN’s “editorial independence,” such as it is, but it’s pretty clear OpenAI isn’t altogether happy with the media coverage it’s been getting lately. The general run of OpenAI coverage these days tends to focus on things like the numerous lawsuits the company faces from the families of former ChatGPT users allegedly........

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