Pluralistic: A Democratic media strategy to save journalism and the nation (12 Dec 2024)

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Originally published at: Pluralistic: A Democratic media strategy to save journalism and the nation (12 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



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The front page of the Davenport Democrat newspaper, with a bold headline celebrating the ratification of the sufferage amendment. Centered below the headline is a late 19th century newsboy, winking. To his left is a suffragist on a bicycle. To his right is the hindquarters of a bucking Democratic party mule.

A Democratic media strategy to save journalism and the nation (permalink)

As unbearably cringe as the hunt for a "leftist Joe Rogan" is, it is (to use a shopworn phrase), "directionally correct." Democrats suck at getting their message out, and that exacts a high electoral cost.

The right has an extremely well-funded media ecosystem of high-paid bullshitters backed by algorithm-gaming SEO dickheads. This system isn't necessarily supposed to turn a profit or even break even: the point of Prageru isn't to score ad revenue, it's to ensure that anyone who googles "what the fuck causes inflation" gets 25 minutes of relatable, upbeat, cheerfully sociopathic Austrian economics jammed into their eyeballs. Far right news isn't a for-profit concern, it's a loss-leader for oligarch-friendly policies. It's a steal: a million bucks' worth of news buys America's ultra-rich a billion dollars' worth of tax-cuts and the right to maim their workers and poison their customers for profit.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have historically relied on the "traditional media" to carry their messages, on the ground that reality has a well-known leftist bias, so any news outlet that hews to "journalistic ethics" will publish the truth, and the truth will weigh in favor of Democratic positions: trans people are humans, racism is real, abortion isn't murder, housing is a market failure, the planet is on fire, etc, etc, etc.

This is a stupid policy, and it has failed. The "respectable" news media hews to a self-imposed code of "balance" and "neutrality" that is easily gamed: "some people say that Hatians don't eat pet dogs, some people do, let's report both sides!" This is called "the view from nowhere" and it gets Democrats precisely nowhere:

http://archive.pressthink.org/2008/03/14/pincus_neutrality.html

Balance and neutrality are bullshit, an excuse that has been so thoroughly weaponized by billionaires and their lickspittles that anyone who takes it seriously demonstrates comprehensively that they, themselves, are deeply unserious:

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/12/10/la-times-billionaire-owner-hilariously-thinks-he-can-solve-media-bias-with-ai/

Press neutrality – the view from nowhere – isn't some eternal verity. In terms of the history of the press, it's an idea that's about ten seconds old. The glory days of the news were dominated by papers with names like The Smallville Democrat and The Ruling Class Republican. Most of the world boggles at the idea that a news outlet wouldn't declare its political posture. Britons know that the Telegraph is the Torygraph; that the Guardian is in the tank for Labour (and specifically, committed to enabling Blairite/Starmerite purges of the left); the Mirror is a leftist tabloid; and the Mail is so far right that its editorial board considers Attila the Hun "woke."

Writing for The American Prospect – an excellent leftist news outlet – Ryan Cooper proposes a solution to the Democratic media gap that's way better than the hunt for the elusive "leftist Joe Rogan": sponsoring explicitly Democrat news outlets:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-12-12-democrats-lost-propaganda-war/

The country is a bleak landscape of news deserts where voters literally didn't hear about what Trump was saying he would do, and, if they heard about it, they didn't hear from anyone who could explain what it meant. The average normie voter doesn't know what a "tariff" is, and chances are they think it's a tax that other countries inexplicably pay for the privilege of selling very cheap things to Americans.

Ironically, this news desert is also a crowded field of hungry, unemployed, talented journalists. What if Dems funded free newsgathering and publication in news deserts that told the truth? What if these news outlets, by dint of being an explicitly partisan, party-subsidized project, refused to adopt all the anti-reader practices of other websites, like disgusting surveillance, intrusive advertising, AI slop, email-soliciting pop-ups, and all the other crap that makes the news worse and worse every day?

Cooper recounts how this was actually tried on a small scale, to modest good effect, when the Center for American Progress subsidized Thinkprogress, an explicitly leftist news outlet. This was going great until 2019, when corporate Dems and their megadonors killed it because Thinkprogress had the temerity to report on their corrupt dealings:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/thinkprogress-a-top-progressive-news-site-is-shutting-down/

And, Cooper points out, this isn't what happens with far-right subsidy news. Right wing influencers, personalities and writers can stray pretty far from the party line without getting shut down.

I love the idea of a disenshittified, explicitly political leftist Democratic news media. Imagine a newsroom whose purpose is to get its message repeated as widely as possible. It wouldn't have a paywall – it would be Creative Commons Attribution-only, allowing for commercial republication by anyone who wants to reprint it, so long as they link back to it. It wouldn't wring its hands over AI ingestion or whether a slop site that rewrote its articles got to the top of Google News. That's fine! If the point is to get people to understand your point of view – and not to attract clicks or eyeballs – other people repackaging your content and finding ways to spread it is a feature, not a bug.

Back in the Napster Wars, entertainment industry shills – like Hillary Rosen, who oversaw a campaign to sue tens of thousands of children before becoming a major Democratic Party power-broker – used to tell us that "you can't compete with free." That's not entirely true, but it's not entirely false, either. If your news is a loss-leader for a democratic society that addresses human flourishing and a habitable planet, then you can make that news free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer, and avoid all the suckitude that makes reading "real" news so fucking garbage.

For the past five years, I've been publishing a newsletter – this thing you're reading now – that has no analytics, ads, tracking, pop-ups, or other trash. As a writer, it's profoundly satisfying and liberating, because all I have to care about is whether people engage with my ideas. I literally have no idea how many people read this, but I know everything people say about it.

That's how the news worked back in the good old days that everyone says we need to return to. Writers and editors measured the success of a story based on how the public reacted to it, not based on clicks or metrics that told you how far someone scrolled before they gave up on it. The supposed benefits of "data-driven" editorial policy have not materialized – the "data-driven" part is the search for an equilibrium between how surveillant and obnoxious a website can be and your decision to stop reading it forever.

Outlets like Propublica have done well by adopting much of this program, albeit without any explicit leftist agenda (the fact that they seem leftist reflects nothing more than their commitment to reporting the truth, e.g., Clarence Thomas is a lavishly corrupt puppet of billionaires who've showered him with riches).

The fact that they've been as successful as they are on a national beat – and partnering with the scant few regional papers to do some local coverage – just proves the point. The Democratic Party doesn't need its own Joe Rogan – they need a nationwide network of local outlets, sponsored by the party, committed to never enshittifying, bringing relevant, timely news to a nation in desperate need of it.

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Your discussion touches on some points from a meeting I attended, a virtual sit-down with a Democratic Party strategist, and about 30 academics, just after the election.

One point I liked was that authoritarian forces own their media outlets (Fox, Sinclair, X, etc.). They let the Democratic Party rent time, but that doesn’t translate to the level of power of owning the reporters, who end up being the people most trusted on the outlet.

Another key point was that the authoritarian messaging triggers “fight or flight”, which the customary mode of pro-democracy messaging counters with “reasoned discussion” and loses. “Build the wall” is simple, engaging and visceral; a discussion that reasons about how immigrants are important to the economy, not so much. That’s fundamentally hard to counter.

Overall, the Democratic “ground game” was called “dark ages”.

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«Imagine a newsroom whose purpose is to get its message repeated as widely as possible.»

And who is going to pay for that?

  • The middle class? The billionaires? Those potential donors are all very comfortable with the current status of a financialized, property and Wall-Street based system.

  • The labor unions or the working class? The problem then is that then you are talking of a much bigger and related topic:

«I love the idea of a disenshittified, explicitly political leftist Democratic news media.»

What you really like is “the idea of a disenshittified, explicitly political leftist Democratic [Party]”. The actually existing Democratic party is a hard right yet “woke” party in the service of middle class and upper class interests. You effectively confirm this by writing:

«This was going great until 2019, when corporate Dems and their megadonors killed it because Thinkprogress had the temerity to report on their corrupt dealings»

As usual it is not merely “corporate Dems and their megadonors”, it is also middle class “woke” voters who reckon that they have the same material interests as middle class “non-woke” voters and they are a big voting block.

«Right wing influencers, personalities and writers can stray pretty far from the party line without getting shut down.»

So the actually existing Democratic Party is even more repressive than the Republicans in their pursuing upper and middle class interests…

Summary: there should be a leftist media that fights against both the hard-right Republican and Democratic Parties and their upper and middle class donors and voters, and “someone” should fund it, and the Republican and Democratic Parties will not do whatever it takes to stop it.

But politics is not like that.

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«“Build the wall” is simple, engaging and visceral»

If the starting point of the discussion is that most left-wing voters are dumb and are easily fooled into voting against their own interests because of some catchy slogans, then the solution can only be that fair-and-just philosopher-kings leading the left-wing must also use catchy slogans to fool them into voting for their own interests. The question is then where to find such skilled and selfless philosopher-kings that cannot be corrupted by the interests of the right-wing…

«a discussion that reasons about how immigrants are important to the economy, not so much.»

When people use abstract and meaningless terms like “the economy” often they are not aware of being victims of right-wing framing. One good question to always ask in such contexts “for whom?”.

In the case of immigration it is pretty obvious that a large increase in the supply of workers through immigration improves the economy of business and property owners and the economy of immigrant workers, not so much perhaps the economy of existing workers in the target country and the economy of the source country.

As to the latter it is pretty obvious :slight_smile: that the enormous improvement in the wages of of workers of countries like Japan, China-Taiwan, China-mainland, Korea-south, Singapore, etc. was just the result of immigration to the USA.

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