In the evolving information economy, Democrats must meet, engage, and recruit voters where they are -- including but not limited to Swifties on social media platforms.
Democrats are blind, deaf and dumb about this. We need to listen up to Tara McGowan and her strategies for Courier Newsrooms in battleground states. Courier has the smartest vehicles deployed to date to "flood the zone" with facts rather than lies. Orchestration of widespread and sustained coverage of the abortion issue in social and mainstream media channels in fall's PA state supreme court election shows the potential power of the Courier model.
Long before we had all the various media choices we have to contend with now, right wing conservatives took over AM radio and transformed it into a pervasive propaganda machine.
Rush Limbaugh perfected the way to do it: relentless hammering on the same anti-liberal accusations day after day, snarky nicknames for those being attacked, and relentless stoking of listener resentment and feelings they were being victimized. In other words, the messaging being spewed out everywhere today has been circulating for some 40 years or so but too many liberals and progressives dismissed its effect on large sections of the public.
In time the right wing talk radio audiences took over the base of the Republican Party and soon after much of its elected officialdom. It did not begin with the Tea Party.
Fox News gets most of the credit but they merely took something already proven to work and glamorized it for TV. Much of the mainstream media news cycle today now seems devoted to addressing the issues Fox News raises (is Biden too old?,too addled?, e.g.) rather than addressing the issues the readers of this website would like to see discussed.
I strongly agree. It would be remiss of any commentator to avoid mentioning talk radio in this trend of long-run media regression – it’s very difficult to call Limbaugh, or Beck, anything but proto-influencers for right-wing propaganda that today flourishes in Twitter subthreads and on OAN.
This was an easy oversight, but I don’t blame Beutler for it; it’s easy to forget about talk radio’s early influence given how much the modern media landscape has evolved. However, also misleading, though not quite as bad, is Beutler’s well-worn assertion that the establishment wing of modern news media is desperately clinging to a false veneer of nonpartisan reporting, ignoring underlying reality. This is like rehashing arguments from the Iraq War discourse. Modern MSNBC is just as loathe to criticize Democrats for anything as Fox is to criticize the MAGA wing – both are monomaniacally focused on breathlessly harping on every stumble or flaw originating from one party, constantly whipping their audience into a frenzy against the hated other side.
I used to think that this view was dumb centrist “both-sides” rhetoric (in other words, I used to be Very Online), until I sat down and watched a bunch of MSNBC with my grandmother over the last few months. They’re not as unhinged on the issues as Fox, obviously, but they match them beat-for-beat on rhetorical style. It’s a sort of idiotic tribal rah-rah negative alarmism that helps no one, serves no good purpose, and leaves their viewers upset, frustrated, impotent, stressed, and addicted to hearing more of the same.
I say this half ironically and half dead seriously - the Biden campaign should have surrogates smoking blunts with Joe Rogan every month from now until the election. Get into the ecosystem. Get that ponytail guy with the sandals and the leather jacket to keep wrecking tiktok conservative morons. Fight on the ground.
Watch the segment Chris Hayes did last night 12/14 on MSNBC. Trump pounded in the idea that "we have the world's best economy" and that went viral on right wing media. The more you repeat it...the more people truly believe it, that message was constant. The DEMS, with their weak ability to message and their lack of an equivalent of Fox News, the economy message goes nowhere or doesn't exist. Even Jermone Powell admitted the other day that all the recession talk over a year ago never came to fruition. The media ecosphere has completely changed the landscape and I don't think many of the DEMS in office get it.
The information war has been disproportionately won by the right because the GOP created their own media universe with Fox and then spun off the online garbage sites like Glenn Beck's the Blaze and Breitbart. The right never trusted the MSM and abandoned the fact based media completely. They created a captive bubble for their propaganda which is impenetrable by truth based media. And the truth based media has been cowed by the right into submissiveness. The left created a far smaller and weaker blogosphere, no offense to TPM and others but they just didn't have nearly the same reach. Now with these information hubs spreading viral information through a million memes the lack of media sites and poor message discipline on the left means it is swamped by the volume of garbage from the right. All the top spreading posts on Facebook are from right wingers, with maybe a few articles from NYT in the mix. There's just no force strong enough to counter the wave of shit from the right. Belatedly we have outlets like Crooked Media but the reach is still too limited. The right got billionaires funding "news" infrastructure years ago and we still have not caught up. So what can we do besides unspin the MSM news and subscribe to newsletters with tiny reach? Stand on street corners with sandwich board signs? It has to be the equivalent, and fight fire with fire. Ds should be spending millions on creating their own info sources to share left friendly ideas on TikTok and other social media. We need to push back against MSM false balance and work the refs. We need to attack the sources of right wing garbage and Media Matters the shit out of them. It's an uphill battle. Will take a long time to catch up.
It will take a long time. But my three-pronged plan is: 1. Dems get better at garnering earned media and creating viral media; 2. Liberal billionaires buy up or create TV/digital media outlets (preferably by asking me to run them); 3. Democrats join liberals in working the mainstream media refs.
Agree, but I want them to be more strategic about their targets. I no longer care about reaching T's deplorables OR the movement R a-holes (the McConnell wing) who exploit the deplorables' votes (for tax cuts, or dereg, or war). I guesstimate these two groups make up 40% of the electorate.
I just want back his other 5-10% of the electorate, and I believe a media strategy that sees them as rational and wins their votes (or their abstention) is doable.
But it's not by doomcasting about the next T admin. (The deplorables WANT that doom, and the a-holes don't care.)
For the critical group, I submit that a much better strategy is to treat T like an incumbent and force him to run on his 2016-2020 record -- which is awful. His multiple failures to deliver *are* the persuasive facts Ds should be trumpeting.
-- He did NOT curb immigration.
-- He did NOT contain China.
-- He did NOT drain the swamp.
-- He did NOT provide better healthcare.
-- He did NOT restore pride in America.
-- He DID leave office with a million Americans dead and with his voters holding nothing but shame.
(Billionaires asking you to run their media outlets. Love it, but I did lol. ;-))
Actually, Ralph Nader about ten years or so ago was on a mission trying to get some liberal minded ultra-rich people to revive something like the old Air America by buying up hundreds of local radio stations in the way right leaning media conglomerates like Clear Channel had done. Unfortunately, it seems liberal billionaires were more interested in running vanity presidential campaigns or throwing away money on secondary candidates.
Now, if I myself had a billion or so to spare, Brian would not have time to be responding to the likes of us.
Let's not forget that Dems have to counter the attacks from their left flank too. #GenocideJoe is getting killed out there. Dems are surrounded and not fighting back effectively!
I agree. It kills me to say it, but there was no better way to split the D coalition than by starting a war in Israel. So far, I give Biden and Blinken high marks, but it's a tightrope.
Brian, left voters are among the laziest. They can’t be bothered coming out in crucial census years, and even when they do, often don’t vote down ballot. In 2010 they were so mad at Obama because no public option that they stayed home “to teach the Dems a lesson.” And how did that work out? They are threatening to do the same now. The right comes out no matter what. They understand the stakes.
RW media has no compunction lying and unlike the left, are happy to sing the same song, word for word, line by line, from the GOP hymnal. The left won’t lie, and God forbid, be told what to say. And they certainly don’t like to carry the admin’s message even when they may agree. Though as we see now, a certain network sets the message and tone for the entire right (impeachment anyone?) and the MM, petrified to be accused of “liberal bias” and desperately chasing eyeballs, follows or rather piles on. In addition, the RW ecosphere does not criticize its own--except to get strays back on message. For the left, criticizing Dems is a fun sport.
How many columns/newsletters do you alone write bashing Dems? It’s not tough love, though that’s what you all think. MM IS the cause of the disconnect on economic news and I believe the dislike of Joe (and certainly the whole age bullshit, along with the left whining. How many times was the admin accused of being tone deaf when cheering the excellent economic numbers “because someone somewhere was hurting.” If I have to hear a younger leftie whine one more time about not being able to buy a house, pay off their student debts, not go on vacation, wah wah wah, I’m going to scream. I graduated from college into a recession. Yes, I carried a much smaller debt, but it was proportional. And I looked it up; my salary in today’s dollars was less than younger people today are making. I had to share an apt in an outer borough of NYC, had to work freelance to earn a little more, and didn’t own a house until I was 55--and the house I inherited is taking much of my 401K to fix up after decades of neglect because my mom was too poor to maintain it besides taking care of bare necessities (and we didn’t have much extra to help). Yet we didn’t/don’t cry and blame everyone else. In the 80s we worried about nukes and climate change while a very popular GOP president enthralled most of the nation--even as his policies set the groundwork for the inequality and instability we are experiencing today.
As for the beaten dead horse trope of bad messaging, I actually follow Dems on social media. To claim the president is invisible there is just wrong. Too many on the left don’t bother following Dems (ugh, why would we do that?!) and they certainly don’t share their posts--unlike their counterparts on the right and journalists. I see more of Trump’s crap reposted by members of the media than anything from the Dems.
Brian, you do criticize the media from time to time, but you are a part of that world and you have lots of political journalists who are your friends. You are in a bubble just as much as the Dems you criticize (and probably more so). I look back at the 2020 campaign and how the party adjusted for the times--from how we conducted the campaign to how the DNC completely revamped the Convention and made it fresh, smart, innovative, and fun to watch.
So what do you want the Dems to do? Offer some concrete suggestions please.
I offer concrete suggestions *all the time*. It's like the foundation of what I do. And they're suggestions I strongly suspect would have you whooping it up if Dems followed them. You should join me in expecting them to pluck low hanging fruit, and stop reflexively defending them from people pointing out all the fruit.
“How many columns/newsletters do you alone write bashing Dems? It’s not tough love, though that’s what you all think.”
This hostile bashing of everything Brian writes is simply not true, and it’s really tiresome. Since you have all the answers, maybe you should start your own blog, rather than repeat the same diatribe ad nauseam?
Recently came across an old article analyzing media and politics from Australia. It does a good job of setting out some of the issues you have referred to in this Substack regarding media coverage of politics with journalists as insiders content to cover most things as a competition.
In the evolving information economy, Democrats must meet, engage, and recruit voters where they are -- including but not limited to Swifties on social media platforms.
Democrats are blind, deaf and dumb about this. We need to listen up to Tara McGowan and her strategies for Courier Newsrooms in battleground states. Courier has the smartest vehicles deployed to date to "flood the zone" with facts rather than lies. Orchestration of widespread and sustained coverage of the abortion issue in social and mainstream media channels in fall's PA state supreme court election shows the potential power of the Courier model.
Long before we had all the various media choices we have to contend with now, right wing conservatives took over AM radio and transformed it into a pervasive propaganda machine.
Rush Limbaugh perfected the way to do it: relentless hammering on the same anti-liberal accusations day after day, snarky nicknames for those being attacked, and relentless stoking of listener resentment and feelings they were being victimized. In other words, the messaging being spewed out everywhere today has been circulating for some 40 years or so but too many liberals and progressives dismissed its effect on large sections of the public.
In time the right wing talk radio audiences took over the base of the Republican Party and soon after much of its elected officialdom. It did not begin with the Tea Party.
Fox News gets most of the credit but they merely took something already proven to work and glamorized it for TV. Much of the mainstream media news cycle today now seems devoted to addressing the issues Fox News raises (is Biden too old?,too addled?, e.g.) rather than addressing the issues the readers of this website would like to see discussed.
And Paul Harvey before Rush.
I strongly agree. It would be remiss of any commentator to avoid mentioning talk radio in this trend of long-run media regression – it’s very difficult to call Limbaugh, or Beck, anything but proto-influencers for right-wing propaganda that today flourishes in Twitter subthreads and on OAN.
This was an easy oversight, but I don’t blame Beutler for it; it’s easy to forget about talk radio’s early influence given how much the modern media landscape has evolved. However, also misleading, though not quite as bad, is Beutler’s well-worn assertion that the establishment wing of modern news media is desperately clinging to a false veneer of nonpartisan reporting, ignoring underlying reality. This is like rehashing arguments from the Iraq War discourse. Modern MSNBC is just as loathe to criticize Democrats for anything as Fox is to criticize the MAGA wing – both are monomaniacally focused on breathlessly harping on every stumble or flaw originating from one party, constantly whipping their audience into a frenzy against the hated other side.
I used to think that this view was dumb centrist “both-sides” rhetoric (in other words, I used to be Very Online), until I sat down and watched a bunch of MSNBC with my grandmother over the last few months. They’re not as unhinged on the issues as Fox, obviously, but they match them beat-for-beat on rhetorical style. It’s a sort of idiotic tribal rah-rah negative alarmism that helps no one, serves no good purpose, and leaves their viewers upset, frustrated, impotent, stressed, and addicted to hearing more of the same.
I say this half ironically and half dead seriously - the Biden campaign should have surrogates smoking blunts with Joe Rogan every month from now until the election. Get into the ecosystem. Get that ponytail guy with the sandals and the leather jacket to keep wrecking tiktok conservative morons. Fight on the ground.
You really nailed it. Democrats need to move faster to ditch the hidebound ideas that currently animate their advertising strategy.
Watch the segment Chris Hayes did last night 12/14 on MSNBC. Trump pounded in the idea that "we have the world's best economy" and that went viral on right wing media. The more you repeat it...the more people truly believe it, that message was constant. The DEMS, with their weak ability to message and their lack of an equivalent of Fox News, the economy message goes nowhere or doesn't exist. Even Jermone Powell admitted the other day that all the recession talk over a year ago never came to fruition. The media ecosphere has completely changed the landscape and I don't think many of the DEMS in office get it.
The information war has been disproportionately won by the right because the GOP created their own media universe with Fox and then spun off the online garbage sites like Glenn Beck's the Blaze and Breitbart. The right never trusted the MSM and abandoned the fact based media completely. They created a captive bubble for their propaganda which is impenetrable by truth based media. And the truth based media has been cowed by the right into submissiveness. The left created a far smaller and weaker blogosphere, no offense to TPM and others but they just didn't have nearly the same reach. Now with these information hubs spreading viral information through a million memes the lack of media sites and poor message discipline on the left means it is swamped by the volume of garbage from the right. All the top spreading posts on Facebook are from right wingers, with maybe a few articles from NYT in the mix. There's just no force strong enough to counter the wave of shit from the right. Belatedly we have outlets like Crooked Media but the reach is still too limited. The right got billionaires funding "news" infrastructure years ago and we still have not caught up. So what can we do besides unspin the MSM news and subscribe to newsletters with tiny reach? Stand on street corners with sandwich board signs? It has to be the equivalent, and fight fire with fire. Ds should be spending millions on creating their own info sources to share left friendly ideas on TikTok and other social media. We need to push back against MSM false balance and work the refs. We need to attack the sources of right wing garbage and Media Matters the shit out of them. It's an uphill battle. Will take a long time to catch up.
It will take a long time. But my three-pronged plan is: 1. Dems get better at garnering earned media and creating viral media; 2. Liberal billionaires buy up or create TV/digital media outlets (preferably by asking me to run them); 3. Democrats join liberals in working the mainstream media refs.
Agree, but I want them to be more strategic about their targets. I no longer care about reaching T's deplorables OR the movement R a-holes (the McConnell wing) who exploit the deplorables' votes (for tax cuts, or dereg, or war). I guesstimate these two groups make up 40% of the electorate.
I just want back his other 5-10% of the electorate, and I believe a media strategy that sees them as rational and wins their votes (or their abstention) is doable.
But it's not by doomcasting about the next T admin. (The deplorables WANT that doom, and the a-holes don't care.)
For the critical group, I submit that a much better strategy is to treat T like an incumbent and force him to run on his 2016-2020 record -- which is awful. His multiple failures to deliver *are* the persuasive facts Ds should be trumpeting.
-- He did NOT curb immigration.
-- He did NOT contain China.
-- He did NOT drain the swamp.
-- He did NOT provide better healthcare.
-- He did NOT restore pride in America.
-- He DID leave office with a million Americans dead and with his voters holding nothing but shame.
(Billionaires asking you to run their media outlets. Love it, but I did lol. ;-))
Actually, Ralph Nader about ten years or so ago was on a mission trying to get some liberal minded ultra-rich people to revive something like the old Air America by buying up hundreds of local radio stations in the way right leaning media conglomerates like Clear Channel had done. Unfortunately, it seems liberal billionaires were more interested in running vanity presidential campaigns or throwing away money on secondary candidates.
Now, if I myself had a billion or so to spare, Brian would not have time to be responding to the likes of us.
Let's not forget that Dems have to counter the attacks from their left flank too. #GenocideJoe is getting killed out there. Dems are surrounded and not fighting back effectively!
I agree. It kills me to say it, but there was no better way to split the D coalition than by starting a war in Israel. So far, I give Biden and Blinken high marks, but it's a tightrope.
I don't see the DNC anywhere. What could they possibly be doing that is more important?!?
Informative, succinct, AND, terrifying 😳
Brian, left voters are among the laziest. They can’t be bothered coming out in crucial census years, and even when they do, often don’t vote down ballot. In 2010 they were so mad at Obama because no public option that they stayed home “to teach the Dems a lesson.” And how did that work out? They are threatening to do the same now. The right comes out no matter what. They understand the stakes.
RW media has no compunction lying and unlike the left, are happy to sing the same song, word for word, line by line, from the GOP hymnal. The left won’t lie, and God forbid, be told what to say. And they certainly don’t like to carry the admin’s message even when they may agree. Though as we see now, a certain network sets the message and tone for the entire right (impeachment anyone?) and the MM, petrified to be accused of “liberal bias” and desperately chasing eyeballs, follows or rather piles on. In addition, the RW ecosphere does not criticize its own--except to get strays back on message. For the left, criticizing Dems is a fun sport.
How many columns/newsletters do you alone write bashing Dems? It’s not tough love, though that’s what you all think. MM IS the cause of the disconnect on economic news and I believe the dislike of Joe (and certainly the whole age bullshit, along with the left whining. How many times was the admin accused of being tone deaf when cheering the excellent economic numbers “because someone somewhere was hurting.” If I have to hear a younger leftie whine one more time about not being able to buy a house, pay off their student debts, not go on vacation, wah wah wah, I’m going to scream. I graduated from college into a recession. Yes, I carried a much smaller debt, but it was proportional. And I looked it up; my salary in today’s dollars was less than younger people today are making. I had to share an apt in an outer borough of NYC, had to work freelance to earn a little more, and didn’t own a house until I was 55--and the house I inherited is taking much of my 401K to fix up after decades of neglect because my mom was too poor to maintain it besides taking care of bare necessities (and we didn’t have much extra to help). Yet we didn’t/don’t cry and blame everyone else. In the 80s we worried about nukes and climate change while a very popular GOP president enthralled most of the nation--even as his policies set the groundwork for the inequality and instability we are experiencing today.
As for the beaten dead horse trope of bad messaging, I actually follow Dems on social media. To claim the president is invisible there is just wrong. Too many on the left don’t bother following Dems (ugh, why would we do that?!) and they certainly don’t share their posts--unlike their counterparts on the right and journalists. I see more of Trump’s crap reposted by members of the media than anything from the Dems.
Brian, you do criticize the media from time to time, but you are a part of that world and you have lots of political journalists who are your friends. You are in a bubble just as much as the Dems you criticize (and probably more so). I look back at the 2020 campaign and how the party adjusted for the times--from how we conducted the campaign to how the DNC completely revamped the Convention and made it fresh, smart, innovative, and fun to watch.
So what do you want the Dems to do? Offer some concrete suggestions please.
I offer concrete suggestions *all the time*. It's like the foundation of what I do. And they're suggestions I strongly suspect would have you whooping it up if Dems followed them. You should join me in expecting them to pluck low hanging fruit, and stop reflexively defending them from people pointing out all the fruit.
“How many columns/newsletters do you alone write bashing Dems? It’s not tough love, though that’s what you all think.”
This hostile bashing of everything Brian writes is simply not true, and it’s really tiresome. Since you have all the answers, maybe you should start your own blog, rather than repeat the same diatribe ad nauseam?
Well said! 🔥
Recently came across an old article analyzing media and politics from Australia. It does a good job of setting out some of the issues you have referred to in this Substack regarding media coverage of politics with journalists as insiders content to cover most things as a competition.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-30/rosen---why-political-coverage-is-broken/2862328