Going way back in time, we had only a mainstream media—the Times and the Post and the Associated Press and the major networks. In the 1970s, after the famous Powell Memo, wealthy conservatives began funding their own media. For most of the last 50 years, even as the right-wing media grew, it remained clear that the mainstream media set the agenda—that is, it determined what we all talked about every day.
But recently, that flipped. This transformation has been in process for several years, but I date it to January 6 for two reasons. First, before that, the right-wing media didn’t have all-consuming power when it came to crunch time. They could not, for example, elect Donald Trump. There was still enough of a shred of news-gathering honesty at Fox News that it called Arizona for Joe Biden. Second, January 6 was a moment of choosing for the American right. Conservative politicians and the right-wing media could have woken up on January 7 and decided that enough was enough and they were captaining their MAGA-ized spaceship back down to planet Earth.
But we’ve seen how both of those matters sorted themselves out. Fox forced out the two people who made that Arizona call. . . . And on the second matter, with a few notable exceptions, virtually the whole party now embraces the January 6 “uprising” (or is too cowardly to say otherwise).
Yes, and no. When there’s only a fews news sources it can be more difficult to define the narrative. Because the wealthy power has to use “respectable journalism” to do it. You know the whole source-based who, what, when, etc. That wasn’t as easy as it is today.
Think of it like this: russia started the lie that AIDS was created by the US and spread in Africa by the WHO. Today, they’d just use a troll army to tweet it, and it’d be in the headlines tomorrow.
Back then they had to buy printed papers in India to run it, have those used as “sources” and then convince the NYT to run the story. Which they couldn’t really do because the NYT said “well, what’s your source for this?” And when they couldn’t get a satisfactory answer, the story died.
It’s different now. Very different.
Are the wealthy still behind it? Yeah, but “it” is very different to what it was. News wasn’t worth billions back then. People who ran it weren’t usually MBAs who had never chased a lead in their lives.