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Some months ago, someone on Twitter said the following:
That's the kind of middle-of-the-road statement that, two or three years ago, I would have associated with Right-wing rationalists. People called out the media and the establishment when it was wrong while also being open and honest about the Right's flaws. While that tendency still exists in places like DSL and here, I've found it's becoming rarer and rarer, with those espousing it increasingly likely to be told they aren't welcome. This parallels a wider tendency in American politics: the rise of the so-called "Tech Right." People like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Shaun Maguire. Richard Hanania initially hoped they would infuse the Right with needed level-headedness, after all, such people were urban, socially moderate, and didn't have chips on their shoulders about class. This has largely not happened. You could hardly imagine Musk, Andreessen, or Maguire saying anything like the above statement. Their attitude parallels that of the Right as a whole - "misinformation" is just a left-wing smear and there's no downside at all to every random person with a two-digit IQ having a social media megaphone. Musk did push back on the tariffs, (perhaps because his business interests were being harmed) but you could never imagine him saying "libs are right" about anything. Even when he's broken with Trump, he hasn't reflected on the barren epistemological environment that led to Liberation Day, instead doubling down on conspiratorial Epstein stuff. To get a reasonable, moderate perspective, you have to follow the kind of people who march around with tiki torches and scream "Jews will not replace us!" That's not much of an exaggeration; the statement that libs were right about misinformation came from Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Charlottesville goon march.
Wait Alex, are you even reading what you are writing here? It's right wing 101 that "yeah disinformation is bad, but acktually the media and journalists are spreading it, not witches on twitter ad 4chan." People all the way from boomercons to hardcore white supremacists and neo nazis would agree with that statement.
So obviously (well you didn't link the tweet because of course not) the author of the tweet meant that, not meant any actual agreement with the libs. I can't see any other way to interpret this statement at all.
Or it could be both? It could be that the media, journalists and a large swath of the rest of society torched the integrity and trust in reliable institutions and now in their absence cranks have taken over.
Those two kind of are complementary theories.
I don't know how reliable they ever were. Before the Internet, the traditional mass media were the only media. There were no other voices. They could easily have been as bad as they are now, and nobody would have known. If anything they might've been worse, as they had less scrutiny.
The structure of it alone practically demands an oligopoly. After all, how many people can afford to run a national TV station, and that's before we start talking about licensing and permits. The same goes for large publishing houses.
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