The Democrats' Alarming Nonchalance About The Juggernaut Of Reactionary Media. By BRIAN BEUTLER

Posting is praxis

JAN 17, 2024

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(Photo by Moor Studio)

I’ve always preferred watching movies in theaters, so much that I’ll regularly buy tickets to a fairly bad movie, like the one I saw this past weekend, rather than watch something good at home. But now I value it on a new level as a disciplining tool. In a theater, if the plot lags, I’m forced by good manners to stick it out. At home, watching the same movie, I’d be liable to pull out my phone and scroll through the news or solve a chess puzzle while the plot thickened. 

As if to underscore how badly modern technology has wrecked my attention span, I watched a pretty good movie at home on Monday night, but even as it held my attention, my addiction overpowered me once or twice. What if something even more interesting was happening in the world, and I was missing out?

This time, I made the mistake of scrolling through the “For You” tab on Twitter. I can’t even explain why—perhaps the app just defaulted there—because I never do this. Even before Elon Musk wrecked it, I only ever enjoyed Twitter as a microblog—a reverse chronological stream of updates from the people I chose to follow. To make this firehose of information manageable, I break my follows down into lists, some fleeting, some permanent. Instead of keeping up with all 1000 or so accounts I follow, I spend the overwhelming majority of my time on Twitter in these lists, getting reliable news from reliable reporters and analysts about issues I’m not on hand to cover, or that fall outside my areas of expertise. Even in the Musk era, this makes Twitter a valuable and powerful tool.

But Musk’s Twitter apparently really wants me to see video clips of violent crimes, almost all of them committed by non-white men. That’s what awaited me Monday night.

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I imagine Musk is pumping the same snuff into all the feeds he can, and to the extent he’s aware of what his algorithm prizes, he’s happy about it, because he wants Americans to become more angry, fearful, and reactionary. (I think he’s well aware, and increasingly radicalized by his own agitprop.)

Scrolling a bit slackjawed through endless depictions of social decay, most fully stripped of context, I had to remind myself that as jarring as this experience was for me, for millions of other Americans, it’s banal. It may not be measurable experimentally, but “scrolling with the TV on” has become a pastime. Or whatever you might call a pastime in a zombie population.

Social media executives like Musk and the engineers who fine-tune their algorithms know this. They also know most users aren’t as discerning about the content they absorb as media professionals. We have reached the future and it’s reactionary media stomping on the human face forever. 

This is especially unfortunate if you’re a political party that has reduced its tools of persuasion to paid television ads. What do the buyers of those ads think people do when a player calls time out and the game breaks for commercial?

MEDIA-RUN STATE

The party I have in mind is the Democratic Party.

Democrats and their aligned elites have done little to counter this onslaught of radicalizing media. That isn’t to say they’re called upon to use progressive wealth to spread progressive lies, but they do have considerable resources, be they money or clout, to better confront people with information that undermines their opponents and helps them politically. It’s a movement and party-wide abdication and every day brings new reminders: Just a few hours before my accidental immersion in the Twitter algorithm, I had learned (from Twitter, naturally) that a right-wing media oligarch had purchased the Baltimore Sun. 

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Republicans have become a media-driven party. First it was a symbiosis with Fox News, then Fox News became more or less the party politburo. But under Donald Trump’s influence the GOP-media obsession has metastasized further, to the individual level. Republican politicians are addicted to posting. Some (Ted Cruz) host their own podcasts. Others simply accept invitations to every right-wing ‘cast (broad or pod) that they can fit into their schedules. They share tweets, takes, videos, and news stories that they believe will benefit themselves and their parties, even when they know or should know that the underlying information is false. 

Understanding the GOP as a media entity more than a political party is a useful way to grasp why Republicans (voters and officials alike) have become so toxic, nasty, and ignorant. (Am I condescending to the hoi polloi? Yes, I suppose I am.) It’s also, if anything, why they’re playing politics to a draw in their insurrection phase, when a Democratic president has rescued the country from Republican wreckage and delivered an economic boom. 

If you’ve scrolled past a viral, context-free picture or video of an expensive gas station anytime in the past three years, whether gas was cheap or expensive, chances are many Republican politicians had already reposted it. If you’re aware of bad news in the world that, for no credible reason, has been framed as a Biden failure (a bird-flu epidemic creating a temporary spike in egg prices, say), Republicans wanted you to encounter that information and did everything they could to make sure you did. They retweeted it, they shared it on other social media platforms, they repeated it on cable news or local news or podcasts. If you sense that news and social media are strangely fixated on the word “recession” or on the risk of a recession, given the historic stretch of growth we’ve been living through, that was by design: Republicans and their wealthy supporters seeded that discourse intentionally. 

Some of these ideas originated as top-down talking points, which party members and allies dutifully amplify (a simple, corporate-style transmission mechanism that Democrats could easily adopt, but have not). Others begin as viral right-wing content that party allies know they should embrace without needing instructions. When they feel the reach of these demoralizing or radicalizing ideas is inadequate, they increase the amplitude of the incitement. Or they buy another media company.

By contrast Democrats don’t even have the wherewithal to tweet about all the money Donald Trump took from the Chinese and Saudi governments when he was president. 

Democrats do post, a few of them are even decent at it. But most of them use social media as platforms for their press releases and other political boilerplate, reaching only slightly more people than if they just left them on their house-or-senate.gov websites. 

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Few of them brag about the Biden boom. Few of those who do are able to do so in a web 2.0-friendly way. They share data (which they should) rather than stories of constituents who’ve benefited from Biden’s employment or health care policies (which they definitely should). When Republican abortion bans maim and kill women, some Democrats express earnest outrage on their channels, but the party as a whole does not establish a single message about the developments, let alone build earned-media strategies around them. Their most towering success in the information realm, the big exception to the rule, was the House January 6 Committee, and—well, they handed the reins of that operation to the committee’s ranking member, a Republican.

Democratic donors are not in the market for Twitter or any other social media company; they have instead spent untold millions on standing up advocacy shops that produce uncanny activist media—much of it harmful to liberal interests—while local news outlets have either gone bust or fallen into right-wing hands. 

I imagine it goes a long way toward explaining this. 

Maybe they can turn it around over the course of this year without shaking up the way they’ve done things for over a decade now. But I’d feel better about November if they started the shake up now.