Marcy Wheeler on the challenge that Breitbart poses to the American political system only because he intends on being competitive with Rupert Murdoch.
Marcy Wheeler, emptywheel: How the “Fake News” Panic Fed Breitbart
That’s the conclusion drawn by a report released by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center last week. The report showed that the key dynamic behind Trump’s win came from the asymmetric polarization of our media sphere, embodied most dramatically in the way that Breitbart not only created a bubble for conservatives, but affected the overall agenda of the press, particularly with immigration (a conclusion that is all the more important given Steve Bannon’s return to Breitbart just as white supremacist protests gather in intensity). …
Fake news is a problem — as is the increasing collapse in confidence in US ideology generally. But it’s not a bigger problem than Breitbart. And as Bannon returns to his natural lair, the left needs to turn its attention to the far harder, but far more important, challenge of Breitbart.
The left has not created the asymmetric news bubble; it exists to demonize and delegitimize the left. There is no left-wing counterpart to the mass media-driven right-wing bubble. And those outlets that were thought to begin to provide that counterweight have turned to policing the opinions of their commenters so that the there will not be a reaction to the left. The right seems not to have that sort of policing function to its right, only to its left.
That dynamic is the challenge that zombie conservatism and the Breitbart attempt at revival poses.
No one is telling the truth that the conservative movement has failed to make lives better for its working class acolytes and middle class proselytizers.
Conservatives can no longer win the argument on freedom after bowing down to Trump’s authoritarianism.
That goes double for libertarians.
Will we have an opposition party or will they self-censor?
“Fake News” panic is as American as apple pie.
When hasn’t “the press” been affected by rightwing polemicists? Affected almost always in the same direction to give those polemicists credibility. An exception might be the Scopes trial, but that was short-lived as creationism remains alive and well. And Murrow who came down on McCarthy. It’s one reason why the MSM sucks.
Another reason is that the MSM is always shoveling crap promulgated by business and military elites. Dangerous and/or expensive crap.
Now we have the zombie SDI and Afghanistan follies that defy all efforts to call them for what they are and end this nonsense.
Don’t despair. The creationists are not thriving. Recent Gallup has creationism at its lowest level of support in 35 yrs. And that wacko Noah’s Ark creationist museum in Kentucky is failing.
As I understand it, years before Murrow there was Drew Pearson (I know, a bit of a mixed bag) who went after Joe in print right from the start. So much did DP irritate Joe, that the Tailgunner cornered and assaulted Pearson in a D.C. club. Dick Nixon supposedly pulled Joe off. Interesting too, by the time Murrow’s show aired in March 1954, McCarthy’s popularity had dropped to below 40%, I think in the period after he publicly aired his charges against the Army.
Credit Murrow of course for his work, but it was rather late, and even he and his producer always felt their show’s influence was overstated.
Wars — they (probably) hike ratings. Also good for the bottom line of their major MIC advertisers. Didn’t both CNN and Msnbc recently hire more generals and ex-heads of CIA/DNI to serve as on-air pundits. Brian Williams is gushing and drooling over his new colleagues. More opportunity for Rachel Maddow to show she’s no peacenik softie lefty with now more chances to promote the neocon perspective.
Yes, Murrow was a day late but fortunately not a dollar short. He gets too much credit because none of his high profile colleagues dared to speak out.
Science based people on this question have increased from 9% to 19% from 1981 to 2017. As we’re now close to a hundred years since the Scopes trial, that’s pretty pathetic. The “creationists” have only declined six points since ’81 (and had increased two to three points as of interim polling dates), and the ones that want it both ways is flat. Odd since Boomers have never known a time when evolution wasn’t accepted science.
Are those newly hired military pundits all identifying who else is paying them? Or is that still undisclosed as it was during the Bush regime?
Since 1776 the US has only not been at war at any point in a calendar year for a total of 21 years. The longest no war streak was 1935-40.
I considered posting this as a separate diary, but maybe it is better here.
The New Republic has an article on Socialism and the rise of the DSA. John Judis noted:
I think Judis describes a good deal of the problem with modern liberalism. In some way socialism has come to me NOT neo-liberalism.
I am not a socialist – but there is a good deal of energy on the left – a left that is for the first time in my lifetime large enough to represent a political force. It is early days – but the energy on the left is real.
I am a socialist. So too are most Americans even if they don’t know it. The problem over many decades is that the definition of socialism has been narrowed to the point where it’s equated with fascist communism with the communism being the narrowest interpretation of Marx.
The real identity politics problem has to do with political ideas and political ideologies.
Since the year I was born (1946), Americans have be obligated by their political culture to declare that they are not socialist and have no socialist ideas or be shunned as Un-American. As we see today, no such requirement attaches itself to fascist or Nazi ideas although that might be gaining some traction after the automobile terrorism in Charlottesville.
Since the year I graduated from college (1968), there has been a growing movement to demand deference and devotion to the flag of the United States, the Pledge of Allegiance after incorporating “God”, and the association has been built that those who advocate “public” infrastructure of most any kind (except roads, to this point) are socialists who hate the flag, Pledge, National Anthem, and God.
Any opposition to the “conservatism” of the current GOP must address that 70-year-long demonizing of public goods.
The discussion of public infrastructure is discussion of non-market ideas, which automatically makes it anti-private and anti-capitalist. Discussion of public infrastructure as serving all the population by definition makes it socialist. Having the interests of the working class taxpayers who will pay a large part o the costs and obtain a larger part of the benefit makes that discussion outright communist. To say this that directly scares Americans because of 70 years of linking those ideas to “totalitarianism”.
One of my earlist diaries here a decade ago had to do with my political identity, which went something like this (if I remember correctly): I am a liberal, democratic, civic, environmentalist, progressive. After the fear of public goods and services shown by the Obama administration and Clinton campaign, I guess I have to add socialist to that list. But that is a complicated political identity in which those different sets of principles and insights jostle around and contend for their position in a consistent political position for a particular time and geography.
What we have gotten is a government that I did not vote for: increasingly dominated by secrecy and arbitrary rule, oligarchic, corporate (not civic), environmentally destructive, reactionary, and sidelining public funds for private gains. The idea that there can be moderation in dealing with those objectives when national power is in the hands of politicians owned by corporation, owned by lobbyists, or billionaires themselves is capitulation of the interests of ordinary people.
Political identity need not be total. Political parties need not be cults. We need to regain a society in which politicians understand that they work for us and do not necessarily drive the terms of that relationship. That understanding would be best communicated through actual two-way communication that talks about the details of legislation and the principles that need to guide government. The trip down the marketing and public relations understanding of political communications has been part of the disaster of media alliances with politicians. Changing that means departing from a sorry history and a sorrier tradition.
There is a book I read recently: Capitalist Realism.
The core idea of the book is that the basic capitalist arrangement is so taken for granted that it is assumed that anything but minor change is impossible. Capitalism in this telling isn’t ideology, it’s description of a rule of nature, like a law of physics that cannot be changed.
I made fun of the Democratic slogan because it was so limited. It really won’t do anything more than tinker at the margins.
But, says the response, this is the best we can do. We can’t have single payer, or free university tuition. There things are simply too hard to accomplish politically.
In this context I found the quote from Judis telling.
One the big surprises in Britain was the re-nationalizing the railroads was popular. Even Tony Blair expressed shock.
The sad part is that Bernie isn’t making a new argument. Tuition used to be free or near free in many states. We are essentially trying to win back what was won a long time ago, before we accepted that anything more than limited improvement was possible.
We are trying to win back an argument that the post-1946 Cold War totalitarian capitalism prevents us under various forms of threat from making.
The reality is that “capitalist realism” is what Marx’s Capital is about, and the current economy is once again approaching the visible reality of what Marx was seeing through the eyes of his capitalist participant observer Friedrich Engels, who inherited a Manchester textile mill. David Harvey has done a lot of work to make Marx’s German philosophical thinking more accessible to 21st century English speakers. The key point is that Marx had no clue about what restrained capitalism other than it inevitably involved the self-interested participation of workers as a political force. In my view, after the US experience with labor, now echoed even in Scandinavia, that prescription is necessary but not sufficient. And the idea of revolution is contingent on the rigidity of the system.
The GOP has spent 70 years innoculating labor from its own interests and its propensity to organize around those interests. Breitbart’s fascist workingmen’s movement is their current failsafe tactic. Dealing with that without civil war in the US is the current challenge.
Yes, it is crazy that subsidizing private prisons and military boondoggles is not controversial, but public roads, free tuition, public schools, and public-fiananced healthcare is. And at the heart of it all is a multi-billion-dollar lobbying industry. And no politician can talk straight and directly about all of this — not even Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren because of the way that the media spins public statements toward conservative notions.