Late one afternoon in October 2023, as the sun slipped down over Tokyo Bay, Masayoshi Son was sitting in his private office at SoftBank headquarters, at the head of a wooden table almost as long as Vladimir Putin’s in the Kremlin. A diminutive, balding figure dressed casually in a jacket and slacks, Son was recounting to me the low point of his career, a year earlier, when he announced he was disappearing from public view.

“What a shitty life!” he exclaimed, with a trace of self-pity. “You know on my Zoom call, I see my face often on the video screen and I hate looking at my face. What an ugly face. I’m just getting old . . . What have I achieved? . . . I have done nothing that I can be proud of.”

At face value, it was an astonishing admission. Son, then 66, ranked among the world’s most renowned investors. He invested in ecommerce giants Yahoo and Alibaba before they became household names. At the height of the dotcom bubble in early 2000, he was briefly the richest man in the world. When it burst, he lost 97 per cent of his fortune, around $70bn. 

But he bounced back, launching a successful broadband and mobile phone business in Japan, propelled by an exclusive deal to distribute Apple’s iPhone. Then he disrupted Silicon Valley with the $100bn SoftBank Vision Fund, and ended up making the biggest swing and miss in the history of investing. (Hence his temporary vanishing act.)

As editor of the Financial Times, I’d met Son twice and he intrigued me as a subject for a biography. A compulsive risk taker, his story was a classic entrepreneur’s tale of survival and perpetual reinvention. But was Son a tech visionary or simply an inveterate gambler who got lucky? Why was SoftBank, the company he founded in 1981 as a pioneering software distribution business in Japan, so often described as a house of cards?

Answering those questions proved more difficult than I anticipated. Twice I flew to Tokyo, only to be informed that the boss was too busy to see me. When I complained that my subject was more elusive than a Bengal tiger, an ex-SoftBank executive, Indian by birth, replied: “In that case, I suggest you bring a goat.”

In western media Son often comes across as a cartoon character. He has compared himself to Yoda in Star Wars; Napoleon (of which more later); and Jesus Christ (who was equally misunderstood, apparently). Obsessed by longevity, he has told friends that he hopes to live past 120, and that SoftBank should be built to last 300 years.

After four sit-downs with Son, as well as interviewing more than 150 people who know or have worked with him, I have concluded there’s a lot more to this restless character than meets the eye. While Son did not invent, control or own a breakthrough technology, he is the archetypal middleman. He has ridden the technological wave which has created untold wealth and penetrated every corner of our society. 

His is a story of our times.

Masayoshi Son is a quintessential outsider. This may explain his bottomless risk appetite and his desire to prove himself, over and over again. He was born in 1957 to poverty-stricken second-generation Korean immigrants on the island of Kyushu in the western Japanese archipelago. The family home was the equivalent of a cowshed, one of dozens of makeshift dwellings on a plot of unregistered land near the railway station.

Years later, Son confessed to a friend that he suffered from a recurring dream, waking up to the stench of pig faeces in his nostrils. His friend told him it wasn’t a nightmare but a childhood memory. “We started at the bottom of society,” Son told me. “I didn’t even know what nationality I was.”

As Korean-Japanese, the Son family followed tradition and lived under a Japanese name, Yasumoto. (Son later persuaded the authorities to let him combine his Japanese first name and Korean surname — a notable breakthrough.) His father Mitsunori was a bootlegger at the age of 14, later diversifying into pig breeding, loan sharking and pachinko, a form of low-stakes gambling that offered a livelihood to Koreans shut out of the Japanese economy. 

In April 2023, Mitsunori, 87, sitting in the family home adorned with photographs of his favoured second son, described how he rearranged the pins on his pachinko slot machines so that everybody in town thought they were a winner. His upfront losses were eye-watering. Then he moved the pins back into place — and started making serious money. 

Watching his father, Son learnt how to hustle. But the boy’s ambitions went way beyond pachinko gambling. He wanted to escape Japan and a lifetime of discrimination. Aged 16, he announced he wanted to learn English and study in the US. His family were dismayed, but soon relented. 

Son’s six years in California, which included three years as a student at the University of California at Berkeley, were a life-changing experience. He saw first-hand the PC revolution. He read about Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs. He also made his first fortune, developing a pocket speech synthesiser with the help of a team of UC Berkeley engineers led by Professor Forrest Mozer, a nuclear particle physicist.

I tracked down Professor Mozer, then aged 92, during a visit to Berkeley in October 2021. He described Son as a modest student with little technical background but a businessman with a capital B. “That guy is going to own Japan one day,” he told his wife. 

Later Mozer claimed that Son had gone behind his back and contracted with Japanese companies to sell American microchips (for the speech translator) that did not exist and for prices that he’d invented. He said he was not told Son was due to earn almost $1mn in fees. “I was his first business partner,” Mozer told me, “and on his first business deal he lied and cheated me.”

When questioned, Son rejected that, and insisted he had wrongly assumed he had permission to do what he did. (Mozer himself concedes there was no written contract between the two, just a gentleman’s agreement.) Son unravelled the Japanese deals and vowed to take more care in future. Perhaps the episode marks Son’s “original sin”, a short-cut on the way to the top that many entrepreneurs would recognise.

After his sojourn in California, Son returned home. In 1980, Japan seemed destined to be the world’s number-one economic power. Son was perfectly placed to act as a gateway for US tech businesses seeking to penetrate the Japanese market.

Bill Gates describes Son as a cultural interpreter as much as a commercial middleman. “Whenever you’ve been three or four days in Japan, and have had nothing but polite things to say to each other, invariably through an interpreter. . . then there’s this guy who speaks perfect English. It was such a relief. Masa was easy to talk to. He was an insider but an outsider too.”

After software distribution, Son pivoted to investing in internet-related business, placing two spectacular bets: on Yahoo, which earned him a six-fold return ($3.5bn), and on Alibaba, which gave a 1,310-fold return ($97bn). While he built a successful Japanese affiliate, Yahoo Japan, he never took his eye off the US market. 

In the mid-1990s, he acquired Las Vegas-based Comdex, then the number-one tech trade fair, the Ziff Davis computer publishing empire and a host of dotcom properties. In 2013, he went one better and bought Sprint, the lossmaking US telecoms operator, finally pulling off a merger with T-Mobile that created a “third force” alongside Verizon and AT&T.

Throughout, SoftBank took advantage of the almost three decades of near zero interest rates in Japan. Son borrowed cheaply to pay generous prices for US assets, raising billions on the corporate bond market. “You don’t understand,” he once told a fretting colleague, “in Japan, money is free.”

In assessing Son’s track record, it is important to distinguish between SoftBank Corp, the listed company responsible for the operating companies, and SoftBank Group, the publicly quoted group holding company and major investor.

Businesses such as Yahoo Japan and SoftBank Mobile have proved highly successful and profitable. The Sprint acquisition, initially a dud, proved a winner after the T-Mobile merger. But Son has always cared more about growth than profits. SoftBank Group has long been highly leveraged, meaning it has a lot of debt in its capital structure. At times, it has ranked as one of the world’s top 10 indebted companies — not a comfortable position when inflation roared back in 2021. 

Son is a major shareholder and a major borrower, using his SoftBank shares as collateral. Risk is built in. Suppose SoftBank shares fall sharply, lowering the value of the collateral, as has occurred many times during Son’s wild ride. Then panicky banks might demand the loans be repaid, destabilising the entire corporate structure. 

Son bristles when challenged, emphasising that as a co-investor he has “skin in the game” and therefore an incentive to invest responsibly. Nevertheless, some associates believe SoftBank’s founder is “addicted” to leverage. They told me he became hooked after the $20bn bid in 2006 to buy Vodafone Japan, the largest leveraged buyout in Asia at the time. He succeeded thanks to a financial magician by the name of Rajeev Misra, a former Deutsche Bank debt trader whose reward was to be put in charge of the $100bn SoftBank Vision Fund in 2017.

Misra was one of several talented executives trained as mathematicians, who applied their engineering skills to finance rather than academia. Over time, they lent a mercenary streak to SoftBank, stoking their boss’s appetite for dealmaking. 

To some degree, the cultural shift was inevitable as SoftBank evolved from a Japanese technology conglomerate to a global investment group. But it was also a recipe for infighting at the top, latterly between Misra and Marcelo Claure, a 6ft 6in Bolivian-American who led the Sprint turnaround. Often the spats played out in the media. “They leaked like septic tanks,” says a SoftBank colleague.

Although Son adopts an abstemious public profile, his private consumption is more extravagant (albeit drawing on his own money rather than the company’s). He pays for his private plane and his favourite red wine (from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, at a minimum $6,000 a bottle). He has extensive properties around the world, including three conjoining houses in central Tokyo likened by one visitor to Wayne Manor, fictional home of Batman. 

The basement features an artificial golf course where Son and guests can play in all-weather conditions on any course in the world. One portion of the house is decorated in the Empire style, the period between 1800 and 1815 when Napoleon modernised France and redrew the map of Europe. I discovered Son has a fascination with the Corsican Little Corporal, a fellow outsider.

In early 2020, a team from Elliott Management, the New York activist investor, paid a visit to Japan. Having bought a 3 per cent stake in SoftBank, their goal was to persuade Son to improve corporate governance, thereby boosting the share price. When an Elliott executive invoked the example of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, or Bill Gates of Microsoft, Son erupted in frustration.

“These are one-business guys. I am involved in 100 businesses and I control the entire [tech] ecosystem,” he remonstrated. “The right comparison for me is Napoleon, Genghis Khan or Emperor Qin [who built the Great Wall]. I am not a CEO. I am building an empire.”

Delusional? Not if you believe that Son is bent on “Making Japan Great Again”. After the collapse of the bubble economy in 1989-90, Japan entered a “lost decade” characterised by deflation and tepid growth. Son, the outlier, remains an object of suspicion among the Japanese business establishment. He counters by playing the patriot, claiming he wants to revive the country’s animal spirits. But his vision of a resurgent Japan contains a megalomaniacal streak. 

When Son launched the $100bn SoftBank Vision Fund, an arms race in the world of venture capital ensued, leading to wholesale value destruction. Doling out sums of between $100mn and $200mn would have meant Son meeting hundreds of individual founders to check their credentials. Even with his legendary stamina, working 20-hour days, often flying on his private jet through multiple time zones, that was a physical impossibility. 

Crucially, much larger sums — $500mn or more — were required to move the needle in a giant fund like the Vision Fund. The target companies couldn’t be start-ups as such; they were “later-stage” companies, turbocharged for growth by the injection of SoftBank capital. One of these companies was WeWork, founded by Adam Neumann, a tall Israeli with a planet-sized ego.

Son was utterly sold on Neumann, a fellow dreamer who spoke about world domination. When WeWork’s losses piled up, colleagues pleaded with Son to stop. The boss refused to budge.  

“As you all object, I am becoming more and more interested in this company,” he said. “I am looking at Alibaba and only he [Neumann] looks like Alibaba today.”

The initial Alibaba investment in 2000 — two bets of $20mn and $80mn — turns out to have been a curse as much as a blessing. Eager to prove his success wasn’t a one-off, Son talked about creating 10 SoftBank Vision Funds with a total war chest of $1tn dollars. These were castles in the air — the stuff of hubris. 

Those who know Son say he is a brilliant operator (when he focuses), an average investor and a terrible trader. Between 2019-21, as markets turned down, Son suffered heavy losses on Vision Funds 1 and 2. He tried to recover by speculating wildly on options trading, using an in-house hedge fund called Northstar. SoftBank was left nursing multibillion-dollar losses. 

For 18 months, he withdrew from public view, ostensibly serving penance but in reality plotting a comeback. Today, he is betting the house on artificial intelligence in order to reclaim his position as one of the world’s leading entrepreneur futurists.

To date, his record is fitful at best. Between 2017 and 2022, he mentioned “AI” more than 500 times in quarterly and annual results presentations. Yet when it came to OpenAI and its breakthrough product ChatGPT, the lead investor was Microsoft. Son never got a look in.

Part of the problem was timing. In the Vision Fund years, AI businesses were either small scale, early in development or out of the public eye. During the Covid pandemic, Son was grounded in Tokyo. In early 2022, when travel restrictions were finally lifted, with the exception of China, SoftBank was sandbagged by record losses. 

Had Son conserved his firepower rather than splurging money on more than 500 separate companies in the Vision Funds, he would have been perfectly placed. With company valuations beaten down by higher interest rates, Son could have acquired stakes in promising AI-related businesses at bargain prices. In hindsight, he admits, “Timing-wise maybe we were a little too early.”

It’s a familiar story: right instincts, wrong timing. (If he’d held on to his 5 per cent stake in advanced chipmaker Nvidia in 2019, he could have made another fortune.) Yet one of Son’s AI bets has paid off handsomely. UK chip designer Arm — acquired in 2016 — is at the centre of yet another super-vision: a $64bn plan to transform SoftBank Group into a sprawling AI powerhouse, including a foray into the development of artificial-intelligence chips, announced in May. The goal is to build a prototype by 2025, with each chip being able to process vast volumes of data. This hugely ambitious venture aims to create SoftBank Group’s own vertically integrated AI ecosystem, from manufacturing chips and operating data centres to industrial robots and power generation.

True, SoftBank cannot touch the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft, but Son is a customer and supplier to the hyperscalers. His new chipmaking venture involves billions of dollars of investment. Once a mass-production system is established, the AI chip business could be spun off, realising billions of dollars of value to its parent SoftBank. 

How does this movie end? Those betting on a financial apocalypse have been disappointed. Call Son lucky, call SoftBank too big to fail. After four years studying the world’s greatest disrupter, my message is unequivocal. 

Don’t ever count him out. 

‘Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Masayoshi Son’ by Lionel Barber is published by Allen Lane on October 3 

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PHOENIX (AP) — The Arizona Supreme Court unanimously ruled Friday that nearly 98,000 people whose citizenship documents hadn’t been confirmed can vote in state and local races, a significant decision that could influence ballot measures and tight legislative races.

The court’s decision comes after officials uncovered a database error that for two decades mistakenly designated the voters as having access to the full ballot. The voters already were entitled to cast ballots in federal races, including for president and Congress, regardless of how the court ruled.

Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, and Stephen Richer, the Republican Maricopa County recorder, had disagreed on what status the voters should hold. Richer asked the high court to weigh in, saying Fontes ignored state law by advising county officials to let affected voters cast full ballots.

Fontes said not allowing the voters who believed they had satisfied voting requirements access to the full ballot would raise equal protection and due process concerns.

The high court, which leans Republican, agreed with Fontes. It said county officials lack the authority to change the voters’ statuses because those voters registered long ago and had attested under the penalty of law that they are citizens. The justices also said the voters were not at fault for the database error and also mentioned the little time that’s left before the Nov. 5 general election.

“We are unwilling on these facts to disenfranchise voters en masse from participating in state contests,” Chief Justice Ann Scott Timmer wrote in the ruling.

Of the nearly 98,000 affected voters, most of them reside in Maricopa County, which is home to Phoenix, and are longtime state residents who range in age from 45 to 60. About 37% of them are registered Republicans, about 27% are registered Democrats and the rest are independents or affiliated with minor parties.

Arizona is unique among states in that it requires voters to prove their citizenship to participate in local and state races. Voters can demonstrate citizenship by providing a driver’s license or tribal ID number, or they can attach a copy of a birth certificate, passport or naturalization documents.

Arizona considers drivers’ licenses issued after October 1996 to be valid proof of citizenship. However, a system coding error marked nearly 98,000 voters who obtained licenses before 1996 — roughly 2.5% of all registered voters — as full-ballot voters, state officials said.

The error between the state’s voter registration database and the Motor Vehicle Division has since been resolved.

That number of votes could tip the scales in hotly contested races for the state Legislature, where Republicans hold a slim majority in both chambers.

Voters also are deciding on the constitutional right to abortion and on a state law that would criminalize noncitizens for entering Arizona through Mexico at any location other than a port of entry.

Though Richer and Fontes disagreed over the status of the voters, both celebrated the court’s ruling.

“Thank God,” Richer said on the social platform X. He told The Associated Press on Thursday that maintaining voters’ statuses would be administratively easier.

Fontes, in a news release, called the ruling a “significant victory for those whose fundamental right to vote was under scrutiny.” Election officials will be contacting voters who need to update their proof of citizenship after the election, he said.

John Groseclose, who was among the voters whose citizenship was in question, said he was relieved he wouldn’t have to spend more time running around to resolve the mix-up.

Earlier this week, he said he waited an hour and a half at a motor vehicle office in Tempe only to find that the employee who attended to him was unaware of the issue and did not know how to update his voter registration — despite him providing an official birth certificate and new passport.

“I’m glad that none of us are going to be disenfranchised over an error generated by the MVD 20 some-odd years ago,” Groseclose told the AP.

Saudi Arabia’s grand boxing project is going global. At London’s Wembley Stadium tonight, British fighters Anthony Joshua and Daniel Dubois face off in the first European showdown organised by Riyadh Season. It follows last month’s fight night in Los Angeles also under the Riyadh Season brand, which began life as a programme of cultural events in the Saudi capital.

This is a sign of things to come. Unlike golf, those leading Saudi Arabia’s sporting push have found a rhythm in the world of boxing, bringing rival promoters together under the Riyadh Season umbrella so that fans and broadcasters get the fights they’ve been craving. Boxers and promoters, meanwhile, get bumper paydays.

Boxing is one of the most biddable sports with a global audience, but the Saudis have had recent success in tennis too. Perhaps this is the big lesson drawn from the expensive LIV Golf experiment — it’s much cheaper to join forces with the establishment than to upend it.

This week we’re looking at the latest big news from Nike, where the chief executive is out. And we ask if football fans are reaching breaking point in the face of rising prices. Do read on — Josh Noble, sports editor

How outgoing Nike CEO John Donahoe lost the plot

On June 27th, Nike chief executive John Donahoe presided over one of the bleakest earnings calls in the history of the sportswear maker. Not only was the company still trying to find its level between online and brick-and-mortar sales, he said, but consumer demand for the brand’s trainers and athletic apparel was slowing.

The company made its name outfitting world-record runners, but the swoosh earned a dubious distinction of its own that day: the worst stock drop in Nike’s nearly 44-year history as a public company. So swift was the market reaction that co-founder Phil Knight issued a rare statement saying “I am optimistic in Nike’s future and John Donahoe has my unwavering confidence and full support.”

Barely three months later, Knight yanked that support away. On Thursday, the board of directors announced Donahoe will retire next month, to be succeeded by Nike veteran Elliott Hill. 

Donahoe, 64, leaves a mixed record at the world’s largest athletic brand. He ably steered the company through the pandemic, despite only taking the helm in January 2020, accelerating a push towards higher-margin online sales that padded profits. He pulled the company to its overdue revenue goal of $50bn just last year. But while Donahoe proved adept at tech and sales — he was poached by Nike from software company ServiceNow after a career spent at consultancy Bain and online retailer eBay — he lacked an essential component for a shoe brand: knowing what’s cool.

Several of Nike’s shoe “drops”, or limited edition releases, either missed the mark or reeked of desperation, such as an announcement this summer of the commercial sale of a once, collector-only Wu Tang dunk. Partner retailers which sell Nike shoes like JD Sports and Foot Locker praised rival brands like Adidas, New Balance, and On, for “newness”. 

In selecting Hill, 60, as the next CEO, Nike’s board is going back to the future. Texas native Hill was once an assistant athletic trainer for the Dallas Cowboys and later started at Nike as an intern after business school. He has 32 years experience at the swoosh, including five years at European HQ in the Netherlands, and oversaw all of Nike’s commercial and marketing operations before his retirement in 2020.

“I couldn’t be more excited to welcome Elliott back to the team. His experience, understanding of Nike and leadership is exactly what’s needed at this moment”, said Knight in a statement issued on Thursday. “We’ve got a lot of work to do but I’m looking forward to seeing Nike back on its pace”.

Price hikes: have football fans lost patience?

When the European Super League launched (briefly) in 2021, one of the main arguments for tearing down football’s status quo was that fans were being deprived of exciting matches between elite teams.

Evidence this week suggests that argument was built on sand. When Liverpool visited AC Milan in the opening game of this season’s Champions League, one of the main talking points was of empty seats inside the San Siro. While the Italian club had an average home attendance for league matches last season of just under 72,000, local estimates put Tuesday’s turnout at around 60,000. So what’s going on?

Milan have started the season slowly — and lost the game against Liverpool 3-1. But more than 71,000 showed up a few days earlier to see the Rossoneri host Venezia in an Italian league match.

The main culprit for Tuesday night’s empty seats appears to be rising ticket prices — seats in the lower tier of the San Siro began at more than €120.

The issue of rising costs for football fans has been creeping up the agenda across Europe in recent months.

This year 19 of the 20 English Premier League teams announced increased season ticket prices, while some did away with certain discounts for concessions.

At Nottingham Forest, for example, a child’s ticket in one part of its home ground more than doubled. Fans of Wolverhampton Wanderers urged the club to reconsider price hikes in order to “preserve the very lifeblood of this famous old club”. Fulham supporters held up yellow cards to protest against the £3,000 rate for a season ticket in some sections of the new Riverside Stand.

“Ticket prices are a ticking time bomb and club executives have their hands over their ears. Something has to give”, the Football Supporters Association said last month.

And it’s not just ticket prices. The cost of replica shirts has also been rising fast. The new Manchester United home shirt starts at £85, but will set you back over £100 if you want a name and number on the back, or if you want an exact copy of the match-worn version. (Although that’s still some way off the £900 options outlined in this weekend’s HTSI.)

Price rises are being propelled by various factors. Inflation across the globe has driven costs for everything from electricity to wages and food. Ticket prices are a quick and easy lever to pull in response — effectively passing on rising costs to the end consumer.

But there are other pressures at work. Tighter spending rules both at European and domestic level are pushing clubs to focus relentlessly on maximising revenue.

The globalisation of the game also means there is a growing pool of football-mad tourists only too willing to pay whatever it takes for a chance to see a top team in the flesh, especially in holiday hotspots like Rome, Paris and London.

In the Milan example, it’s hard to ignore the influence of institutional investors. After private equity firm RedBird Capital Partners bought the club in 2022, revenue generated on matchdays rose to €73mn from €33mn a year earlier and €34mn pre-pandemic. Commercial, TV and sponsorship income all rose considerably too — helping the club to its first annual profit in 17 years.

Tuesday night’s empty seats may prove a one-off. The issues could also be specific to club and competition.

But as the pull from new regulation and the need to generate investment returns leads more clubs to raise prices wherever they think they can, executives will face increasingly tough choices — and less forgiving supporters.

Highlights

• Cricket has been booming thanks to the Indian Premier League gold rush. But are we reaching saturation point? And is there now a bubble? Those are some of the questions we look to answer in this Big Read.

• Lord Sebastian Coe is one of seven candidates to replace Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee who steps down in March next year.

• Adrian Wojnarowski, veteran NBA journalist for ESPN who single-handedly transformed sports reporting for the social media era, announced his retirement from the industry and will become the general manager of the men’s basketball team at his alma mater, St. Bonaventure University.

• Glasgow has agreed to stage a slimmed down Commonwealth Games in 2026, which will be partially funded by Australian taxpayers. The state of Victoria had previously been lined up as hosts, but pulled out after deciding it was too expensive.

• Raj Sports has paid $125mn to bring a new WNBA team to Portland, Oregon, the latest step in raising the total number of teams in the league from 12 to 15. Raj Sports also owns the Portland Thorns women’s football team.

• The Diamond League has announced an increase in prize money, the latest salvo in the battle for the future of athletics.

• Qatar Airways has replaced Turkish Airlines as a main sponsor of the Uefa Champions League. The six-year deal is worth up to €500mn, according to SportBusiness.

Final Out

Shohei Ohtani had the single best game by a baseball player in the history of the sport on Thursday night: three home runs, two stolen bases, ten runs batted in for the Los Angeles Dodgers in their 20-4 rout of the Miami Marlins. Even wilder, he became the first player in more than a century of Major League Baseball to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in a single season, establishing the so-called 50/50 club. (Non-baseball fans may be familiar with the 40/40 club, the previous benchmark of a power player, as it inspired the name of Jay-Z’s exclusive Manhattan lounge.)

“That has to be the greatest baseball game of all time”, Ohtani’s teammate Gavin Lux said Thursday night. “I’ve never seen anybody do that even in little leagues.”

Watch the incredible performance here.

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By Mickey Huff and Nolan Higdon

As we write for World Press Freedom Day, declared May 3, 1993, by the United Nations, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks languishes in Belmarsh prison awaiting possible extradition for trial in the US under the Espionage Act. His alleged crimes? Daring to publish evidence of American war crimes, information utilized by legacy press outlets to win prestigious awards while also calling for his punishment. If he is found “guilty of journalism,” it will have remarkably negative implications for press freedoms in the US and worldwide. 

Also, as we write, Gaza lies under siege not only from US-made bombs but a barrage of establishment media propaganda denying genocide taking place against Palestinian civilians in Israel’s attacks on Hamas. Meanwhile, the US recently enacted a law that not only sends more money and weapons to Israel and Ukraine, ensuring more carnage, but simultaneously targets the social media platform TikTok for potential banning or divestment due to its ownership by the Chinese company ByteDance.

Many Americans are turning to social media platforms for news more and more, which is not something we normally promote as journalism or sound media literate practice on the surface. However, it is also increasingly becoming a place where people can see different perspectives about what is happening in places that the establishment press spins, slants, distorts, or ignores altogether.

Young people particularly get news from social media, and while Facebook is still the most popular overall, TikTok is the favorite and fastest-growing platform among Gen Z. Ironically, in some instances, Big Tech platforms that are not journalistic outlets demonstrate more “press freedom” principles than exhibited by the New York Times and other stalwarts of the establishment press. To adopt the words of the late, great muckraker and media critic George Seldes, TikTok users tell the public “what is really going on”— from Columbia University to Gaza and beyond.

So, then, it’s not a surprise that the US government is going after a “foreign-owned” platform that undermines official control and narratives and is more difficult to censor by proxy, which is how RT America was memory-holed by YouTube and telecom companies in March 2022. This is also why the US government has ruthlessly persecuted Assange, an award-winning journalist and publisher who dared to expose US war crimes in the so-called “war on terrorism,” and why they attack and frame today’s protesters as “anti-Semitic” and “supporters of Hamas” when they call for a ceasefire in the Middle East.

This isn’t about TikTok any more than it was about RT in 2022. The end goal is to silence alternative views (especially anti-war voices), suppress dissent (including by physical force), and censor independent sources.

Press Freedom Principles vs. Dangerous Reality for Journalists

According to the United Nations, World Press Freedom Day is “dedicated to the importance of journalism and freedom of expression.” It serves as an occasion to “celebrate the fundamental principles of press freedom; assess the state of press freedom throughout the world; defend the media from attacks on their independence; and pay tribute to journalists who have lost their lives in the line of duty.”

These values and principles often seem at odds with the practice of establishment journalism in the United States. Indeed, in response to growing public opposition to US support for Israel, authorities have sought to beat, arrest, expel (if students), fire, and intimidate those who exercise their First Amendment rights to speak freely, peaceably assemble, and petition grievances against government policy and action.

Journalists have not been spared. Indeed, reporters in the US and around the world have been arrested and charged, attacked, and further intimidated in the crackdown on anti-war and anti-genocide demonstrators. In Gaza, far more than 100 journalists have been killed to date (including at least two Israeli ones). The Committee to Protect Journalists called the current war in Gaza more dangerous for journalists than any previous war. When journalists are targeted, death is the ultimate form of censorship.

Meanwhile, social media platforms—where many independent journalists share their work to reach a larger audience—silence and censor by proxy, with some users being totally banned when publishing content that represents the views of these pro-peace protesters.

In the US, where journalists are allegedly protected under the First Amendment, the “freedom of the press” clause doesn’t really apply to social media or other privately controlled entities. In fact, according to the 2023 Press Freedom Index produced by Reporters Without Borders, the US ranked 45th worldwide, and Israel, which just moved to ban Al Jazeera as a security threat, was 97th.

Thus, it is no surprise that the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) currently labels the US a “flawed democracy” at 29th place in its Democracy Index 2023, just ahead of Israel in 30th place. Referring to global democracy in a worrying “backslide,” the EIU reported, “To reverse this worrying turn away from democracy, governments and political parties need to work hard to restore trust in representative democracy by delivering on the issues that matter to the electorate.” Having a free and vibrant independent press is one way to achieve that goal, but alas, there is work to do.

The Myth of a Free Press: Official Propaganda as Censorship and the “Paper of Record”

The challenges to press freedoms in the US are rooted in the political economy of mass media. As scholars Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky outlined in their seminal book Manufacturing Consent (1988), news media in the US operate for profit. They are thus not incentivized to cover stories that threaten their bottom lines, including the financial interests of their advertisers or shareholders. 

These so-called “mainstream” outlets decide who or what is newsworthy, meaning which voices are platformed and which are not. Even though more people are increasingly getting news from digital sources, most news stories still originate from a handful of corporations that own roughly 90 percent of the news media in the US. These news outlets rely on a hyper-partisan narrative approach (Republican versus Democrat, Team Red versus Team Blue) where MSNBC, CNN, New York Times, and Washington Post confirm the Democratic biases of their liberal audiences, while Fox News, Wall Street Journal, and New York Post do the same for the Republican biases of their conservative, MAGA audiences.

This for-profit, hyper-partisan approach to managing news media has resulted in censorship of varied and diverse viewpoints. Case in point—in April, The Intercept reported on a leaked memo, circulated initially to staff at the New York Times, often referred to as “the paper of record,” that put restrictions on the use of terms such as “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “occupied territory” in the newspapers’s coverage of the Israeli assault in Gaza.

If the memo’s directives had the effect of sanitizing the Times’ coverage, this dovetailed neatly with the interests of the Biden Administration, which had been stalwart in its support for Israel. Indeed, the New York Times operates under economic and political pressures that align it with official US foreign policy. And, if they don’t, other “Team Blue” media are waiting to step up and take their place.

For example, earlier this year, when the New York Times noted that Biden’s speech on the economy was a combination of statements that were “false,” “misleading,” and in need of “context,” MSNBC’s Claire McCaskill, a former Democratic US Senator, called it “ridiculous” that the New York Times “fact-checked Joe Biden on something.” But isn’t that what journalists are supposed to do?

In another “paper of record” moment, the New York Times also published an early story about the horrific sexual assaults committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, in Israel. However, the story, which was produced in part by a person who had never reported before, was soon contradicted by other reports that claimed there was insufficient evidence to verify that mass sexual assaults occurred. This may help explain why the New York Times canceled a podcast based on the first story, but it doesn’t explain why they did not offer a correction to the original report.

As a result, Team Blue–friendly press have taken to echoing Democratic Party talking points. For example, they have repeatedly mischaracterized the critics of US support for Israel as anti-Semitic or pro-Hamas, when in fact, they are actually pro-BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions), pro-peace, and anti-genocide.

The Team Blue press have also propounded false stories, including about how Hamas supposedly beheaded forty babies, reminiscent of earlier false US war propaganda themes about Germans ripping the arms off Belgian babies (in World War I) or the Iraqi Republican Guard throwing babies out of incubators (during the Gulf War). President Biden himself repeated some of the false stories about Hamas, as previous presidents repeated other noted false claims until they slowly faded into the background noise of the next atrocity propaganda campaign.

Meanwhile, not to be outdone, Team Red media outlets like Fox News amplify the voices of public officials such as GOP Senator Tom Cotton, who called for citizens to engage in vigilante justice by throwing protestors off bridges or having their skin ripped off if they glue themselves to property.

Many campus administrators have channeled that sentiment as they declared a fear for security, resulting in canceled commencements; censored speeches; arrested faculty, staff, and students; and police violently attacking protesters. Some, like GOP Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Senator Josh Hawley, even called for the National Guard to be called out to quell unrest in Ohio, eerily echoing a potential past-as-prologue tragedy at Kent State University 54 years ago on May 4, 1970, when the Ohio National Guard killed four students and injured nine others during an anti-war protest.

A Tale of Two Platforms

The passage of the bipartisan ban on TikTok, expected to go into effect sometime in the next year, was enabled in part by legacy media critiques that such digital media spaces promote the spread of false information (aka fake news). Since October 7 of last year, the Biden Administration’s frustration with TikTok has grown as online users accessed content that purported to show Israeli soldiers committing human rights abuses and killing unarmed hostages, the ongoing humanitarian crisis for Palestinians, Israeli influencers mocking Palestinian suffering, and the Islamophobia of those connected to US leaders. 

Biden could rest assured that similar reports would not appear in legacy media outlets, evidenced by CNN filtering its reporting through its Jerusalem Bureau before it reached American audiences; MSNBC removing news personalities who were sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians; and, as previously mentioned, the New York Times publishing the disputed reports on sexual assaults and rape during the October 7 attacks.

Numerous reports demonstrate a history of the federal government pressuring social media companies to remove content that threatens their power. Indeed, the US can threaten regulations, raise taxes, or cancel lucrative contracts to influence social media companies to do their bidding. In this way, TikTok offered a unique threat as it is a foreign-owned company. As a result, it could ignore certain US government pressures.

In the meantime, polls show that social media users in general, and on TikTok in particular, are responding to Biden’s unwavering support for Israel by abandoning his campaign and, instead, refusing to vote at all, threatening to vote for Trump, or considering voting for a third-party candidate. In a particularly striking example of opposition to Biden, during the 2024 Democratic primary, thousands of registered Democrats voted “uncommitted” instead of for their party’s incumbent candidate. The response from Biden and the Democratic Party is censorship, whether banning a social media platform or suppressing legitimate and lawful political protest.

A Vibrant Independent Press—Not Censorship—Is the Antidote

Those who cheer the banning of TikTok as the first step in the larger goal of regulating Big Tech’s ability to spread false content, erase privacy, or engender mental and physical health problems should remember the values and principles enshrined in the UN’s World Press Freedom Day.

Rather than set a precedent for regulating a toxic industry by singling out a foreign scapegoat (as is our wont in foreign policy and war propaganda), these acts would codify the principle that when a government cannot influence outlets by proxy, they can ban any alternative platform that dares to threaten its power. From TikTok to WikiLeaks, efforts to control freedom of information will undoubtedly create chilling effects, with platforms and publishers choosing to adhere to the demands of power, directly or by proxy, rather than risk their own extinction.

While the travails of TikTok as a company may not excite one’s concerns about the freedom of the press the way the case of Julian Assange should, they are nonetheless further indicators of these grimly censorious times. We, the people, would not have to learn factual information about what’s happening around the world from TikTok if the principles of World Press Freedom Day were practiced by journalists every day. The “paper of record” and their ilk must clean up their act or be exposed as a failed Fourth Estate.

If we are to be a free people, if we are to be self-governing, then we need a free and independent press, reporting factually and transparently in the public interest—owners, shareholders, elected and appointed officials be damned. The state of our free press must be improved, its protected status exalted, as a means to resetting the moral compass of our republic and embarking on a path toward truth and social justice for all.

Bangladesh has emerged as the leading voice of climate change activism in the Global South in recent years. The country has shown resilience, determination and an unapologetic stance in the pursuit of climate justice.

As a low-lying, densely populated country, Bangladesh finds itself on the frontline of climate change impacts, grappling with rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and the displacement of vulnerable communities. Currently, the country is reeling from extreme flooding which has displaced half a million people and killed at least 23.

Despite contributing minimally to the carbon emissions responsible for these changes, Bangladesh still holds the developed world accountable for its part in accelerating climate change. However, Bangladesh also must fight to bring the Global South into climate action. The advocacy Bangladesh demonstrates for climate action and justice must remain at the forefront of the global stage.

Bangladesh fights for climate justice within its own borders

Bangladesh, often described as one of the most climate-vulnerable countries, has been dealing with the severe consequences of climate change for decades. Geography and socio-economic conditions make it uniquely susceptible to the impacts of global warming. Rising sea levels pose an existential threat to coastal communities, and extreme weather events such as cyclones and floods disrupt livelihoods. According to the World Bank’s Country and Climate Development Report, tropical cyclones cost Bangladesh about $1 billion annually on average. The country could see as many as 13.3 million people displaced by 2050 due to climate change. Its GDP could fall by as much as 9% in case of severe flooding. 

In the face of these challenges, Bangladesh displays an action-centered attitude in dealing with climate change. The World Bank calls it “the emerging hot spot” where climate threats and action meet. Its initiatives have resulted in impressive climate adaptation ventures, including the construction of the world’s largest multi-storied social housing project in Coxs Bazar, which will rehabilitate 4,400 families displaced by climate change. In mitigation, Bangladesh has become one of the world leaders in Solar House Systems, with 6 million households using solar photovoltaic systems.

Bangladesh has not stopped at the social level. It has also worked towards boosting economic action to mitigate climate damage. Bangladesh was one of the first developing countries to establish a coordinated action plan in 2009. Till now, its climate policy deck includes the Bangladesh Climate Change Trust Act, the Delta Plan 2100, and the Mujib Climate Prosperity Plan. Each policy focuses on directing funds towards the prevention of climate damage.

The country has also set up a Climate Change Trust Fund, the first of its kind, allocating $300 million from domestic resources between 2009 and 2012. In 2014, the country adopted the Climate Fiscal Framework to create climate-inclusive public financial management. Bangladesh also introduced a National Sustainable Development Strategy to align economic development with climate priorities further. Bangladesh put forward a target to generate 5% of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2015 and 10% by 2020.

However, Bangladesh has failed to meet either of these targets. It continues to generate most of its electricity from fossil fuels. The reliance on natural gas and coal puts Bangladesh at risk of power crises. This should not, however, be a sign of lax climate advocacy. Bangladesh continues to fight for justice both within its borders and on the regional stage. 

The regional stage must join Bangladesh in advocating for climate justice

Pursuing climate justice also includes Bangladesh’s proactive advocacy of raising awareness about the disproportionate impact of climate change on vulnerable nations. In the latest Munich security conference, this issue of regional disparities in renewable energy investment was discussed broadly. Till now, the funding discrimination in the Global South is glaring—mostly circulating in China and some high- and middle-income economies, with India and Indonesia gaining recent attention due to the steep rise in emissions. But poorer nations in the south are still largely off the radar.

During the pandemic, Bangladesh launched the South Asian regional office for the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) in Dhaka in September 2020. The GCA Bangladesh office will promote indigenous nature-based sustainable solutions and innovative adaptation measures with the regional countries.

In December 2022, Bangladesh even became a party to the case by an international organization of small island states, known as the Commission of Small Island States (COSIS). COSIS sought an advisory opinion, the first request of its kind, on the states’ obligations regarding climate change at ICJ. Bangladesh submitted a written statement explaining the need for international law regarding climate change.

The failure of advanced economies, the major contributors to climate change, to mobilize investments in renewables for low-income countries is a critical discussion that must be kept alive for opportunities for global green growth. While Bangladesh should continue to be a vocal party to this conversation regarding other low-income countries, it too must advocate for itself. Its measures are not adequate to deal with its climate urgencies forever, especially considering the pressure of financing climate actions on its emerging economy. The country could require an estimated $26.5 billion to meet its goal of generating 40% of electricity from renewables by 2041. 

Bangladesh must be vigilant in securing climate finance and technology from the public and private sectors at future COPs, or it risks losing decades of economic gains to climate change during the crucial period of its development. Thus the country has emerged as a vocal proponent for the need for collective global responsibility in addressing climate change.

The Global South cannot face climate change alone

The hallmark of Bangladesh’s climate awareness and advocacy is that it has played a crucial role in shaping the discourse around loss and damage at international climate negotiations. Bangladesh has consistently called for developed nations to take decisive actions in reducing their carbon footprints. 

Bangladesh calls for such nations to provide financial and technological support to developing countries. The failure of advanced economies, the major contributors to climate change, to mobilize investments in renewables for low-income countries is a critical discussion that must be kept alive for opportunities for global green growth. 

 Bangladesh has been a member of essential bodies set up by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) over the years, such as the Adaptation Fund Board and the Green Climate Fund Board. It also plays a significant role in international climate diplomacy, having organized and led the Least Developed Countries negotiating bloc in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations since the bloc’s inception. The country’s advocacy has contributed to establishing the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage, which promotes dialogue around climate change effects. Bangladesh’s global advocacy signals a step forward in recognizing and addressing the impacts beyond action. 

The burden of climate change disproportionately falls on those who have contributed the least to its causes. Recognizing the challenges the Global South faces is crucial for fostering a fair and inclusive response to the climate crisis. The COP28 Loss and Damage Fund has been the right direction to take in this regard. The global community must acknowledge and support the efforts of nations like Bangladesh to pursue climate justice. Climate justice is not a charity but a shared responsibility for a more equitable and sustainable future for all.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

A few years ago, the UK’s National Theatre staged an exceptionally moving Christmas show. Among the characters were a pregnant woman and her partner, searching for a place to rest. So far, so seasonal. But Love, by Alexander Zeldin, wasn’t set in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago — it took place in a temporary accommodation hostel in modern Britain.

One of three plays — The Inequalities trilogy — focusing on those sorely affected by austerity, the government’s programme for cutting public spending in the 2010s, Love used painstaking naturalism to envelop the audience in the world of the drama. Key to it were the quiet dignity and compassion Zeldin accorded his characters. The ending, in which a middle-aged man tenderly washed his elderly mother’s hair in the communal kitchen sink, would have made a concrete slab weep.

Now Zeldin is back at the National Theatre with a very different project — at least on the surface of it. The Other Place comes with the subtitle After Antigone, so you might expect an updating of Sophocles’s great tragedy. But Zeldin, 39, has barely arrived in a small room in the theatre before he’s emphasising that that is not the case: there’s no Theban princess — or modern equivalent — facing down her royal uncle over the burial of her disgraced brother. Instead, he has gone back to what he feels is the engine of the original and reworked it in a contemporary domestic setting.

“Antigone is a play about the aftermath,” he says. “It’s not about someone resisting arrest or something: it’s [about] two forms of grief.” In his version, a man who was left looking after his two nieces following his brother’s suicide has, 10 years later, decided to remodel the house, move his new wife and child in and scatter his brother’s ashes — thereby going back on his promise to his niece, Annie. That and Annie’s fragile state prompt a family crisis. “So it’s a modern tragedy around one person wanting to erase the past and one person wanting to preserve it,” says the playwright. “We have radically different ways of dealing with grief.”

Zeldin is not the only writer and director grappling with Sophocles this winter. London is about to embrace two high-profile productions of Oedipus, one staged by Robert Icke, one by Matthew Warchus and Hofesh Shechter, while Hollywood star Brie Larson will play Elektra in January. For Zeldin, the tragedian throws down a gauntlet to a modern writer.

“The challenge of a contemporary tragedy is really exciting for a playwright,” he says. “Antigone takes place in less than 24 hours: it’s one action, one place. It’s a real test to write something that has the mechanism of inevitability . . . There are situations in life when there is no resolution possible and acknowledging that has a great value.”

Zeldin, a warm, friendly presence, looks tired but wired after the week’s rehearsals. He leans across the table, intent on clarity, bringing the same restless honesty to the conversation as he does to his work. His new play is funny, he says — “I like laughing a lot in theatre” — but it is also an attempt to face up to difficult questions without flinching.

Is theatre something that can get into the marrow of our world and make stories out of it?

“At the centre of the play is somebody who has been in crisis for a long time,” he says. “The question that is central to it, and to our time, is: what to do in the face of the suffering of others? Because we know about suffering everywhere. It’s very hard to live with. But that’s where theatre has a space. It can bring us into something that we don’t normally see and that’s essential to live — to really live.”

His 2023 play The Confessions turned that eye on his own family, inspired by the experiences of his Australian mother and her generation. But it also touched on Zeldin’s own childhood trauma: he lost his father, a Russian-Jewish refugee, when he was 15. In essence, it was that tragedy that propelled him towards theatre.

“When someone dies you want to live,” he says. “So I lived hard. I had a bit of a rough time as a teenager. Theatre for me was a space where it was possible to say anything. And it still is . . . That’s the purpose of art — to make the unsayable sayable. And inside that it’s an act of kindness, it’s a moral act. We need it.”

Still in his teens, he took a production to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it received the accolade of “worst play of the year” from one critic. “It was a real badge of honour,” he grins. But where many might have slunk off, defeated, Zeldin was hooked. He knew he had found something in which he really believed. “I realised theatre was a way of cutting through the bullshit and getting at what is essential.”

That urge to bottle truth came out in his Inequalities trilogy, which he began working on in his mid-twenties. His own time doing temp jobs left him determined to find a way to honour onstage the experiences of people often ignored. The first of that trilogy, Beyond Caring, focused on factory cleaners on zero-hours contracts.

“The question was whether you can carve a story out of just life,” he says. “Is theatre something that can get into the marrow of our world and make stories out of it? I’m interested in empathy. I’m interested in dignity.”

After university, Zeldin travelled extensively, seeking out different ways of making theatre. He worked with the great director Peter Brook in Paris, where he still lives (though he’s considering moving back to the UK), and in 2019 set up the A Zeldin company, partly with the intention of touring. An outward looking theatre culture is “very valuable” he suggests.

Fourteen years after falling in love with the stage, he remains besotted. But, in a sense, it’s a tough love. “I always ask myself the question, why theatre? What do people need to see? What’s useful?” he says. “I remember hearing a Greek director say, ‘I want this play to travel in you.’ I love that.”

September 27-November 9, nationaltheatre.org.uk

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