Penske Media's Animus Towards RFK, Jr.

A case study of corporatism vs constitutionalism

Los Angeles Magazine recently published a long report headlined Citizen Jay: How An Eccentric Racing Heir Became King of Hollywood Media. The sub-headline is also sexy: “Jay Penske now controls ‘Variety,’ ‘The Hollywood Reporter,’ ‘Rolling Stone’ and some of the most esteemed cultural brands in publishing. And he’s just getting started.”

The report tells a glamorous story of a handsome young heir to a car racing and transportation company dynasty. A photograph of Penske—wearing a white dinner jacket and clasping the hand of his beautiful wife, the model Elaine Irwin—reminded me of the style and elegance of Gianni Agnelli, the principal shareholder of Fiat who acquired Ferrari in 1969 and became closely associated with its racing division, Scuderia Ferrari.

As Los Angeles Magazine tells the story, while the entertainment journal business has been formidably difficult in recent years, testing the mettle of even seasoned executives, Penske has enjoyed the Midas Touch:

For the last 14 years, Penske has carefully accumulated media brands at a time when the conventional wisdom—usually the worst kind—suggests that traditional print and online news media are in intractable decline. But Penske saw only opportunity amid a landscape of fading or undervalued titles, and he typically leads them to new financial viability where others have fallen short.

How exactly he has led Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone and Variety to financial viability is something of a mystery and would be an excellent subject for an MBA thesis. A good place to start the inquiry is an examination of Penske’s investors. As reported by Vox (of which Penske is a minority shareholder) “in 2018, Penske Media Corporation received a $200 million investment from the Saudi Research and Media Group, which is closely linked to Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud.” One wonders why “MBS”— who ordered the assassination of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi—wanted to invest in American popular culture magazines. Another prominent investor is billionaire hedge-fund manager, Daniel Loeb.

At first glance, Penske’s entertainment media empire appears to be a conspicuous though somewhat typical example of America’s increasingly corporate culture—that is, an economic enterprise in which “culture” is more a matter of slick packaging, marketing, and PR than artifacts created by independent artists. Many artists have long lamented this trend, which seems to have been accentuated by the extremely low interest rate environment following the financial crisis of 2008.

The Penske Media story takes a strange and somewhat dark turn with its acquisition of Rolling Stone in 2017. Since then, the once unabashedly counter-culture magazine—a magazine that published hard-hitting investigative journalists such as Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Loder, Tom Wolfe, and Matt Taibbi—has become scarcely distinguishable from a propaganda organ.

Rolling Stone’s founder and former editor, Jann Wenner, occasionally published essays by RFK, Jr. about corporate polluters of America’s waterways, corporate regulatory capture of U.S. federal agencies, and even safety concerns about childhood vaccines. 

In 2020, during the pandemic, the magazine’s directors removed Kennedy’s 2005 piece about the probable link between childhood vaccines and the increasing incidence of childhood autism. This trend became especially alarming after vaccine manufacturers were granted liability protection by the 1986 Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. As Kennedy saw it, if the childhood vaccines were safe, why did the manufacturers lobby for liability immunity for injuries caused by them?

Who persuaded the decision-makers at Rolling Stone to remove Kennedy’s report from the magazine archives? This decision roughly coincided with the departure of the magazine’s star journalist, Matt Taibbi, who won the National Magazine Award in 2008 for his investigative reporting. His pieces on Goldman Sachs, AKA “the Vampire Squid,” were especially memorable.

Since 2020, Rolling Stone has tacitly endorsed the “Censorship Industrial Complex” that Taibbi and fellow journalist, Michael Schellenberger, have recently exposed. This Complex was laid bare by the release of the “Twitter Files” and during discovery in Missouri v. Biden, whose plaintiffs are suing the Biden administration for pressuring big tech companies to censor any opinion or content that displeases the government.  

This brings us to Penske Media’s decision in 2021 to hire Noah Shachtman as Rolling Stone’s editor-in-chief. Like the Saudi investment in Penske Media, its choice of Schachtman to edit its flagship magazine about popular music and culture seems very strange.

For most of his career, Schachtman has been a national security journalist. As anyone who has done national security reporting knows, you don’t maintain access to DoD and CIA sources for long if your reporting challenges their narratives or criticize their policies. From 2013-2021, Schachtman was an editor at the Daily Beast, holding the editor-in-chief position from 2018 until he took the helm at Rolling Stone in 2021.

Shortly after he arrived at the magazine, he fired off tweets about how he intended to purify the journal of associations with artists whom he deemed “bad actors.”

As he put it in an October 12, 2021 communique:

Welcome to the new@RollingStone. We’re going to call out bad actors — no matter how big they are, and no matter how many times they may have been on our cover before.

EXCLUSIVE: Eric Clapton isn't just spouting vaccine nonsense. He's bankrolling anti-vaxx protesters. One of a bunch of WTF moments in @RollingStone's investigation into Clapton's long journey on the fringe, including some shockingly racist episodes.

That’s right, Eric Clapton—ranked by Rolling Stone in 2015 as the second greatest guitarist of all time—was declared a heretic and censured by the magazine’s new editor, who apparently regards conformity and adherence to vaccine orthodoxy as proper standards for evaluating a rock star.

Part of Schachtman’s purifying operation has involved publishing relentlessly rude, hostile, and imbalanced reports on Kennedy. Staff writers routinely open their pieces with the assertion that Kennedy is a “conspiracy theorist.” Since the JFK assassination, “conspiracy theorist” has become a pejorative, accusatory label like “racist” or “sexist.” Through common usage, the label has become charged with the power to smear and dismiss someone without supporting evidence.

Readers may note the stunning shallowness and prejudice expressed in Rolling Stone’s recent piece, RFK Jr. Tells Joe Rogan He’s ‘Aware’ of Possibility CIA Could Assassinate Him: The conspiracy theorist thinks he could become the target of a nefarious deep-state plot, just like he says his uncle was. The report doesn’t acknowledge that Kennedy is a skilled lawyer and researcher who has spent decades studying the presidency and assassination of his uncle.

What are we supposed to make of the fact that, in a singular break with custom, the U.S. government refuses to provide Secret Service protection for the presidential candidate, even though he has polled favorably (over 20%) for months, has received death threats, and is the son and nephew of public office holders who were assassinated?

The Rolling Stone’s recent coverage of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. v. Google & YouTube, written by Kory Grow, expresses a strange lack of interest in protecting free speech. According to Grow’s bio posted on the magazine’s site and his Amazon author’s page, he is a hard rock and heavy metal reporter. His report on Kennedy’s lawsuit is little more than a series of assertions and assumptions that the plaintiff is wrong about everything. What side is Rolling Stone on—the side of First Amendment protection of freethinkers, or the side of censorship? Judging by Kory’s article, he and the magazine’s editor endorse the latter.

A few months ago, Schachtman was the subject of a critical NPR report headlined “The FBI raided a notable journalist's home. Rolling Stone didn't tell readers why.” The report detailed how, in October, 2022, Rolling Stone broke the news that the FBI had raided the home of ABC News producer James Gordon Meek, but omitted the detail that the raid was carried out because of child pornography. Schachtman and Meek have long known each other through their mutual national security reporting, so Schachtman decided to intervene on his colleague’s behalf to conceal the true grounds for the raid.

The suspicion that Schachtman may be, in his capacity as Rolling Stone’s editor-in-chief, serving as a propagandist for U.S. government agencies and their corporate allies, reminded me of a recent article in Texas Monthly headlined, “What is the CIA Doing at SXSW?” SXSW is short for the South by Southwest film and music festival. For years SXSW was regarded as a premier conference for independent and aspiring filmmakers and musicians seeking to break into the entertainment industry. Since 2017, the CIA has sent a delegation to the annual conference to recruit attendees. In April 2021, Penske Media acquired a 50% stake in SXSW, and this year the CIA’s presence was especially conspicuous.

The writer of the flattering Los Angeles Magazine profile of Jay Penske called him “Citizen Jay” in the headline—a reference to Citizen Kane. The film tells the story of media mogul Charles Foster Kane, modeled after William Randolph Hearst, who became infamous for manipulating American public sentiment to favor the Spanish-American War despite the U.S. government’s dubious grounds for waging it.

The Penske Media Corporation reminds me of the theory of Corporatism developed by Italian fascist intellectuals in the 1930s such as Giovanni Gentile, a close associate of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Fascist Corporatism is the doctrine of binding together (from the Italian verb fasciare: to bind) state and corporate interests into an ever-closer, mutually beneficial relationship.

While industrial corporations may benefit from generous state contracts, the state may benefit from the strong allegiance of corporate bosses and their workforces. A notable industrial beneficiary of Italian fascist corporatism was Giovanni Agnelli, founder of Fiat and grandfather of the glamorous Gianni Agnelli who acquired Ferrari.

In theory, fascism is a way to promote greater economic prosperity and social cohesion. In practice, the fascist states of Italy and Germany quickly lapsed into dictatorships that suspended constitutional protections and liberties.

RFK, Jr. has long recognized the baleful consequences of allowing financial, military-industrial, and bio-pharmaceutical corporations to capture the federal agencies that are supposed to regulate their activities. Such capture is usually achieved by signaling that a man or woman working in a regulatory office could have a bright future in one of the enterprises that he or she is supposed to be regulating. A notable example of regulatory capture was the FDA’s approval of Purdue Pharma’s Oxycontin painkiller. As reported by Patrick Radden Keefe in The New Yorker:

Purdue had conducted no clinical studies on how addictive or prone to abuse the drug might be. But the F.D.A., in an unusual step, approved a package insert for OxyContin which announced that the drug was safer than rival painkillers, because the patented delayed-absorption mechanism “is believed to reduce the abuse liability.” … The F.D.A. examiner who oversaw the process, Dr. Curtis Wright, left the agency shortly afterward. Within two years, he had taken a job at Purdue.

Of all public figures today, RFK, Jr. is also the fiercest defender of our constitutional protections, especially the First Amendment. Penske Media’s animus towards him is a case study of the conflict between corporatism and constitutionalism. The U.S. Constitution was not conceived to optimize the power of state actors and their corporate friends, but as a set of rules for the protection and liberty of all citizens.