The Lucky Sperm Club

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. Publisher – New York Times; President Lucky Sperm Club, NY Chapter

Here’s an interesting statistic:

In 1870, 80% of the land in England was owned by 7,000 families.

The vast majority of it was in the hands of 431 hereditary members of the House of Lords – dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons.

These people pretty much owned the country, and everyone else worked for them.

However, starting in 1880, things began to unravel.

The lifeblood of the great landed estates had been the income they derived from their agricultural produce.

But by the late 19th Century, technology began to impact on what had been an established way of life for nearly a thousand years.

Refrigeration and steam transport suddenly opened the floodgates of the British food markets to cheap imports from America and Australia.

The impact of these new technologies – steam and refrigeration – crashed the British agricultural economy.

Agricultural rents in 1936 were the same as they had been in 1800.

The underpinnings of the British landed gentry were eviscerated.

At the same time, death duties were introduced, largely to support a population that was leaving the land in droves and headed for the industrial cities.  Death duties in 1894 were 8%. By 1948 they were 75%.  The great landed estates and the rich and powerful Noble Families of Britain were destroyed.

In the US, we never had landed gentry. We never had an upper class based on land.

We did, however, create an upper class based on wealth.  And in the early 20th Century, there was no greater path to wealth and power than controlling the emerging mass media.

Noble Families such as the Sulzbergers at The New York Times or the Grahams at The Washington Post or the McCormicks or the Gannetts all controlled the levers of power and wealth. And those positions, like the Duke of Marlborough, were hereditary.  The power passed unquestioned from father to eldest son (or daughter), as a matter of right.

No one quested this.

And it had nothing to do with ability.

Neither did the inheritance of the Seventh Earl of Cholmondeley, either.

And as the peasantry of the great estates of England were expected to doff their cap and tug at their forelock and say ‘thank you m’Lord’ for the crumbs that they scattered, so too were the employees of The New York Times or The Washington Post expected to do the same when Prince Arthur or Princess Katherine walked by.

The media in this country was the last vestige of Feudalism.

But now, as refrigeration and steam ships once broke the power of Medieval English aristocracy, so the web is breaking the power of the American Media Aristocracy.

The handful of families that once owned 80% (or more) of the media landscape find that the peasantry have struck out on their own and begun farming the vast and fertile fields of the Internet.

With the monopoly on access broken irrevocably by the web, more and more journalists will start to question why they would want to become peasants on the Sulzberger or Murdoch latifundia.

And a good question it is too.

When you consider that an unemployed journalist sitting in his underwear set up Paidcontent.org a few years ago, and a few years after that sold the whole enterprise to The Guardian for an eye-popping $22 million.

Arise ye peasants!

You have nothing to lose but your chains.