We now live in a world in which the right-wing media sets the national agenda. The mainstream media follows.
Going way back in time, we had only a mainstream media—the Times and the Post and the Associated Press and the major networks. In the 1970s, after the famous Powell Memo, wealthy conservatives began funding their own media. For most of the last 50 years, even as the right-wing media grew, it remained clear that the mainstream media set the agenda—that is, it determined what we all talked about every day.
But recently, that flipped. This transformation has been in process for several years, but I date it to January 6 for two reasons. First, before that, the right-wing media didn’t have all-consuming power when it came to crunch time. They could not, for example, elect Donald Trump. There was still enough of a shred of news-gathering honesty at Fox News that it called Arizona for Joe Biden. Second, January 6 was a moment of choosing for the American right. Conservative politicians and the right-wing media could have woken up on January 7 and decided that enough was enough and they were captaining their MAGA-ized spaceship back down to planet Earth.
But we’ve seen how both of those matters sorted themselves out. Fox forced out the two people who made that Arizona call. . . . And on the second matter, with a few notable exceptions, virtually the whole party now embraces the January 6 “uprising” (or is too cowardly to say otherwise).
where has this guy been?
it's been that way since fox news went on air. every media outlet was terrified that the fear of missing out on a story because if one major outlet is reporting a story the others aren't and it blows up, those other places lose credibility.
right wing media thrives on OUTRAGE and that outrage brings the revenue. the only reason why other media doesn't do it is that either the market won't tolerate that kind of thing and would turn it off or there are still a few (a very few) people still in the works who have the journalistic ethics to not cover news in that fashion.
That’s his point? Though?
It wasn’t like fox news went on-air and you could immediately call Mexicans rapists and it would be a headline. There was a long struggle. And respectable journalism (imagine!) lost.
No they specifically said they dated this to Jan 6th, but it precedes that by several decades, at least.
Media has always been a method for informing and disinforming the public.
I see that he does use Jan 6 as some sort of demarcation, like an offical death knell of "mainstream news objectivity". So you're right there.
But how we got there is not an overnight thing; it's been a decades-long fight. Maybe a lot of people don't remember it.
Yes that's the point
All media does. Especially social.
I was going to say the same thing .... media had always been affected by right wing ideologies for the past hundred years.
If left wing or moderate centralists heavily influenced the media, we wouldn't be having a discussion about far right elements trying to take over the US government right now.