Peeling back the onion
How did the major media allow objective truth to become "political"
At some point truth became “cheerleading”
I’ve promised to keep moving forward as we prepare for a second Trump Administration that promises to be bigger, dumber, and more rotten than the first one in just two months. But, to do that we have to quickly figure out some things we missed and that includes me personally.
We have to start peeling back the onion of what went wrong to make sure that even as we face local and state elections starting in February, we don’t make the same mistakes.
Clearly even as a critic of our mainstream media I missed just how badly they were reporting the moment. We all realize that there has been a concerted and coordinated disinformation campaign against the American people for years. We will dive into that more later.
But, like light is the opposite of dark, the opposite of disinformation, is information. To succeed at successful disinformation you have to undermine trust and distribution of real information.
I’ve long held that MAGA has so effectively ‘played the refs’ that the media has been bending over backwards to avoid being accused of being cheerleaders for the Democrats or openly supportive of the Biden Administration. MAGA leaped on every media outlet that dared be positive about Biden to the point where somewhere along the line objective truth became “political.”
The fact is that much of our media decided that reporting objective reality about good things happening under the Biden Administration was too political for them. So, they simply soft peddled it or outright ignored success after success allowing the MAGA counter messaging to fill the void.
A vacuum cannot exist in nature and when truth is ignored untruth will easily fill the gap. It did and we are all worse for it.
How does the best economy in the world become a liability?
I have had a lot of conversations with Democrats who won their races like last week with Representative Greg Landsman who is the first Democrat to win reelection in Ohio’s CD-1 in 40 years. It’s literally JD Vance’s home district. He did it by being real, constantly being in the community, listening to people who felt their bank accounts were telling them the truth about the economy, and going on every single show or podcast that invited him.
Consistently we are hearing that many simply had no idea how much better our economy was doing than others and why it was doing it. They literally had no clue that the investments by the Biden Administration and the many important laws passed by the Democratic Congress were producing record manufacturing growth, actual infrastructure improvements, and millions of jobs.
They just heard eggs were expensive and things weren’t getting cheaper. They were convinced inflation is out of control. Why? Because the disinformation spreaders were telling them and the people we trust to tell us real information refused.
Want the most glaring example I can think of? How about this headline from USA Today…today…three weeks after the election.
Do you guys suppose that prices were coming down already before the election? That this wasn't a sudden drop? I do. I know it because I do the family grocery shopping for my house much of the time. I’m painfully aware of how things have gone up. I am also seeing them coming back down. So, why didn’t the media report this before the election?
Because it was cheerleading for Biden. The objective truth that things are getting better became an actual argument in the Presidential race and the liars won. If USA Today had published this before the election it would have been 24/7 on Fox about how the liberal media was carrying the water for Joe to save him when REAL AMERICANS know better!
Now they will go on and say ridiculous shit like “See! Electing Trump is already making things better!” Just watch.
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That’s one layer
So, one clear layer to this onion is that our media was so pressured by the malign forces of MAGA and their disinformation ecosphere that they allowed both sidesism to leak into covering objective truth. Unemployment has almost never been lower. Post pandemic inflation was bad but it’s coming down. The long dream of reshoring manufacturing was coming true not through trade wars but welcoming them with benefits and workers who are talented and eager. That we can really rebuild our long ignored infrastructure and it creates jobs and opportunity.
The main stream media from the New York Times to MSNBC found themselves twisting into pretzels to avoid sounding like these objective truths were not happening or that they weren’t important enough for page one. This created a vacuum for lies and disinformation to fill from other sources.
The next layer we have to answer is an uncomfortable one. Why didn’t Democrats do a better job of filling that vacuum themselves? That question is going to make a lot of people mad when I attempt to answer it so we will save it for…later.
In the meantime we have onions to peel for Thanksgiving this week and I appreciate you joining me for this one.
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Fred, I subscribe to David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. He wrote today about this very subject. I’ve done a cut and paste so I hope it all comes through here, and sorry David C. There was no other way to share.
Our Land
A NEWSLETTER FROM DAVID CORN
A Bad Formula for Democracy: Voter Ignorance and Media Fragmentation
By David Corn November 26, 2024
Donald Trump supporters jeer at news reporters at a rally for Trump in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on October 29, 2024. Francis Chung/Politico/AP
Donald Trump supporters jeer at news reporters at a rally for Trump in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on October 29, 2024. Francis Chung/Politico/AP
Three weeks before the election, Ipsos released polling data that was rather disturbing. The research and consulting firm presented a stark and unsurprising conclusion: “We live in two Americas.” It noted that the information ecosystem had much to do with this divide:
Partisanship has created a deep divide among Americans on politics and beyond. However, beneath partisanship, media source is also significantly correlated with Americans’ views.
Americans’ primary news source plays into what they believe to be true, their own daily personal economic situation, and ultimately, how they view former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
This was an obvious observation. The two sides in the tribalistic face-off of American politics have vastly different sources of news and information. But the data Ipsos presented revealed a much sharper split: One side is more ignorant than the other. Fox News and conservative media consumers, it stated, are “less likely to answer questions about inflation, immigration and crime correctly.” Of the Fox and conservative media crowd, only about 12 percent said it was true that inflation had declined in the past year and was near the historic average. About two-thirds of respondents who primarily received their news from national newspapers and other cable news outlets got this right. Ditto on crime. Only 10 percent of the Fox folks knew that violent crimes rates were not at or near all-time highs in most major American cities, and most believed that crime rates were soaring. Sixty-five percent of newspaper readers and other cable news consumers held an accurate view. As for social media, the poll showed that Americans who mainly got their news in this cosmos were also quite misinformed.
All this, naturally, influenced the choice of candidates for voters. Ipsos reported that “Americans who have correct information on current political issues” were more likely to say Vice President Kamala Harris was “stronger on policy areas” than Donald Trump. Among those voters with accurate views on inflation, crime, immigration, and the stock market, Harris won overwhelming majorities. Trump was the favorite of the misinformed.
There’s been a tsunami of after-the-fact supposin’ about the election. But this poll showed that a major fault line in American politics is ignorance. Amidst the yapping about how the Democrats need to revive their connection to working-class voters (meaning, white working-class voters) and debate about whether the party has gone too far to the left or has been overly tethered to centrism and neoliberalism (whatever that may be), this data indicates that a fundamental challenge for the Democrats and others is how to operate within a media ecosystem that not only is fractured but that propagates and reinforces much false information. Can an ideological shift (in either direction) matter, if so many voters lack an accurate picture of reality?
When I attended a Trump rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, the day before the election, I spoke to diehard Trump supporters and found many of them echoing his talking points: Crime was at record levels; millions of immigrants were pouring over the border every month; the economy was in worse condition than ever before. And Democrats were deliberately destroying the nation. None of this was true. When I gently asked these Trumpers if they were concerned that retired generals who had worked with Trump during his first presidency now described him as a “fascist” and a threat to democracy, at least a third said they were unaware of these statements. The others replied that these Trump detractors were being paid to say this, or they were envious of Trump, or they were his political enemies. No one accepted these remarks as good-faith criticisms of Trump. It didn’t matter what the New York Times or Washington Post reported.
Then it hit me. For these people, Trump was their media. Maybe they watched Fox or Newsmax. Or read Breitbart. Or scanned the social media posts of Elon Musk and other MAGA personalities. But they saw Trump as the paramount source of information. What he said was what was true—and certainly more accurate than the “fake news” of the New York Times, CNN, or NBC News. In Trump they trust. Not merely as a politician but as the supplier of news and information, as their guide to the world. If he said millions of criminal migrants were flooding across the border, you can believe it. If he said the economy was worse now than it ever had been, bank on that. Let’s call this what it is: a bubble. And there’s no way for mainstream news outlets to penetrate it.
How to reach voters has always been a fundamental question of politics. Not too long ago, the answer was simple: TV ads. A lot of people watched a lot of television, and there were only a few channels. You could reach people where they lived—in the living room in front of a television set. With the rise of social media and the fragmentation of media, it’s tougher for campaigns to target voters. This year, the Trump campaign, as many have noted, devoted much attention to the audience of aggrieved men—what has become known as “the manosphere”—through podcasters like Joe Rogan and social media.
As more voters obtain their information from sources outside the news media, they’re more likely to be recipients of inaccurate or skewed news. This is not to say that the traditional news outlets always are on target. But I’ll go out on the limb and say that generally journalists are going to be more mindful of facts than podcasters or social media influencers who primarily are talkers and posters (and sometimes shit-posters) frequently determined to build audiences through outrage, not verified and solid information. These new-media guys and gals are not edited or fact-checked. Certainly, some are responsible and intelligent commentators, analysts, and presenters of news. But the most popular often succeed because they strike emotional chords with viewers, listeners, and scrollers.
These far-from-reliable information sources have become increasingly impactful. This month, the Pew Research Center released a report noting that one in five Americans—or about 20 percent—received their news from influencers on social media. (An influencer, Pew decided, is a person who regularly posts about current events on social media and has at least 100,000 followers on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, or YouTube. Yes, that makes me an influencer.) The figure for Americans under 30 was almost double: 37 percent. Almost two-thirds of news influencers are men. Twenty-seven percent identify as pro-Trump, Republican, or conservative, as opposed to 21 percent who are liberal or Democratic.
The dominance of news influencers and non-traditional news sources will likely expand in the coming years. Will this lead to a better-informed electorate? Will their presence make it easier for political candidates to counter the spread of misinformation or disinformation? The more unchecked sources of information there are, the greater the likelihood that misinformed views will spread and distort the national discourse. “We are the media,” Elon Musk, the boy-king billionaire owner of X (formerly Twitter) and one of the most prominent promoters of disinformation, exclaims. If so, we’re in deep doo-doo. With the information ecosystem shifting more toward trolling than journalism, Democrats and the news media itself need to ponder how best to confront this dynamic.
It certainly sounds elitist to gripe about voter ignorance and perhaps naive to suggest that a better-informed electorate will lead to better outcomes. After all, politics often is not about facts. Voter feelings and attitudes—vibes—have always mattered in elections. But what’s noteworthy and perhaps (relatively) new these days is the interaction between media dissolution and voter misinformation. Within the fragmented media landscape, misinformation (and disinformation) can easily be reinforced. There’s always someone out there on the internet to confirm and bolster a false narrative. Meanwhile, in this environment, it’s more difficult to counter and correct false impressions, so whatever misinformation is out there sticks harder than ever.
We lost not to the Republicans as much as to Russian psy ops. They learned it from us. We used it successfully many times since WW II. We failed to fully prosecute the 2016 election interference, and although we had advance notice did little to stop it.
Tempus fugit, but Biden can step up and be a hero. Given the threats by an inchoate unitary executive, who beleieves that his elction is redemption for being victimized and threatens recrimination, he should grant tens of thosuands of pardons to folks like us.
Are crimes of election interference acts of war? We should be discussing war powers. What about Biden as unitary executive for a month?