This is the tale of two billionaires at the heart of the current debate over truth and trust in the media: one, George Soros, long used to being vilified by the press; the other, Elon Musk, who last week turned on journalists and called them liars.

After a few negative headlines about his electric car company, Tesla, Musk took exception to an investigation by Reveal, website for the Center for Investigative Reporting, into the number of unreported injuries. Linking to a report disclaiming the negative headlines, the PayPal founder and space explorer tweeted: “Holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them.”

He suggested that Tesla was criticised because it didn’t advertise, while Reveal’s supporters pointed out that the centre is not-for-profit and relies on donations, not ads.

Perhaps, more tellingly for someone schooled on Silicon Valley’s obsession with data and doubts over journalism, Musk mooted a “media credibility rating site” where users can “rate the core truth of any article & track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor & publication. Thinking of calling it Pravda …”

While this could have been just a joke using the Russian word for “truth”, a company called Pravda Corp, linked to Jared Birchall, a director who works for Musk, was registered last October.

When Musk asked his 22 million followers to vote for such a site, or the statement “the media is awesome”, more than 500,000 did so within 24 hours, the vast majority in favour of rating “core truth”, whatever that means.

What use would there be for submitting British journalism to the thumbs up or down model of the gladiatorial web? For we know that polls, such as that produced by communications experts Edelman, point to a level of trust in the press and journalists that gets lower and lower every year.

‘In Silicon Valley titans’ brave new world, poor reviews or any adverse view is just “fake news”’

How, for example, would these voters rank the credibility of last week’s Daily Mail front page which accused billionaire Soros of funding a “plot to subvert Brexit”? No one can deny the existence of a 26-page report detailing a six-month PR plan ahead of a key parliamentary debate in October. Nor that Soros, a survivor of Nazi-occupied Hungary, has used more than $18bn (£13,5bn) of his fortune to fund many projects, including those he considers pro-democratic.

But the issue is one of perception. The Mail accused Soros of being an “unaccountable nabob” who is “undermining democracy” by supporting a campaign “putting up billboards around the country calling for a second vote”.

Such campaigns are typically considered part of a democratic process. Even Mail Online, in one of its occasional bursts of independence from its print sibling, took a step back by adding the words “claimed” and “apparently”.

Soros, aka the man who broke the Bank of England, is no stranger to journalistic brickbats, of course. Called the “bugaboo of European nationalists” by the Economist, his support for various causes has led to accusations that he is engineering the migration of millions of Muslims to Europe. One Hungarian politician posted a picture on Facebook of a burnt carcass of a pig with the words “This was Soros” carved into its skin.

And the Mail, of course, was exercising its democratic right by proclaiming its “belief that it is simply wrong for a foreign billionaire to exert his muscle” funding a campaign group in the UK. Leave to one side, for now, the non-domiciled status of its owner Lord Rothermere, the right to free speech in a democracy does, indeed, apply to everybody.

Earlier this year, Soros told fellow plutocrats and politicians in Davos that it took a “real effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called ‘the freedom of mind’”. He called Facebook and Google – the digital giants sucking advertising from all media including the Daily Mail and Reveal – a “menace to society”. For all the criticism, Soros does seem to have some appreciation of how a free media works.

By contrast, Musk’s attitude towards journalists seems typical of a breed of titan in Silicon Valley. In their brave new world, poor reviews or any adverse view are just “fake news” and companies which make no money are not to be trusted.

One hoped for better, not least because Musk’s made his first mega-millions with web software company Zip2, which allowed media companies to establish web presences with features such as maps and directions.

In 2003 after selling his stake in PayPal, Musk said of his investments in web companies: “I like to be involved in things that change the world.” But he didn’t say anything about changing it for the better.

Press needs Brexit balance

For some change is disastrous. It is an outrage, for example, that Asda and Morrisons are refusing to stock the New European on the grounds of its anti-Brexit stance. Launched in nine days after the EU referendum, the weekly campaigning paper – with an average circulation of 22,000 – has won several awards since launching in June 2016. The editorial and management has made no secret of its pro-Remain stance. Indeed, its raison d’etre has been to redress the imbalance in the national media. Newspapers supporting Brexit are read by four times as many as those supporting the status quo. So why, if both supermarkets sell pro-Brexit papers, have they told the New European’s distribution team their “stores do not want to be seen to take a political stance”?

Editor Matt Kelly has accused the retailers of “damaging media plurality” in the UK. And given the importance of supermarket sales to print newspapers, he is 100% right.

All a matter of scale

Netflix, a streaming service about to turn 21, has been briefly valued at more than any other media company in the world. More than the vast Walt Disney or cable giant Comcast. It has been, in many ways, astute. A deal with the Obamas helped double its share in a year. For their part, the two older companies have been punished by shareholders concerned about their futures as well as their desire to merge with Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox and UK satellite company Sky. The rise of Netflix throws the Murdoch rationale to combine with something even bigger, into sharp relief.

Digital competition prompted consolidation and led to the closure of many hundreds of regional papers. Now economies of scale are changing the face of far bigger groups and shifting tectonic plates.