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I don't watch the news, but I recently found myself in a situation where I had to watch MS NOW (apparently what MSNBC became). My God, it was rough and bleak. It seems like it's trying to be the leftist answer to Fox News. Maybe it is. I'd always assumed leftist news carried a veil of credibility that conservative news didn't. Maybe it used to. But this particular network, at this particular moment, felt so pundit-driven that it was actively turning me against whatever they would say.
They'd mention something associated with Trump, like his family making money while he's president, then play a clip of him talking about it. And yeah, he sounds like Trump, a tactless braggart. But he also sounded reasonable, especially since I could tell the clip had been edited in the least charitable way possible. They'd have Chris Hayes, who's clearly trying to be the leftist version of Bill O'Reilly or Tucker Carlson, addressing the camera directly, smirking, telling the audience what to think about it.
Or in a roundtable discussion they'd mention the rising number of Democratic Socialist candidates in the party and, in a strikingly angry tone, insist it's naive and lazy to think this means the party is being "taken over."
It was just insinuation after insinuation, delivered with this anger and dismissiveness. It wasn't news reporting. It was punditry. They were never just reporting anything; they were stating opinions while implying no reasonable person could disagree. The goal, it seemed, was to deepen partisanship: build an echo chamber for the already-onboard, and shame anyone who isn't into submission.
Like I said, I've never been the biggest news person, so I don't know if this is a new thing for the left, or an old thing, or just this network, or every network.
MS NOW is pandering to the Democrat base. CNN panders to the Democrat establishment. The veil of credibility was always a sham. People used to care a lot about the aesthetic of 'journalistic integrity' and being rational, responsible and credible. But that's less of a concern for people nowadays. It has often been said that the entire 'don't be a crazy person' thing died the same day Christopher Hitchens did. Not to speak too highly of his flawed character.
My conspiracy brain believes that it's a controlled setup. There is a conception of the left media ecosystem as an emergent reality. All the actors play their role to keep it alive by providing as broad a tent as possible to keep as many people captive inside as they can. You need to make everyone comfortable. You can't do that by broadcasting division within the tent or having too small a tent. So everyone gets their corner of affirmations. But why?
When push comes to shove, you have everyone politically active there. You can make broad appeals to a shared crisis or enemy. Which is what happened with Trump, as an example. There is no 'news' there per se. That's just not what these media outlets are supposed to do. They're there to keep you captive until you are needed. The conspiracy part of my belief is that these media outlets have their chain yanked by the same hand.
This is a necessary context to understand media. It also helps explain why Musk buying X was so important. It gave the base on the right a place to organize. A place to make calls to action. A tent. Without that there was just 4chan, Talk Radio and Fox News. And out of the three 4chan was the only platform that wasn't explicitly in the pocket of zionists and the Heritage Foundation, though I repeat myself. The larger and more unanswered question on the right is who is yanking the chain over there. Which would help us understand the shifting media landscape on the right in recent years and why it's suddenly not banned everywhere like it used to be.
It’s also worth remembering that smugly smirking pricks are actually great when they agree with you. So the goal here is not to pretend to be some logic lord that can not be captured by any smile or contained within any tent. Just to remember that when you are hunkered down under the canvas, the constant pitter-patter above can make it incredibly easy for people to believe that it’s raining, especially when everyone inside agrees that it must be. When, in reality, it’s just the overlords of the media ecosystem sprinkling our tent with water.
What a polite way to put that.
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