On the eve of the inauguration of the president-elect, the mainstream media announced its intention to withdraw from politics.
Donald Trump reacts to a newspaper at the 68th annual National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton on February 6, 2020.
(Evan Vucci/AP Photo)
When was the de facto watchword for mainstream journalism under the first Trump administration The Washington Post’s self-serious and a ringing sound is observed irregularly “Democracy dies in darkness” is the rallying cry for media companies in Trump’s second term, it seems, “you deserve a break today.” After journalists documented a long series of unprecedented abuses of executive power under Roy Cohn’s protégé, who sets policy on the basis of a sweeping calculus of punishment and mob-like tribal exclusion, media executives assess the prospect of a revival of MAGA’s siege of power with a limp shrug from seasoned brand managers .
“One of the things we’re realizing is that there’s no one who cares about politics and nothing else,” said Kathy Palmer, executive editor of the Liberal Resistance. HuffPost, told product letter on media marketing Digideus. “You can follow politics very closely, but you also need marriage advice. We try to recognize that people need a little bit of everything.” Thus HuffPost will meet the existential challenge to democracy posed by an unhinged Trump White House by expanding the site’s lifestyle coverage, Digideus reports, including an increased focus on “the American family.”
Palmer’s smug click-chasing strategy is far from unique. Josh Autry, Executive Director of Audience Development Newsweekexplained that his goal for the next year is to achieve “greater interactivity with our readership.” And that, in turn, means less hard news and political coverage. “Many days, the majority of our audience comes from Google Discover,” said Autry, who “prefers an increasingly soft, lifestyle and consumer” type of content. Yes, the aggressive agenda that Trump and his supporters have promised to introduce in his first days in office will increase traffic thanks to a continuous stream of scandals and breaking news, but the market’s recent apprehension of properties formerly called resistance, such as The Washington Post and MSNBC, whose CEO Rashida Jones resigned on the eve of Trump’s new presidency, have media marketers worried about the adoption of a politics-focused coverage model. “I think the general feeling in the market is that a news site that exists solely around a news service is not going to be able to continue to create long-term renewable (direct) advertising partnerships,” says Blair Tupper, another UK maven contributor Independentwhich recently expanded into the US and, wait for it, plans to “expand lifestyle coverage across travel, personal finance and culture this year.” Digideus reports.
The pursuit of maximum “interactive” and hands-on engagement in the world of digital media is what I experienced in oppressive close remove during my tenure as head of news at Yahoo. The basic formula has changed little since then: digital producers launch brand partnerships, video snippets and interactive gimmicks on a nebulous mission to deliver bland and occasionally heartwarming content to distracted digital users. Then you keep them in line for more email newsletters, glorified product reviews, games, and other lifestyle trivia. This strategy may worsen the bottom line in terms of engagement, but it is a far cry from journalism, like any public social practice, which primarily operates by telling readers exactly what they no need want to hear – news about corruption, self-serving, fanatical falsehood, gross economic privilege and other, unfortunately, chronic features of our social life.
One anecdote stands out among countless others during my time at Yahoo’s Prostate Market news shop: After the Obama administration released an expanded version of the president’s birth certificate in response to Donald Trump’s nonsense campaign to question Obama’s citizenship, one of my bosses told me that we must “get a birth view” on this latest development. When I explained that there really wasn’t an empirically agreed-upon “birther view”—that it was all a racial panic caused by bad ideologues, and that that’s how we were going to cover it—I realized that my Silicon Valley news executive were counted; initially, the digital engagement model left extremely little room for traditional news evaluations and plenty of room for malicious ideologues, liars, and all manner of frauds to wreak havoc.
And now, more than a dozen years later, the dominant model of digital information in our fragile republic has, against all odds, become immeasurably worse. This is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s unmistakable message about the MAGA change ahead of Trump’s return to the White House: Meta, Facebook’s dystopian parent company, is suspending content moderation checks for Instagram and Facebook posts, Zuckerberg announced, and will instead rely on a user-generated system of “community notes ” that turned Elon Musk’s Platform X into right-wing paranoid shit.
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How Siva Vaidyanathan observesZuckerberg’s hard-right rebranding is an extension of the megalomania of the world-conquering billionaire bro; in this respect, it follows the main arc in which Musk became an apostle of “dark gothic MAGA”. And Zuckerberg visited all the Stations of the Cross for the eager MAGA billionaire recruit: a seven-figure donation before Trump’s inauguration, a ritual sacrifice DEI program from Metadate with kisses at Mar a Lago and turning on the star the joe rogan podcast attacking the “cultural elites”, creating a media discourse, and calling for their “resettlement” by a “new class of creators” — Mr. i.e. endlessly pandering plutocratic jerks like Zuckerberg and Musk.
You don’t have to strain to understand where this formula leads. While wildfires rage in Los Angeles, X, Facebook and other sites that don’t like moderation choking on false right-wing conspiracy theories about what got them hooked and what prevented them from pouring immediately. The culprits include the DEI initiative, military support for Ukraine, Chinese subversion, and — yes — the Jews. President-elect Donald Trump has offered slightly sanitized variations on the same basic themes, falsely claiming that the Biden administration has failed to fund disaster relief efforts and inventing out of whole cloth a smelt conservation program that he fondly imagines diverted water with Angelenos at bonfires. Reliable on-the-ground reporting of the disaster comes overwhelmingly from local and nonprofit reporters, such as a Los Angeles-based journalist and union activist. Matt Pearce notes:
Our local news broadcasters have produced an incomparable visual materials and informational interviews about the last one on earth. Created by our local photographers stellar work showing the tragedy and heroism of civilians and firefighters on the front line; they are not the same damaging fire planes with unauthorized amateur drones in closed disaster areas. When Patrick Soon-Shiong became the source misinformation in Elon Musk’s Appendix X on the Los Angeles Fire Department’s finances, his own editors at the Los Angeles Times corrected the entry about a very difficult budget problem. The traditional press will continue to play a central role in decipherment knotty politicians and the political issues that revolve around what went wrong in these fires, what politicians will be must be resisted.
The contrast creates a refreshing split-screen effect for those seeking reliable information in times of crisis. on the line to cover up the Altadena and Palisades fires, the profit-driven tech platforms that many of us now get our information from have fallen behind as conspiracy theories and hate mongering for the suffering of our neighbors have proliferated.”
It’s no exaggeration to say that this stark difference in honest reporting is a preview of what’s to come. Indeed, one of the tell-tale pieces of the local news initiative included a viral edit of firefighters from a live broadcast of the fires, in which Musk berated a Los Angeles Fire Department official for a non-existent water shortage. As the official patiently explained that Los Angeles’ system was running out of water — that the scale of the fires was overwhelming the city’s firefighting regime, which isn’t designed to handle wildfires — Musk abruptly interrupted his live broadcastsimilar to a punished ignoramus. Meanwhile, our main political press already staging disputes over Trump’s attempt to annex Greenland, as if there was a sane political debate buried in it, The Washington Post offers to call approval of the scorecard of the most incompetent Trump cabinet nominees covered by Trump and an emboldened Trump coming into the White House taking the oath of allegiance civil servants dealing with issues of national security. Don’t worry though – each new week will bring a new wave of how-tos, listicles, amazing tricks and celebrity gossip as the right-wing MAGAs continue to rob, bully and lie.
