Axel Springer, the German media company whose corporate constitution includes support for Israel and “the principles of a free market economy” as its founding values, gives an award each year that can be thought of as the Press Ruiner Award. In past years, it’s gone to Jeff Bezos of Amazon, who ruined the Washington Post; Elon Musk, who ruined Twitter; Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who ruined the entire advertising-funded journalism market; and Sam Altman of OpenAI, who is working on ruining the existence of any remaining news outlets, by building a bot to replace them. Last week, the 2026 Axel Springer award was presented to billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, who ruined my own former employer Gawker, by suing us into bankruptcy ten years ago.

Honoring Thiel at his ceremony was Bari Weiss, the mediocre former Times opinion writer who is currently ruining CBS News. In her speech, Weiss lauded Thiel as “audacious” and “ferociously independent” a “pioneering” “vanguard of the counter-elite” who “knows what’s coming and seems to consistently get there first.” His ability to “see around corners,” she said, has enabled him to help found great companies such as Palantir, which has “changed the nature of warfighting.” Comparing his “pursuit of truth” to that of Socrates, Weiss declared that “God knows we need people like that now more than ever.”

“There is a reason that so many public figures of our age seem to speak in perfect unison on every important topic. And there is a reason that we can count on one hand the ones that don’t,” she said. “Which is why that quality, that willingness to be shouted at without going wobbly, is vanishingly rare these days.”

Were Weiss a more honest or insightful thinker, she might have noted that the ability to be a ferociously independent thinker who knows what’s coming and speaks your mind freely is more indicative of being rich than of any praiseworthy personal qualities. Owners who make decisions that others must follow and who cannot be fired can know what is coming fairly easily, since they decided it. The qualities she admires are also present in, for example, the many journalists who sacrificed their own career advancement by speaking truthfully about what the Israeli government that Axel Springer supports has been doing in Gaza for the past three years. Those people did not get awards. Nor did my colleagues at Gawker who Thiel successfully drove out of journalism altogether when he plunked down ten million dollars to file nonstop lawsuits against us in a fit of pique over being made fun of.

Something that many people who work in the press do not like to acknowledge is that the press is a participant in a fight—an ideological, political, power struggle against entrenched power itself. In a free society, accumulated power attracts the interest of the press, whose reporting tends to erode (or at least trouble) that power. Great concentrations of wealth and power tend to be built through morally odious if not outright illegal means, and being able to whitewash that reality is a perpetual interest of the powerful, just as exposing it is a perpetual interest of the press. Powerful people and institutions, as a rule, do not like journalism, because journalism properly done makes it harder for powerful people to carry out their will with no public oversight or pushback. Some in the media find it uncomfortable to state these things plainly, because they are wedded to the idea of objectivity and they mistakenly believe that political conflict is a sign of political bias. It is not. This is just the way of the world. Behind every fortune is a crime; behind every crime is a journalist trying to expose it; behind every journalist trying to expose it is a powerful person trying to shut the journalists down. It has always been thus.

The power of the free press—its ability to hold its own in this fight despite being at a financial disadvantage—is not just the power of truth itself. Truth carries weight, and will prevail in time, but time can be very long, and many thousands of journalists can be left strewn on the battlefield in the meantime. To be able to operate effectively while under constant assault from powerful interests, the press also needs solidarity. Publications that compete with one another must be ready to stand together as one for the higher purpose of press freedom. Individual journalists do this with admirable consistency through media unions. Those who run entire publications do it with somewhat less consistency. (Witness Trump’s clumsy attempt to ban several outlets he dislikes from the White House last week: five TV news networks agreed to suspend the television pool covering Trump in response. That lasted until this weekend, when the pool resumed—even though the White House was still illegally banning CNN. This is the difference between working people going on strike until the bitter end and a bunch of suits halfheartedly gesturing their displeasure at something that they don’t think really affects them personally.) Powerful interests understand that breaking the solidarity of the press is another weapon against them.

That has been done, in part, by the wildly successful half-century-long campaign to paint the press as a liberal partisan actor and thereby make news outlets extremely shy about doing anything that might be cast as concerted action against one particular political party. Even if that political party is trying to put them out of business. It can also be done by owning the press, and installing toadies in leadership positions. Bari Weiss herself is today’s shining example of this approach. She has overcome her journalistic mediocrity by applying large doses of careerist bootlicking. Her patron, rich boy Oracle heir David Ellison, has now managed to push through his merger of Paramount and Warner Bros, placing CNN and CBS under his and Weiss’s control. Last week, just days after Weiss spoke so nicely at Peter Thiel’s award ceremony, David Ellison attended the White House state dinner as Trump’s guest. You can expect to see any remaining embers of independence at CNN snuffed out soon, just as CBS has been experiencing under Weiss’s tenure. This is a dirty and rickety sort of fascism, one of oligarchs picking off and neutering news outlets that displease the strongman in charge, in exchange for licenses to do whatever they want with their businesses. The news outlets purged as a result—the Washington Post, CBS, CNN, and surely more to come—are, from the perspectives of the oligarchy, a fringe benefit. They don’t have to worry about the pesky writers attacking them so much any more, either.

Thiel’s destruction of Gawker, a publication that attacked virtually everyone, was the first shot fired in this era’s remarkably successful war against the free press. The war itself is not new. It’s just that today’s iteration of it is so very on the nose. Thiel, at its vanguard, gets his own award from a media company that declares its affinity for the free press. Bari Weiss, ever the opportunist, sells her own company— “The Free Press”—to a billionaire who puts her in charge of dismantling some of the genuine free press’s most storied newsrooms. Trump, the thirstiest and most self-serving press hound of his generation, wields the power of the White House as a PR firm dedicated to reshaping the entire national media in his own image. Big media companies, whose managers have been trained as businessmen rather than as reporters, raise their lukewarm objections but mostly carry on.

Those who think that the media business is about power, about fame, or about money have no incentive to stick their necks out as this tawdry downward spiral plays itself out. The only ones willing to risk anything real to stop it are the journalists themselves—mostly underpaid and unappreciated—who only got into journalism in the first place because they believed in it as a civic good rather than a business opportunity. They are the ones who carry on after layoffs, who start independent publications on shoestrings, who keep reporting in the face of legal threats, who unionize and strike, who write true things even when those things are politically unpopular or formally banned. They are the ones who will ultimately stand in solidarity, in defense of journalism itself. They don’t have any other options.

I don’t mean to flatter journalists too much. We are just as full of slobs, bastards, greenheads, and cornballs as any other profession. Any individual journalist you meet is likely to be a desperate soul tortured by dreams of literary fame while existing in a pit of freelance despair. Many of us are unattractive, with off-putting personalities. It’s just that there is one big thing overriding all of their individual flaws: the (perhaps misguided!) belief that journalism is about telling the truth and that that is worth doing as a career despite all of the evidence to the contrary. Such is the thin and shaky foundation beneath American democracy.

Journalists may not have much. But we retain the right to call the frauds and bootlickers masquerading as the pillars of the media industry a bunch of scumbags. Truth, after all, comes free.

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