During his first term in the Oval Office, the Fox News echo chamber consumed Donald Trump. Something Media Matters’ Matt Gertz uncovered and was able to track in real time. As Trump fell deeper into the Murdoch rabbit hole, Media Matters could translate his bizarre tweets by helpfully pointing out to the rest of us what Fox News broadcast shows or segments they were referring to.
This time, Trump has become a background player in his own presidency, but the MAGA echo chamber is still doing its thing. Elon Musk, a man who seems to be doing Trump’s job right now, has been similarly engulfed by false conspiracy theories and disinformation – much of it racist, misogynist, and homophobic. Whereas Trump was an avid consumer of right-wing media, Musk paid $44 billion to purchase a social media platform and transform it into the MAGA hellscape. In other words, Musk paid $44 billion to radicalize himself.
I’m often asked about which Republican politicians actually believe in all the conspiracies and which ones are simply playing along to placate Trump and the MAGA base. Mostly, I’m not sure the question matters since they’re all voting the same way and leaning into hateful and violent rhetoric. I suspect that the percentage of GOP electeds who drank the Kool-Aid is much higher than it was eight years ago, especially any Republican who was elected after 2016.
Trump’s disdain for a free press is no secret. He’s been inciting violence against reporters and encouraging targeted harassment for years. He’s threatened to put reporters in jail and shut down broadcasters. Elon Musk has followed in Trump’s footsteps, adopting the same rhetoric. Both men have sued and threatened to sue media outlets for coverage they don’t like.
Trump and Musk clearly understand the value of controlling the media and continually take drastic steps to ensure dominance. The White House has picked a fight with the Associated Press over the agency’s refusal to abide by Trump’s decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico on a whim, blocking the AP from covering presidential events. This week, the White House barred HuffPost from the press pool, and the press office announced it would determine the assigned pool reporters for events, something the White House Correspondents’ Association had previously done.
But they’re not the only powerful men who seek to control our media. Jeff Bezos announced that the Washington Post, the newspaper he owns, will now refocus its opinion section to support “personal liberties and free markets” – this after directing the Post not to endorse in the last presidential election. There’s also Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to let hate, harassment, and harm dominate our Facebook and Instagram feeds once again and send signals to the MAGA Right that Meta is happy to be a propaganda arm for the movement. Zuckerberg and Bezos also understand the power of controlling the media and what the public consumes.
It’s wild to watch the same people who seek to control media and social media fall down the same rabbit holes they created. It’s even wilder to watch them accumulate power and attempt to control the rest of us in service of the false reality they now exist in and the false conspiracies they now subscribe to. Conspiracies that reinforce the notion that white men like themselves should be running the world and no one else should have a seat at the table.
It’s worth noting that these folks seeking to control the media are also taking advantage of an industry in crisis. Local news, as we know it, has been decimated, and national newsrooms have generally been subject to countless rounds of layoffs and outlets imploding entirely. If you’re a robber baron, there’s never been a better opportunity to seize power.
Countering all of this is essential for the opposition – and at this point, I’d define the opposition as the Left and anyone who doesn’t want America to become an authoritarian state – but we’ve made some strategic blunders. For one thing, we haven’t funded media nearly enough, nor have we built our own ecosystem of media outlets, influencers, and platforms. We’ve also shot ourselves in the foot multiple times, playing into the Right’s false liberal media frame and obsessing over whether news is politically neutral instead of if it offers quality and factual stories that are relevant to people’s everyday lives. (I swear to God, if I see another one of those media bias charts that people love to share onlin,e I will scream. But they still show up regularly in trainings and materials, even from progressive institutions.)
There are no quick fixes and no easy answers here. It’s crucial that we support and amplify quality media outlets and individuals who work against the grain and speak truth to power.
The same goes for funding journalism at every level and creating new models for media and voices to emerge. We have to broaden our perspective of media and how people consume it and meet folks where they already are.
Here’s a glimmer of hope to end on: This week, Media Matters published a study of right-wing radio. They found that “following Trump’s first month in office, many right-wing talk radio hosts are having to face callers who, regardless of their personal politics, are voicing their frustrations with the Trump administration’s impact on their own lives.”
Eventually, reality hits you upside the head, and Americans will have to reckon with how this Administration has wrecked their lives. Something no amount of Bezos-approved op-eds on the free market or propaganda segments on Fox News can realistically counter.
