It’s always been my opinion that with the rise of social media, the mainstream media had no choice but to become official state propaganda machines. I based this on the logic that if MSN accepted social media, it would also be accepting that it had become an anachronism. That social media was the next evolutionary stage of all media, and MSN would have to acquiesce to it. If it was going to survive, it necessarily had to take the opposite stance and forsake free speech for approved speech. It had to go to war with truth.
Chamath Palihapitiya of the All In Podcast has a similar hypothesis, that social media cornered the market for truth-seeking as opposed to cronyism. That there were simply not enough people in MSN — a bloated business model — with the intellectual abilities to “opine on the truth” and so chose to lie.
My opinion has changed however after watching Mike Benz, Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online — although everything now with words like “freedom” “peoples” or“democratic” in their name now has the whiff of corruption to me (Democratic People's Republic of North Korea, anyone?) — on Tucker Carson. If his analysis is correct, we now know that the MSN has always been a propaganda machine for statecraft, initially used to implement political goals such as in the Arab Spring. After Brexit and other populist political events began to frustrate the powers that be however, social media companies such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook came under intense pressure to become a weaponised arm of statecraft, once used against enemies of these powers now, stunningly, to be directed against the citizens of the states themselves. Benz asserts that democracy has been rebranded, not as by the people for the people, but as the defence of institutions of power over the people, such as the MSN. The behavior of the MSN makes this claim undeniable.
Millions of journeymen journalists simply followed the new directive. A few saw what was happening and either left of their own accord or were forced out, the last being Tucker Carlson. The rest doubled down under increasing fear of layoffs. Not all of them could be saved, however, as the bottom fell out of an already bloated business model, and the Go woke - Go Broke model replaced it. For more on this being a business model see my free article Bankrupting The Patriachy. To date, I can only think of one person who jumped ship from independent social media to MSN and that person is Claire Lehman. During COVID-19 many people on social media became disappointed with her increasingly illiberal stance on subjects like mandatory masks, Covid jabs, and lockdowns. She also turned on former independent media colleagues and free speech advocates, such as Elon Musk. With hindsight, she seems to have used Quillette as a vehicle to enter legacy media.
Now with the demise of major MSN brands like Sports Illustrated and countless redundancies of journalists, millions of what were effectively paid operatives of the state are flooding the writing marketplace. Where will they go? In their zealotry, they have burned the bridges that could have led them back to social media collaboration to ashes.
I am still digesting the explosive content of the Carlson/Benz interview. It is making me rethink a few things. I’ll keep you updated here.
Democracy in a large industrial society will never be anything more than a popularly elected oligarchy. I don’t say that as a cynic; I say that as a realist. Anarcho-capitalism is the better solution (which usually appears very unrealistic to most people). The state is negative sum.