Media outlets across the country covered the Virgin Galactic launch Sunday. The billionaire space race opens up an opportunity for newsrooms to aggressively and cohesively focus on the intersection of outer space and billionaires.
The billionaire beat “isn’t a luxury beat about the rich and famous doing crazy stuff,” Teddy Schleifer, founding partner of Puck News, said. “These are private citizens who have enormous power, enormous wealth and are able to use it in really fascinating ways.” He added that it’s impossible to talk about the success of these billionaires “without talking about the system that creates it in the first place.”
“The same forces that create the winners of capitalism also create a lot of inequality,” Schleifer said. Journalists need to cover how billionaires take their winnings from capitalism and use them to try to combat inequality “and do amazing things for humanity,” he said. “That’s the tension that I think newsrooms need to dive into more.”
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