Seeing Attorney Marc Elias’ appearance on 60 Minutes put into stark relief just how far the mainstream media (MSM) have fallen from living up to their responsibilities to the public, instead allowing themselves to be badgered, bullied and worked by agitators on the right wing until the MSM shriveled up into the Cowardly Cowering Capitulating Corporate Giant that it is today: a soft propaganda outlet that rarely counters MAGA lies or offers any programming bearing a true progressive take on the issues.
I was very young, but I remember when the MSM, especially 60 Minutes, would have given wall-to-wall damning coverage of Trump’s and MAGA’s conduct, using serious, hard-hitting verbiage like the forceful, serious commentary that made a brief re-emergence on 60 Minutes that evening. Television, radio, and the hundreds of newspapers of the 1970s and early 1980s would be sounding the national alarm in unison about the dangers facing the nation.
The Marc Elias interview. That’s what the MSM could sound like, and often did sound like, 40 and 50 years ago.
During this golden age of the MSM, journalists and investigative reports would have covered Trump and MAGA as vigorously as it did the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, stressing the gravity of the threat to our way of like in a manner that could not be over-emphasized.
I was asking myself “how can it be that the population of one state can hold one dominant set of views, opinions, and beliefs, while the population of another state can hold beliefs and opinions that are so opposite that residents of the respective states have begun despising one another?” Human beings are human beings, and we all have the same general DNA, and I’m pretty sure that compassionate, empathetic, intelligent, rational, and altruistic people exist in Alabama in pretty much the same percentage as they exist in Massachusetts. So, how can one state be “deep red” and another “deep blue?”
It’s the media, and not just the mainstream media. However, the MSM are clearly negligent in refusing to do anything to counter the rise of MAGA disinformation and historical revisionism when it was getting started.
What sets red states and blue states apart is what sort of media are most readily available at arms length, ready to consume with little or no effort.
Today, the reddest states are awash in MAGA hate propaganda on the radio, on cable, and on streaming services, with alternatives much harder to find. A flip of a switch, a turn of a knob — all of these put hate propaganda directly in front of decent, normal people. As a result, some good people — who unwittingly rely on hate propaganda as their primary sources of information — vote for fascists in a sincere but false belief that the fascists really are the defenders of liberty.
How did this happen? It began in 1987 with the dirty work of Ronald Reagan: abolishing the Fairness Doctrine. According to the journalism advocacy organization Poynter Institute, the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine accelerated the polarization of US media. Quoting from the article, [w]hen broadcasters no longer had to present diverse viewpoints, conservative radio thrived.
And so it began. One by one, left of center perspectives were driven out of the mainstream broadcast and print media by the incessant, orchestrated screams of “liberal bias!!!” and replaced with right wing content, which often consisted of misrepresentations, distortions, and, at times, outright lies. The MSM responded by trying to appease the nascent fascists by shifting the spectrum of its content rightward and phasing out left-leaning viewpoints. Like all such appeasement strategies, it failed spectacularly.
Gone are the sex-positive programs of yore, such as CNBC’s Real Personal, replaced by look-alike right wing substitutes like “Love Line,” a late evening radio show that was hosted by Trump supporter Adam Carolla and conservative Drew Pinsky. Even when the subject matter seemed contemporary and relevant to today’s sexuality climate, the opinions and general theme became always the same: Right, Right, Right Right Right Right Right. Just try to find a left-of-center, truly sex-positive cable or broadcast program anywhere. You can’t. They have been completely driven out of the MSM.
Similarly, you wouldn’t know it by listening to Christian radio or listening to Christian cable programming, but a lot of Christians are not right wing bigots who want to enact a totalitarian religious caliphate for our government. “Christian” radio has not allowed an opinion that favored church/state separation for 35 years, and they aren’t about to start now.
Perhaps the darkest hour for left-of-center voices in the MSM was the mid 2000s, where for years the leftmost pundit in the MSM cable and broadcast news was CNN’s Lou Dobbs. Lou Fricken Dobbs! At the time, Dobbs was the only pundit calling attention to the power of multinational corporations. But Lou Dobbs is not left by any stretch of the imagination. Dobbs is right wing and has been for a long time, and has aired craven praises for perhaps the most anti-Constitutional Supreme Court nominee of all time, Robert Bork.
The reflexive response to this is often “Restore the Fairness Doctrine!”
Restoring the Fairness Doctrine would help to some degree, but it would have limited effect. What makes today different is that the modern media landscape has changed, expanded and evolved dramatically from the limited-access environment of broadcast media and newspapers of record. Enforcing a modern equivalent of the Fairness Doctrine on the Internet would be next to impossible. It is hard to imagine how a new Fairness Doctrine could be applied to media such as podcasts, RSS feeds, and streaming content.
In developing a modern response, bear in mind that, as mentioned above, good people exist in similar proportions in red states and blue states alike. But when good people are immersed in bad information and malicious media, some of those good people will accept the bad information as fact, and form false perceptions or harmful opinions in good faith. People who live in red states are just like the rest of us. They simply have more hate media available at arm’s length for low-effort consumption.
So, what do we do? We make good, accurate, truthful, humane, and empathetic information available to them that can be consumed with the same degree of ease. Make it as easy to come across good, positive, accurate information and opinion as it is to encounter hate propaganda.
It’s commonplace to belittle “keyboard warriors,” but social media are exactly where disinformation endeavors to infect the mainstream reader who lives outside the hate-media bubble. Disinformation uses social media to spread and propagate itself; accurate information can, and should, fight on the same battlefield.
Fight disinformation with good information, fight hate propaganda with pro-humanity policy ideas, and support and spread the word about those who dig deep and put together the factual, pro-human information that we need to fight back with.
Like, perhaps, Deanna’s Lair.