By Clodovaldo Hernández – Oct 23, 2026
It is old news, very old news, and therefore it is no longer news, although it is news because of the prominence of those involved: the big media oligarchs on a global scale have gone out of their way to denounce the fact that the feudal lords of technocapitalism want to eat them alive.
Well, to be more precise, they did not claim that the technocapitalists want to do it; they said that for some time now they have been eating them, and what is worse, cooked in their own sauce.
Let us follow the rules of journalism and tell the story before analyzing it. It happens that “Agence France-Presse (AFP), The New York Times and several media associations in Latin America joined a global media coalition to demand fair compensation from artificial intelligence companies for the use of their content, the organization announced on Tuesday [October 20].”
“Standards for Publisher Usage Rights (SPUR), founded by the British BBC, Sky News and The Guardian, among others, federates corporate publishers to create a fair market for the use of content by AI systems,” the press release explains.
“Every day, AI bots answer the questions of millions of people with information that has often first been gathered and verified by mainstream media journalists. That source value must be recognized, cited, and remunerated,” said AFP chief executive Fabrice Fries in a statement.
So, trying to analyze the non-news that is news, we can say that the old masters of the press (borrowing the title of George Seldes’s book) realized something that had long been known: that capitalism is cannibalistic.
Of course those big media oligarchs have known this since their youth. They know it from culinary experience because their enormous media estates were forged by applying the old trick of devouring their smaller or weaker competitors.
You do not have to go that far. In Venezuela the local media oligarchs with what they call their financial muscle had their printing and distribution companies in the country or in specific regions. When someone else achieved the feat of launching a media outlet, let us say a modest magazine about film, tourism, motor racing, or whatever, they had to go to these media mafia who would impose the conditions (almost always onerous) to print and distribute the publication.
And the worst part was not that. If the magazine “caught on,” if it gained audience and advertising, they would resort to extortion: either you sell it to me at a cheap price or I will not print or distribute it anymore. If someone wants to look more deeply into this practice, just look in the mass graves of equestrian magazines that the Dearmas bloc and the Capriles chain created last century.
The rights of journalists
The complaint of the big international publishers has something of poetic justice, since among the favorite dishes of those agencies and newspapers have always been the rights of those same journalists they now claim to defend. In the long era that now seems to be coming to an inevitable end, those big media have made use of journalists’ work, in many cases paying miserable wages and formally hiring only a few, while the majority must accept precarious conditions through the figure of stringers, who are “independent correspondents” without a formal employment relationship.
It is suspicious that media owners are raising the banner of professional jounalists, because their dream has always been—and some have already achieved it—to make a newspaper without journalists. For decades, for example, the Inter American Press Association, the club of the bosses of the printed press in the American continent, fought to repeal laws regulating the exercise of the profession, calling them restrictive of freedom of expression. As you can easily guess, what they intended to do was to reduce labor costs and have communicators without university education who would better serve their editorial lines because they would have fewer ethical constraints.
In the current circumstances, the stance of the media owners on artificial intelligence is, with honorable exceptions, hypocritical. It is hypocritical because they have been using artificial intelligence to reduce their payrolls, throwing reporters, photographers, designers, illustrators, and infographic artists out on the street. As in so many other branches of economic activity, the employers do a simple calculation: why have an employee who earns a salary, accumulates benefits, gets sick and, in some cases, joins unions, if an AI can do their work?
So something natural happens in that ecosystem: the artificial intelligence that serves to fire journalists and other media workers also works to plunder the work of news agencies and the great global media. And a very interesting phenomenon occurs: the powerful media oligarchs have formed a kind of union to protect their rights.
The typical thing, then, is happening. When one who has always swallowed others realizes that they are food for someone else with stronger jaws, they cry out to heaven against such injustice.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/SC
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Let’s burn down their empires
