So I talk a lot about what I call the Republican Propaganda Apparatus, boy, I wish I could come up with a better name for that thing, because that sure falls flat. Plus, just like our left-wing arguments for social justice, it’s just too long. Calling it fake news would be way better, because it’s factually correct, but that’s taken. I’ll be talking about our upside-down and backward linguistics in an upcoming piece, but for now, let’s talk about how our legitimate media is toast; it’s been overrun and outflanked.
The first thing to understand about the right-wing media ecosystem is that it is extremely well funded by a growing alliance of illiberal forces, including most recently, Silicon Valley investors. You’d think they’d already done their share by building platforms that have made the truth unknowable, but now they also feel the need to hurry things along and are adding to the spigot of disinformation ooze. There’s nothing new about propaganda in America. Ben Franklin famously used his many newspapers, even writing under a pen name in some, to convince the colonies to reprint their money out of security concerns. Then his company won the printing contracts. But while he profited from it, he also had legitimate security concerns and he didn’t feel the need to turn the colonies into a dictatorship just to make a few more bucks. Or feel the need to sacrifice the freedom of the press in general and only print propaganda, like what’s happening now.
What we’re witnessing is nothing short of history being erased and reality turned on its head in real-time. There are very few places to get legitimately researched and vetted information, and the little that we do have is being drowned out by a firehose of right-wing illiberal propaganda coming at us from all angles. So let’s take stock of our current media situation. For one, we have cable news and its leader, FOX, we’re all familiar with that one. But there are now dozens of entities much worse than FOX flooding social media that have a much broader reach. Local television stations have been largely taken over by Sinclair Broadcasting and have dictated a national agenda of repeating Republican talking points. As local newspapers have been decimated over the years, they have been steadily replaced by what’s called “pink slime” websites. These are partisan, mostly Republican, funded websites that pose as homegrown local news but are designed to spread disinformation. And of course, there is an army of well-funded podcasters, YouTubers, and influencers who are producing an endless stream of mind-numbing nonsense.
Then we have the supposed non-political programming on social media. The gaming groups, sports channels, health and wellness, beauty, even yoga— but they have also been infiltrated by well-funded right-wing influencers who are littering all of it with Republican talking points and toxic masculinity jagoffery. So now, young men and women are often in a completely different media ecosystem, and as a result, people under thirty have the largest gender gap of political affiliation in American history. With men largely voting to strip away equal rights from their female peers.
Meanwhile, what is left of legitimate sources of information are often behind paywalls with an ever-shrinking audience. And while there is a small army of new podcasters and YouTubers who peddle in legitimate fact-based reporting, they don’t have nearly the funding that the right-wing ecosystem has. They’re mostly organically funded by small donors and advertising. Media Matters recently analyzed the most popular shows on various platforms like YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram and found that right-wing programming has five times the number of subscribers as left-wing shows. You can say that this proves that people are just more ideologically prone to right-wing ideology, but the reality is that they had substantial financial help getting off the ground, with budgets for slick production value. And they also had the advantage of uniform messaging to latch onto that was not only based on nothing, but was also proven to be easy to digest. That’s the kicker.
If you spend any time listening to the most popular shows, the first thing you notice is that none of it is based on reality. It’s bizarro world, and yes, bizarro world is wildly entertaining, much more entertaining than reality world, my preferred world. That’s right, what I’ve learned is that my preferred world is not a very popular world. It works like this. Real information is expensive to produce and takes work to ingest. Where disinformation is cheap to produce and, apparently, very easy to take in, more than easy, it’s actually gratifying. Like a dopamine hit. Reaching people on an emotional level is why disinformation is so effective; it just feels good. And how do you compete with that? Especially when this content is delivered on platforms owned by corporations that can, and do, slant the algorithms to favor right-wing propaganda.
Now, obviously, to me, discovering new ideas and learning about other cultures is interesting and gratifying. And in contrast, to me, listening to Trump, or Stephen Miller, or Charlie Kirk, feels toxic and draining. But what’s become apparent is that for millions of people, five times more people on the social platforms, this stuff is extremely gratifying. And, as mentioned, it’s cheap to produce, easy to digest, and omnipresent. Left-leaning shows are, well, more nuanced and less entertaining, to say the least. Yet the right-wing eco-system, the one that is much cheaper to produce, is funded by a small squadron of billionaires in a carefully crafted project that has spanned decades. Investors include familiar names across industries, like the Kochs, the Mercers, the Thiels, the Uilleins, and many more who stand to profit from the spread of disinformation. Oh, I almost left out the richest man in the world, Vladimir Putin, oh wait, I’m sorry, his disinformation campaigns are now being overshadowed by the misinformation campaigns of the second richest man in the world, Elon Musk.
So, to recap, right-wing disinformation is more entertaining, cheaper to produce and if the most recent polls are any indication, extremely effective. Because, while many of us can recognize that the Trump administration and Elon Musk and their army of America-hating maniacs are going to send this country back to the 1890s, there are tens of millions of people believing a whole other reality. We keep thinking that they’re going to snap out of it, but why should they? All they have to do is tune into the feel-good ooze of disinformation that surrounds them. Believing anything different at this point is too difficult, and we have no idea if there will ever be a line too far. Before it’s too late, that is.
Of the pillars that exist outside of government that need to be deconstructed to dismantle a democracy, the media, or our source of fact-based information, is one of the biggest. The others are the business community, universities and law firms—and of course, the people. Unfortunately, much of the news media has already been consolidated into the same corporations that are either fully backing the dismantling of our democracy or, even with their considerable power, are already obeying in advance. We haven’t seen any real power players in our business community take a stand for democracy. Pretty amazing, huh? Tells you a lot about the relationship between Democracy and capitalism.
But we do have some good news. Some of the universities have finally started to fight back. A new squadron of law firms has banded together. More and more leaders in the traditional media are resigning in protest from entities like the L.A. Times, Washington Post, 60 Minutes and many more. And while underfunded, there are more independent journalists working to keep us informed than ever before. Now is the time to speak out and stand up at every opportunity. And time to recognize who is trying to keep us from fully sliding into an autocratic police state and make sure we support each other. Especially since this isn’t gonna get any better any time soon. A.I. hasn’t been unleashed into the disinformation space at scale yet, but soon it will be.
So sure, American media as we knew it is toast, but that doesn’t mean we’re all fried. Or we’re butter? I can’t get the right metaphor here, so forget it. What’s important is that now more than ever, we need to keep our reality caps on and remember that we’re not crazy. An army of illiberal actors, using Trump’s cult-like hold on millions of Americans, are endlessly injecting a mixed-up and backward reality into the media that they digest. In the face of that, we need to band together and support each other like never before. All is not lost until we say it is.