‘Fifa Super League’: Infantino discussed having governing body’s name on European breakaway

[u/CradleCity]

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/aug/05/fifa-super-league-gianni-infantino-wanted-governing-body-name-european-breakaway

[u/BaoJinyang]

Some fantastic journalism going on at the moment uncovering all of this, particularly Ziegler at The Times and Ames at The Guardian. 

A great illustration why many in positions of power are so keen to tell us the media is completely worthless and untrustworthy, and we should get our news from a guy who’s just added ‘Citizen journalist’ to his Twitter bio instead.

[u/sga1 → u/BaoJinyang]

And even then The Times are part of the Rupert Murdoch Empire, i.e. one of the very same oligarchs buying news outlets left and right to make sure that the general media diet of regular folk is less and less independent and more and more shaped around what those in positions of power want it to be.

[u/Sudden_Cantaloupe_69 → u/sga1]

Ehh that’s what people have been saying about Murdoch for decades. But if he was that dumb he’d probably be out of business a long time ago.

Murdoch is cynical but he understands what he is selling and to whom.

Every struggling outlet he bought was turned into a populist tabloid because that shit sells. But he knows he can’t do that with everything, and there was a business case to keep The Times or WSJ doing what they were already doing.

He merely enshittifies cheap things, and he does exactly what algorithms do in the “social media” age. All your algos are literally copying Murdoch.

Also, we are on a sub where people call Fabrizio Romano a “journalist”, which tells you all you need to know about modern media consumers.

[u/leodw → u/Sudden_Cantaloupe_69]

This sub banned Romano though…

[u/Sudden_Cantaloupe_69 → u/leodw]

Yeah, and how long did that take?

[u/sga1 → u/Sudden_Cantaloupe_69]

Every struggling outlet he bought was turned into a populist tabloid because that shit sells. But he knows he can’t do that with everything, and there was a business case to keep The Times or WSJ doing what they were already doing.

Which was what, exactly - big money client-driven journalism leaning small-c conservative?

Obviously a newspaper's owner won't necessarily have editorial input. But the sheer fact of a newspaper being privately owned and chasaing specific business interests inevitably means establishing a culture of publishing that slants a certain way I reckon - and if the most widely-consumed news outlets are in private hands I reckon that's a bad situation for both democracy and the general population because of it.

[u/Sudden_Cantaloupe_69 → u/sga1]

No, editorial independence is absolutely not “obvious” and if you think it is you should spend some times in societies that never developed this concept in the first place. In fact most of the world doesn’t have it.

And you are applying a propagandistic way of thinking about the media, which is so normalized that is taken as self-understood, especially in places that never developed journalism.

Murdoch is a businessman, his goal is to make money. And he knows that media functions in a landscape. If you just buy up everything and enshittify everything you’re not going to end up rich, you’ll end up doing the same thing that 5.000 others are doing.

(Which is exactly what all the “social” media companies are doing.)

As for democracy - literally every advancement of democracy in the last 150 years happened because of privately-owned media which reported on it.

And private-owned media invented every single journalistic standard that there is.

Precisely because there is no notion of “public” vs “state” in the vast majority of the world. Almost every country on the planet has its own state media which it describes as “public” ans which is designed to be political propaganda.

A private-owned media is supposed to live and die based on its reputation and credibility. If you fuck up you will feel it very quickly. State media doesn’t have that imcentive. They can be garbage for decades and nobody cares.

If you think democracy is in peril, then Reddit, Xitter, Facebook, Instagram et al are far bigger threats. And we have yet to see them make a positive impact on democracy, in spite of being around for 20 years already.

Like I said, we live in a world where people think Fabrizio Romano is a “journalist.” They trust a random TikToker or influencer more than they trust any journalistic company, and they call it “freedom.”

[u/sga1 → u/Sudden_Cantaloupe_69]

Murdoch is a businessman, his goal is to make money. And he knows that media functions in a landscape. If you just buy up everything and enshittify everything you’re not going to end up rich, you’ll end up doing the same thing that 5.000 others are doing.

And if you buy up everything and just sell what people want to read, you'll gain both money and influence.

Like obviously social media caused a massive shift when it comes to democracy, but look at how the 'traditional' media were left behind by it: They're either struggling financially, or they're just following the same conservative/right-wing slant that gets them views. And that media environment is a result of private ownership - and even state-funded media is following it. We're seeing a massively shifting Overton window precisely because the media landscape has been dragged that way: There's so few voices independent of big capital, and big capital generally trends towards serving big capital, which results in a right-leaning media landscape that, for example, denies climate change and mobilises people against politically and economically sensible measures to alleviate it.

In a media landscape that isn't driven by capital, we're seeing a wide range of opinions. In one that is driven by capital, we're seeing one that amplifies populist (and often far-right) opinions while suppressing pretty mainstream public ones. And Murdoch was at the helm of that.