Why The Media Landscape in the United States is hard for Democracy

I recently created a BlueSky account. The Twitter clone is as welcoming as social media can be. Mostly librarians and lefties like me at this point. I’ll give it about 5 years before it’s invaded by trolls and bots and becomes as untenable as X. It will eventually be bought by a billionaire and become a wasteland like X and Facebook are now or it will be shut down to eliminate competition.

Free speech is a necessity for a liberal society. X is not that and will not be as long as Elon Musk thinks his voice is more correct than anyone he disagrees with, and he uses his influence to diminish anyone not in the MAGA verse.

Conversely, everyone moving to another platform seems like self-sorting. To me the whole point of expressing my opinion online is for the opportunity to change someone’s mind or at least help them understand my reasoning and concerns so I can understand theirs. I still have an X account. I don’t have many followers (2500), so I haven’t been plagued by trolls so much as sex workers and porn sites. I do want my ideas out there where they might spur some thought and maybe even give a Republican a reason to vote for a moderate Democrat. I think by segregating ourselves into like-minded groups we delude ourselves into believing what’s said in our bubble like “Who could vote for Trump?” “X will die” and other wishful group thinking.

Has the internet & social media been good for our country or society? Our free press has always been a vulnerability, it is an opportunity for nefarious people to inject false and harmful ideas into the public domain, but the truth has mostly won by being right. The old adage “You can fool some of the people some of the time…” is true until possibly today when the massive overpopulation of mis and dis information in conservative media may have the ability to fool most of the people most of the time. It doesn’t help that foreign and domestic forces have been pushing false ideas for a long time. Not just conservatives but Vladimir Putin and other despots are waging a battle on our airwaves.

American citizens have been arranging themselves into like-minded groups since the end of the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s. I’m old enough to remember when the local news was 20 minutes with no commercials. 10 minutes news, 5 weather, and 5 sports. The national news was 15 minutes also no commercials and “that’s the way it was”. Broadcast stations were required to report news of the day to keep their broadcast licenses. They were also required to clearly identify opinion pieces, and present opposing opinions to every editorial they broadcast. And no one company could own more than one media outlet, radio, TV, or print in any single market. The doctrine abided by the First Amendment and was able to restrict ownership because of the idea that money is not speech. How quaint.

That brings me to the reason I started thinking about this subject. During the election I wanted to watch Rachel Maddow. I use a Roku device instead of cable TV. On Roku I can get Fox News, Fox Nation, Onan, Newsmax, and a plethora of other conservative and offensive opinion programming for free with apps. And all channel aggregator apps have most of the conservative channels, but not MSNBC. Each Fox and Sinclare local stations have an app for Roku, Amazon Fire stick, Apple Home, LG TVs, Visio TVs, and any other brand of smart TV you can buy. All the apps are free and do not require a subscription, though they’d like you to have one. Why is there not a similar variety of progressive news apps available? I don’t know, I only know that I cannot, watch MSNBC on my Roku. Even with the Peacock app and a subscription MSNBC is limited to 10 minutes or segments, not the entire program. MSNBC should be free. At least it should have its own app and its own subscription if desired. Other liberal options are Democracy Now and that’s all I can think of at this point, there may be more. This is just one example of how conservative media is taking over all media.

Sure, I can get CBS, NBC and ABC for free. Traditional mostly honest news is what I watch most of the time. I wonder how free and honest these outlets are when they are owned by the same billionaires and billion-dollar conglomerates that own conservative news. And so many of the stories are driven by what happens on Fox and other GOP outlets.

Now with the naming Brendan Carr as the next Federal Communications Commission chairman, we must wonder if there will be any “honest” news broadcasts in the future. It may be too late to try to change the media landscape in the immediate future. Threats to fine and cancel broadcast licenses for networks because Dear Leader doesn’t like the coverage is a real possibility with the new administration.

One of the late-night shows mentioned that one of the top Google searches before election was “Did Joe Biden Resign?”. Which brings us to how poorly all news media is informing citizens. I looked it up and Joe Biden was not in the top 25 searches. Neither was Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. The only news related items in the top 25 was the “Hurricane Milton” followed by “When is election day”. To me this is pitiful. First, it was a failure of the Harris campaign to not know where Americans get their news and information. More importantly this is a failure of corporate news not informing and in fact misinforming their audience. Some news corporations are okay with this. American citizens are poorly informed at best and more likely misinformed. It’s not their fault.

A free press is often described as the fourth branch of government. Like the courts, and now the elected government, it has been taken over by people whose mission is not to inform the populace, but to deliberately mislead, and to mold it into willing subjects. There have been studies of how misinformed Fox News viewers are vs traditional news.

Confirmation bias is one factor in explaining our polarized media and misinformed citizenry. Another idea is that people don’t think they need to know what is in the news. They feel what happens in Washington, or a far-off war does not affect them directly, and that they don’t have the knowledge, time, or energy to delve into these issues, so they accept the ideas and solutions that are convenient, entertaining, and fit their existing opinions. People are mostly disengaged because, making a living, raising children, and life is big and complicated enough already.

The Democratic party does not and should not control the media, but conservatives control most of the media. And right-wing media is united. The same talking points are repeated endlessly on all the platforms and eventually make it into country music and entertainment deepening conservative ideas. The next four years will be dark times, and the voters could rebel unless they’re convinced that their hardship is worthwhile or necessary. The GOP has the media power to convince them this is normal and right.

We, the United States, needs to decide how to inform ourselves, the citizens, truthfully and with a wide range of ideas. We need to invest in honest media. The question is how? Subscriptions? This model creates more sorting by ideology. Government funded? Maybe, but funding PBS & NPR is already difficult. Another billion-dollar corporation or individual? This seems most likely but that provides the same suspicion newspapers and the networks are already fighting against. Public media like NPR, PBS and ProPublica are supported by foundations. Perhaps more and new foundations with expressed commitment to not interfere with the journalism created by news outlets is the answer.

ProPublica.org is a good example of quality investigative journalism and traditional networks and newspapers do a good job of creating interesting and informative stories and diverse opinions. The biggest problem is most people don’t watch or read them. Distributing these stories into more news feeds and social media is necessary to get more people accurate news.

Beginning in the 1960’s conservatives started calling all media liberal, left wing, and slanted. Of course it wasn’t true, there were conservative newspapers and commentators in broadcast. But the idea began to stick as the world became more complicated and mistrust of government and institutions became common. We progressives need to identify media that is slanted conservative media and misinformation. Encourage people to find other sources and guide them to honest news. There should be a segment or story every day about how conservative media is misinforming people. Most people are smart enough to understand biased media when they see it, but a little push wouldn’t hurt. More importantly, there should be media literacy and logic classes taught in high school.

Liberals tried to counter conservative radio in the 90s with the Air America Radio network. The problem was we were too late. Corporations run by conservative CEOs like Clear Channel had already bought up most of the local radio stations and had a competitive advantage, AAR didn’t have deep enough pockets to win markets. Another issue was liberals do not like to be angry, sorry for the generalization. We want to be informed, not pissed off. And NPR already existed.

The United States needs to have a media that respects the first amendment and provides a wide variety of ideas. The problem we have with the vast array of media outlets is, it is impossible for everyone to hear all of these ideas. People self-sort into media silos where in some cases we’re told to not trust people who do not listen to your station or share your ideas. To me this is why we are so polarized and why a criminal narcissist can become President.

Recently I watched the documentary Join or Die joinordiefilm.com on Netflix. The film discussed the book by Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. His research hypothesized that in person communicating, talking to people face to face is an essential element in a healthy society. Studying the regions of Italy in the 60s he concluded the difference between healthy well-run governments and failed governments was not the leaders, education, or wealth, It was the fact that the successful provinces had more people participating in clubs, churches, and community groups. Something completely unrelated to governance but provided the citizens with the practice and training of working together.

Maybe, in order to unify and heal our wounded country we should shun the media altogether. Turn off the TV, get out of the house, and talk to your neighbors, join a club, volunteer. Unsubscribe from social media and stop worrying about what the trolls and people you haven’t seen in a decade think. If we, or at least more of us, engaged in person with our local communities, it could influence our fellow citizens for the better. Afterall, we know The Revolution Will Not Be Televised