The process of corporate watering down and suffocation of media that does its job moderately well has been quite successful. Money and creeping one-sidedness. First get rid of the older “More expensive” people… ease out the more effective ones who ask better questions instead of pandering to right-wing-pleasing memes. The result, not very good journalism that mostly sticks to direction from above where their salaries ultimately come from. Hire script readers who as Donny would say were “Straight from Central Casting” in terms of “looks” who do not need to know all that much more than what angles to lean towards and for whom subtlety is largely absent. But does that matter if each audience for each “platform” has been “Overton windowed” far enough then that is the reason too many will not notice the heavy lean.
The net result is what the “Bags O’Money crowd look for. Investments always involve a mix of loss and gain. Destroying trad Media and or its weak but functional neutrality is a win. Losing audience is a loss, but if enough of them are eased over to more right wing friendly propaganda organs of whatever kind, then that is a win. Where do progressives and Dems go if voices that report more truthfully are gone? The internet? Older people on the Left and Independents are stuck with versions of the MSM… papers are dying or being bought by Right wing interests and broadcast TV and Cable are looking at demographic forecasts that are not promising. The internet is a nest of trolls that has to be navigated carefully but the Right wing and even foreign trolls have set up minefields and work to poison discourse as much as they can. Perhaps this hot front-line in the info wars while worrisome is or can be the way that reality gets in a win.
Buying influence and warping reality is not a problem given enough money but the number of easily scared and fooled people is finite so the very rich on the right have to maximize reaching enough of them. The movers and shakers on the right just have to grab hold of enough of the reservoir of fears and ignorance in that portion of the population to make sufficient progress. But how much is enough for their purposes? Reality has a way of invalidating things over the longer term which can make the short term messaging self sabotaging eventually. But again, with the super rich and their minions a short term mindset is what matters and they have the average person’s short memories to help them. Full speed with the Billionaire Boys Club mantra. “Mo money Now!”… Electoral results NOW… or near future which sets up more power for longer and the next steps in the big plan. And to do that requires makes a mockery of memory and reality.
Who does longer term planning and sets the goals for their agenda? The Billionaire boys clubs fund all the foundations, societies, think tanks etc for that sort of thing, fire and forget or rather fire while focusing on the short term of what is possible. And the Religious right is joined at the hip in all of this. And internationally, it is their mirror… people like Putin and his insiders who run their own oligarchy without much hindrance from things like elections and public opinion who do a more naked and powerful version of all this. But the hubris of maximizing wealth and power is to lose sight of how much the population of a given nation can put up with or be fooled. The difficulty for the victims is how long it takes for reality to undermine the few and their games, both the consequences of unfettered greed and its capacity to sustain the squeezing and fooling of the many.
Sometimes a rotted power structure is too full of people who have wised up but while not brave enough to overthrow it cannot maintain the level of lies and abuse needed to keep going or even just fending off collapse. And sometimes it is the will of enough people to push the rotted structure. The super rich in the US and around the world are over-leveraged, over hedged and dependent on such a stupendous amount of expanding vapor wealth that they look to have undercut their own success already. And the open question is what kind of “landing”? Hard or Soft. And will a latter day Hitler or a latter day FDR lead people out of the economic havoc? And regardless all the money in the world cannot keep a rotten information and political edifice standing. Pretend versions of reality cannot do anything to help sustain it or ease a collapse as much as possible since the tool media’s job is to pretend that one is not imminent or even when it is happening.
And key to all of how that works out is whether whatever crucial part of the media, what is actually making a difference by telling the truth, will be on the side of the many or of the few and crucially how much it is heeded. As dinosaur News media is replaced with social media vehicles will there be more of a “people’s Journalism” rising up even more than it has already where effective people not on a power trip or puppets of the few will be the trusted voices and people are wise enough to know who they are… or will there be a herd of showy, glitzy, or folksy fakes who are actually just owned influencers operating to further a Neo Trump/big money regime and poison truth enough to fend off reality based people? Well funded trolls certainly dominate much of it and work hard to infiltrate as much of the space as they can.
We already have enough examples of what takes over our public information and entertainment space and portends extensions of these trends: Reality show reporting that is orchestrated alternate reality all Kabuki and shadow puppet theater that would not shame the best efforts of media in the old USSR. But all along in tandem there are independent voices, some barely heard while others are making headway. I do have faith in regular people in large enough numbers turning away from clumsy authoritarian leaning journalism and those versions of reality and rewarding more reality based information sources with their attention. Will it be enough? Can we work to enable and strengthen any and all of that to help make it enough? To be sure that is a scary bet for the near future but long term it is the winner. And the final question here is if that is so, how long will that take, and how long will a more democratic and plural responsive media respite last, because the greedy few NEVER go away or give up and any win against them is always temporary.