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The left does ignore this problem or get wrapped up in their useless “big picture” rhetoric that leads nowhere when this is a very practical, tangible problem. Dominating over the right-wing propaganda machine is the obvious answer. When I suggest the left needs their own propaganda bots & troll farms flooding social media, their own podcasters & influencers to propagate their propaganda, better engagement through local organizations to answer & counteract right-wing bullshit & push some of their own to keep the right-wing occupied, I get responses like
This is such a boomer take. This is like trying to claim Clinton lost in 2016 because she didn’t tweet enough or use the right young-person slang, skibidi
or digressions like the comments here that dismiss everything as another problem to pin on capitalism without offering constructive ideas that could seriously lead anywhere. A left-wing propaganda machine to outdo the right-wing is doable, I doubt propaganda bots would cost a fortune to set up. The loser mentality of just venting about impractical shit instead of organize & reach for practical solutions is a major part of the problem.
It doesn’t quite work like that. Nobody needs a “leftist alex jones” or an "ai swarm of leftist bots’ and in terms of tech and money you just can’t compete with right wing power. Lies are easier to fabricate than truths. Trust is easier to destroy than build.
We do need information networks that work and the left has a lot of people willing to volunteer, etc.
I honestly think just going door to door and asking people if there’s anything local people should know about and then compiling frequent concerns, or notable local stories into newsletters would be far more effective than anything else.
Local journalism. There’s no money in it at the moment but the work is not incredibly complicated.
the problem with bot farms specifically is that the mainstream online platforms themselves are not neutral. i’m open to ideas.
This isn’t exactly new. But it’s still problematic, especially in today’s age. And also much bigger now because of today’s age. Mainstream media is owned either by the right-wing, or by the rich who just surrender to the leading power (which in this case is the right wing anyway). My politically literate friends understand this, at least. But when the major media outlets are unreliable, it leaves either unknown or biased sources of information or citizen journalists (who have their own biases). So there’s no reliable outlet of information that favors the left, at least any that would be considered trustworthy in the wider media sphere. So again, this isn’t news to the politically literate. Those that aren’t get perpetually stuck in the right wing infosphere, because that’s the only “reliable,” known sources, in their perception.
Newspaper serve two purposes: spreading information and making sure that the population carries along with the political decisions being made.
For everything that you’re outraged about, there’s 3 things that are more important that you have no idea about, that you have never heard of, because the media doesn’t report it. They don’t need to lie, just not forward some information. There’s no way to prove it either since it’s technically not a lie. Just misrepresentation of information.
I experienced this firsthand last week when I watched live as congress voted to hold the Clinton’s in criminal contempt of Congress, then failed to see a single news outlet publish the information. Feels like I’ve been gaslit.
I mean, I get it, nobody is talking about the MAGA takeover of the media, but literally half the media is now captured by MAGA, who is going after the rest. Where are people supposed to hear about it?
We don’t have a lot of time left. We have to take control after the Midterms, and go hard on MAGA. Congressional investigations and hearings into anti-monopoly/anti-trust issues in the media will be an important priority. They’ll find that there was a lot of corruption and bribery involved, and those companies will be broken up.
If your ideology requires the censorship of competing ideology its a shit ideology.
The real part of this that people on the left won’t talk about is how this directly intersects with their campaign of pushing cynicism in leftwing spaces through shill accounts pretending to be liberals and progressives, and how effectively they have divided the party like this.
I remember when this started with the Bernie Bro stuff, even as Bernie himself was like “hey you idiots stop falling for this agitprop.” Since then they’ve run the same basic playbook with every election and it has gotten more and more effective as the same useful idiots double down on the same basic narratives
Word, where’d you hear that msnbc? Cnn?
Biden, Hilary, Kamala - all Israeli corporate whores.
You neoliberals need to get out of the way.
those “centrists” are fascists, they just play a different role, normalizing the last republican’s actions and stopping leftward opposition.
Agitprop
This guy acts like any of this is new, or that it’s some right wing conspiracy to make us mistrust the government.
They’re in the pocket of capitalist interests and have been for hundreds of years. More and more it’s becoming clear that the leading factor behind most of our major societal issues is unfettered capitalism, destroying everything and squeezing everything.
Our governments answer only to the rich these days, moreso than ever before in recent Western history. Any response from the people can be moderated and restricted, and at worst results in a pathetic protest that - while it may be large - is a brief, unsustained blip that doesn’t even rattle the stock market, let alone worry the rich ruling class at all.
Society has been cleverly trained to think they can’t affect change, and that writing a comment online (like this one) is a good way to affect change or make a difference.
All it does is make you feel like you’ve done something useful, when you haven’t, and identified yourself and your political opinions to your government, who will put you on various lists and come for you when the time comes.
This guy is on the right track, but needs to think bigger. Much, much bigger.
“I’m stating this obvious thing that NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT” is reverse ragebait. That’s all.
They don’t want to talk about how it’s capitalism that’s the problem, about how capitalist control of media will inevitably subvert democracy, making capitalism and democracy incompatible.
Capitalism is the hellspawn of feudalism which is inherently authoritarian so we shouldn’t be surprised but thank you for saying the quiet part out loud.
Ding, ding!
Except it is not the right, it is the billionaires, filthy rich shareholders, etc. Big company CEOs and politicians (left and right) are just their pawns. They heavily lean on right/conservatives because they are easier to manipulate. Remember, billionaires are food, not friends.
There’s no “Big company left CEOs”. The megacorp model is inherently rightwing - democratizing workplaces makes it difficult for a single person to run a large company.
You are describing the right. It is moot point; it must be stopped.
They are not the right, they have no ideals besides money, power and privilege. It is just easier to bend the right into obedience and their world view, hence why. Same shareholders you would call “right” also will have shares in green energy and sustainability because to them everything is an investment, including politics.
Yup. These fucks will happily send our troops into harms way murdering foreign civilians for a buck. Sure they’ve already attained wealth so massive that none of their heirs will ever have to do anything besides ask the butler for a refill, but why not blow up some brown kids so they can take a little more?
The right doesn’t actually want this, it’s their kids going too. But then the heads on Fox start talking in big words, so they must be smart and they’re saying it’s a good thing, so it must be. Sure, the other taking heads say it’s awful, but they are paid actors by the liberal pizza pedo ring and Obama. Trump said so! Sure he lies, but he lies to the liberals, not me!
I still think that they’d make for a terrible meal.
Maybe they’d make for good fertilizer instead?
Compost the rich
I think part of the issue is that a lot of people who are aware of this know that it’s been happening for a lot longer than since Trump’s first election, and it’s not specifically a right wing takeover. It’s an overall consolidation of power into the hands of an ultra-wealthy few, and right wing is currently the most advantageous position for them to take.
This particular video is from 2018, a year into Trump’s first term, and it shows a large amount of local news stations that were believed to be spread across the political spectrum (at least for US run stations) all reciting the same exact script.
But the movements of Rupert Murdoch, or the Sinclair Media group, or iHeartRadio, or any of the many number of conglomerates didn’t just crop up overnight purely under right wing situations to support right wing movement.
Unless you really think Trump’s first election was some 5D chess thing, he was catching flak from all sides. Before that, the news media gave incredibly kind coverage to Obama’s involvement in the Middle East, his use of drones, his moves to further the rights granted to the US government and intelligence agencies through the Patriot act (started under Dubya, but expanded under Obama), the construction of illegal immigration centers during his tenure… the list goes on for him like it does for most Presidents.
The screws have been tighening for decades, this isn’t something shockingly new to present day, we’re just approaching critical mass.
The control of the media really started gaining speed in the 1960s when a certain President Nixon had a media consultant named Roger Ailes and the two dreamed of creating a conservative news network that functioned as a Republican party clearing house. Roger Ailes later went on to be president of Fox News after of course working in the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations
It’s worth also remembering for anyone not alive and/or not aware that during that period Nixon was also a wannabe dictator and authoritarian and he attempted to rig his re-election and got caught when his associates broke into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate hotel.
It’s not a right-wing takeover, and it’s not a takeover by the ultra wealthy. It’s more complicated than that.
The NY Times is still the crown jewel of news, and it isn’t owned by a right-winger or an oligarch. It’s a publicly traded company traded on the NYSE. The CEO is a multi-millionaire, but definitely no oligarch. USA Today is also publicly traded. Same with Comcast which owns NBC universal which owns NBC which runs NBC news.
Most of these publicly owned companies have a few rich shareholders, but they have so few shares they can’t exert much control. For example, the CEO of Comcast, Brian L. Roberts does own more than $1b worth of Comcast stock, but Comcast has a market cap of more than $100b, so Roberts owns less than 1% of the company. If you actually look at who owns most of these big public companies it’s always going to be Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street, etc. who all own it on behalf of their investors. Those companies are basically hands off with their ownership, because they basically own it as part of an index fund, so it’s not really them who owns it. But, they do want their investments to keep making money.
Then there’s The Associated Press, which is a not-for-profit cooperative owned by its member newspapers and broadcasters. Reuters is officially a British news agency, owned by a Canadian publicly traded company Thomson Reuters. It’s one of the unusual ones because although it’s publicly traded, the majority of its shares belong to The Woodbridge Company which is owned by the Canadian/British Thomson family. And there’s NPR, PRI, APM, PBS, etc. which are publicly owned, but relatively small. And then there are the international news orgs that have penetration in the US: BBC, the Guardian, etc.
The real problem is that news in the US has always been owned by for-profit companies. This is unlike most of the world where there are for-profit companies, but one of the major players in news is a state-owned company: ABC in Australia, BBC in Britain, CBC in Canada, DW in Deutschland, ERR in Estonia, France Télévisions in France, etc.
When the world went online, and online advertising was captured by the Google / Facebook duopoly and classifieds were captured by Craigslist, it became really hard for news organizations to make money. The ones that suffered most were the ones that used to be newspapers. TV networks had to adjust but not as much. The ones that were owned by oligarchs didn’t have to change because their goal was never about making a profit for the oligarch. But, the ones that were in it as businesses had to scramble because the way they made money had to change.
IMO, where we are now is that we have oligarch-owned media which is mostly right-wing – but “pro-business right wing” not “evangelical right-wing”. Then there’s the for-profit media which is mostly sensationalist news, panel discussions, and other stuff that can be done cheaply. The days when reporters could do month-long investigations are mostly gone. Same with sending a reporter to the city’s meetings. There are a few remaining dedicated news orgs that can afford to fund in-depth reporting, funded by people playing Wordle or similar wierdness.
The dial on the “yellowness” of the news has been turned up, and oligarchs have more influence than they used to. But, it’s not as simple to say that it’s all right wing, or all oligarch owned. It’s more that journalism as a profession has taken a major hit and everything that used to compete with reliable, honest journalism has grown.
There was an episode of West Wing where CJ was really worried about (it was obviously Sinclair media) the consolidation of news media especially. I think that episode was in 2003 or 2004. It’s not a huge problem until it is. But, I contend it has been a right wing plan. Yes, the oligarchs have been the ones doing the buying but the plan to consolidate all media has been a major plan by the Christian right since at least the 80’s. They’ve been the ones pushing hard for it. And while it can benefit the oligarchs it primarily benefits fascism and the right.
If you think it only started with right wing christians in the 80s and hadn’t been going on since the end of the seccond world war, the invention of the intelligence agencies and the sudden realisation that governments can move exorbitant quantities of money into companies that dont exist, to pay for experiments on the population in secret, you’ve missed a beat
'Because all those post-nazism scientists have a lot of ideas on how to get those damn commies to spill the beans and we can’t have them go work for someone else, how else are we going to make the drug that makes you trip so much balls your arms and legs fall off? (yes. that’s a real thing. Bromo-DragonFLY)
The second I saw that you said news stations after that link I knew it was gonna be the “This is extremely dangerous to our democracy”
Consolidation from what? A time when television news studios were owned by your average mom and pop who mortgaged their house for a chance at their dream lifestyle?
Media has always been owned by the oligarchs. For literally centuries it’s been owned by the oligarchs. The Opium Wars, the Indian Wars, every war ever has been supported by the news outlets owned by the war-profiting oligarchs.
The consolidation was just an optimization, both of operationalizing ideology and of extracting profit.
But there was never a time before which media was actually competitive and balanced and could guide someone towards an accurate understanding of the world. The white supremacist oligarchs have literally always controlled the media, the narrative, and the propaganda.
Yep, there are some interesting connections to how advertising got started and got perfected into that repetition based system that reinforces beliefs by familiarization. The consolidation is just centralization of that process.
I also don’t think the consolidation is the root cause, it’s a tool.
Unless you really think Trump’s first election was some 5D chess thing, he was catching flak from all sides.
That’s at least 3D chess. Bad news are good news. The media made him popular.
Problem is, people ARE talking about it…
…but where exactly would you expect to HEAR about people talking about it?
Actions speak louder than words.
You’d hope so, but a lot of recent events tend to point to the opposite and it doesn’t look like we’re going to see any actions strong enough to really break through any time soon.
He’s put the cart before the horse.
It’s not “the right”, it’s the super wealthy billionaires who have taken over the political media & infosphere. Earnest liberals and conservatives should open their eyes and see, they are both being used against the other right out in the open.
The political media and infosphere is FOR SALE, why does he ignore that? Anybody can buy them and control the narrative. Oh, correction, anybody who’s filthy rich can buy them. Not you.
Earnest liberals and conservatives
Both those groups support the existence of capitalism. Wealth inequality and capitalists owning media are natural results of this.
If they stopped supporting the system that caused this, they wouldn’t be liberals/conservatives, they’d be leftists.
So, that’s every country since the reformation? Uh-oh we’re in big trouble
By “the right” did he mean the pedo elite and the epstein class? Or is that synonymous now?
Cause by my eyes, having ghislane with supermod status on reddit and jeff having been in close enough contact with the 4chan guy to make /pol exist, not to mention zuck playing every side on fb and now long rat owning twitter; all these mean that the majority of left/right discourse can be boiled down to “manipulated opinions astroturfed by billionaires who have the ability to bot farm absolutely any opinion into the general populace.”
but it’s literally fascism. like the inability to refer to the fascism as fascism is what Rowling the transphobe was writing about?
