Michael Tomasky @ The New Republic
One personal humiliation here right off the bat is how the legacy media that people like me fret ab all the time, NYTimes/WaPo, are actually already marginal to the real big influencers with these online audiences that dwarf the old media: Fox, Musk's X, Joe Rogan, Tik Tok, Rush Limbaugh's ghost, honestly, I don't know this stuff and I'm not sure I want to know, but point taken.
And I'm not entirely unsympathetic to Grump being their champion. So he obviously lies about everything, cheats every which way he can in every election, that's what politicians do they reason, he is fighting for us. He isn't but you get the idea. They like the story that everyone is against him and he's a fighter. They feel like everyone (liberal establishment) is against them too and admire what they perceive as his heroic response to such terrible liberal left antifa protester opposition. This brings up that old saw about how some people need to get what they want before they can understand what that means, even if what it means is fascist violence and purges and pogroms, apparently.
None of this is good, very very bad, but I understand it or find it legible, anyway. I'm a much less clear, or maybe I should say alarmed or worried about how this dominance of conservative media in the cell phone era effectively gets an electoral majority to overlook or dismiss as unimportant that Grump tried to overthrow the 2020 election with an armed mob, or refused to relinquish a bunch of top secret national security documents, or is obviously compromised by his relationship to Putin, who has now attacked our last three national elections and divides us from our biggest friends and allies in the world. Or even how this conservative media juggernaut gets a winning majority to forget that this guy botched badly a global public health crisis that we have barely gotten out of but, apparently, everyone wants to pretend now never happened. Yolo, etc.
I feel like I'm saying more or less the same thing over and over, which I guess is what people do when they get my age, but it isn't just the inhumanity and injustice, the cruel and intolerant hierarchy in this popular election, which stands for over 200 years of conservative boilerplate at this point, but the who cares obliviousness to the direct assaults on our national independence and extreme, isolating, and self-destructive tendencies in this retreat from real world problems and the future that is most ominous, to say the least.
Let's put is this way: This electoral victory isn't a model of A.I. as Techno-optimist liberation but A.I. as a tool of surveillance and corporate manipulation of the media. Doomy and repressive. And America said, yup, that's what we want: 'Grump knows how to deal with the illegals and he's easier on the pocket-book.' Okay, if you say so, we'll have to see how that works out but I have grave doubts.
And Why Dems Are Losing the Culture War
Horatio Hornblower @ The Atlantic And then, yeah, more about conservatives dominating online media in the run-up to the election and Dems punking out and not even showing up for the "fight" in these spaces. Where, I might remind the author and readers, fascist monopolists and "libertarian" super corporations run the algorithms. Bless Pete Buttigieg for going on Fox. And bless Josh Marshall and journalists still putting up the good fight on X. But it isn't hard to see that these online media forums for "free speech absolutism" and troll wars are no-win situations packaged by corporate rule; pitting social media mob tendencies against ethical journalism. I was at Twitter for the Musk takeover and watched him nullify the Blue Wave there. What we need are corporate media untainted by the ideology of corporate rule and the patronage of power. But this isn't a viable business model, we are told.
Anyway, conservative right-wing media domination is emerging as a big factor in the election. Hard to say what can be done about it but the level of dysfunction (obscuring the national security threat posed by Grump, for instance) it has imposed on our civic life is concerning, to say the least.
No comments:
Post a Comment