Cory Doctorow
As unbearably cringe as the hunt for a "leftist Joe Rogan" is, it is (to use a shopworn phrase), "directionally correct." Democrats suck at getting their message out, and that exacts a high electoral cost.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/12/the-view-from-somewhere/#abolish-rogan
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Cory Doctorow
The right has an *extremely* well-funded media ecosystem of high-paid bullshitters backed by algorithm-gaming SEO dickheads. This system isn't necessarily supposed to turn a profit or even break even: the point of Prageru isn't to score ad revenue, it's to ensure that anyone who googles "what the fuck causes inflation" gets 25 minutes of relatable, upbeat, cheerfully sociopathic Austrian economics jammed into their eyeballs.
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Cory Doctorow
Far right news isn't a for-profit concern, it's a loss-leader for oligarch-friendly policies. It's a *steal*: a million bucks' worth of news buys America's ultra-rich a billion dollars' worth of tax-cuts and the right to maim their workers and poison their customers for profit.
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Cory Doctorow
Meanwhile, the Democrats have historically relied on the "traditional media" to carry their messages, on the ground that reality has a well-known leftist bias, so any news outlet that hews to "journalistic ethics" will publish the truth, and the truth will weigh in favor of Democratic positions: trans people are humans, racism is real, abortion isn't murder, housing is a market failure, the planet is on fire, etc, etc, etc.
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Cory Doctorow
This is a stupid policy, and it has failed. The "respectable" news media hews to a self-imposed code of "balance" and "neutrality" that is easily gamed: "some people say that Hatians don't eat pet dogs, some people do, let's report both sides!" This is called "the view from nowhere" and it gets Democrats precisely nowhere:
http://archive.pressthink.org/2008/03/14/pincus_neutrality.html
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Cory Doctorow
Balance and neutrality are bullshit, an excuse that has been so thoroughly weaponized by billionaires and their lickspittles that anyone who takes it seriously demonstrates comprehensively that they, themselves, are deeply *un*serious:
Press neutrality - the view from nowhere - isn't some eternal verity. In terms of the history of the press, it's an idea that's about ten seconds old.
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Cory Doctorow
The glory days of the news were dominated by papers with names like *The Smallville Democrat* and *The Ruling Class Republican*. Most of the world boggles at the idea that a news outlet *wouldn't* declare its political posture.
7/
Cory Doctorow
Britons know that the *Telegraph* is the *Torygraph*; that the *Guardian* is in the tank for Labour (and specifically, committed to enabling Blairite/Starmerite purges of the left); the *Mirror* is a leftist tabloid; and the *Mail* is so far right that its editorial board considers Attila the Hun "woke."
8/
Cory Doctorow
Writing for *The American Prospect* - an excellent left news outlet - @ryanlcooper proposes a solution to the Democratic media gap, far better than the hunt for the elusive "leftist Joe Rogan": sponsoring explicitly Democrat news outlets:
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-12-12-democrats-lost-propaganda-war/
The country is a bleak landscape of news deserts where voters literally didn't hear about what Trump was saying he would do, and, if they heard about it, they didn't hear from anyone who could explain what it meant.
9/
Cory Doctorow
The average normie voter doesn't know what a "tariff" is, and chances are they think it's a tax that other countries inexplicably pay for the privilege of selling very cheap things to Americans.
Ironically, this news desert is also a crowded field of hungry, unemployed, talented journalists. What if Dems funded free newsgathering and publication in news deserts that told the truth?
10/
Cory Doctorow
What if these news outlets, by dint of being an explicitly partisan, party-subsidized project, refused to adopt all the anti-reader practices of other websites, like disgusting surveillance, intrusive advertising, AI slop, email-soliciting pop-ups, and all the other crap that makes the news worse and worse every day?
11/
Cory Doctorow
Cooper recounts how this was actually tried on a small scale, to modest good effect, when the Center for American Progress subsidized *Thinkprogress*, an explicitly leftist news outlet. This was going great until 2019, when corporate Dems and their megadonors killed it because *Thinkprogress* had the temerity to report on their corrupt dealings:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/thinkprogress-a-top-progressive-news-site-is-shutting-down/
12/
Cory Doctorow
And, Cooper points out, this *isn't* what happens with far-right subsidy news. Right wing influencers, personalities and writers can stray pretty far from the party line without getting shut down.
I love the idea of a disenshittified, explicitly political leftist Democratic news media. Imagine a newsroom whose purpose is to get its message repeated as widely as possible.
13/
Cory Doctorow
It wouldn't have a paywall - it would be Creative Commons Attribution-only, allowing for commercial republication by anyone who wants to reprint it, so long as they link back to it. It wouldn't wring its hands over AI ingestion or whether a slop site that rewrote its articles got to the top of Google News. That's fine!
14/
Cory Doctorow
If the point is to get people to understand your point of view - and not to attract clicks or eyeballs - other people repackaging your content and finding ways to spread it is a feature, not a bug.
Back in the Napster Wars, entertainment industry shills - like Hillary Rosen, who oversaw a campaign to sue tens of thousands of children before becoming a major Democratic Party power-broker - used to tell us that "you can't compete with free."
15/
Cory Doctorow
That's not entirely true, but it's not entirely false, either. If your news is a loss-leader for a democratic society that addresses human flourishing and a habitable planet, then you can make that news free-as-in-speech *and* free-as-in-beer, and avoid all the suckitude that makes reading "real" news so fucking garbage.
For the past five years, I've been publishing a newsletter - this thing you're reading now - that has no analytics, ads, tracking, pop-ups, or other trash.
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Cory Doctorow
As a writer, it's *profoundly* satisfying and liberating, because all I have to care about is whether people engage with my ideas. I literally have no idea how many people read this, but I know *everything* people say about it.
That's how the news worked back in the good old days that everyone says we need to return to.
17/
Cory Doctorow
Writers and editors measured the success of a story based on how the public reacted to it, not based on clicks or metrics that told you how far someone scrolled before they gave up on it. The supposed benefits of "data-driven" editorial policy have not materialized - the "data-driven" part is the search for an equilibrium between how surveillant and obnoxious a website can be and your decision to stop reading it forever.
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Cory Doctorow
Outlets like *Propublica* have done well by adopting much of this program, albeit without any explicit leftist agenda (the fact that they seem leftist reflects nothing more than their commitment to reporting the truth, e.g., Clarence Thomas is a lavishly corrupt puppet of billionaires who've showered him with riches).
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Cory Doctorow
The fact that they've been as successful as they are on a national beat - and partnering with the scant few regional papers to do some local coverage - just proves the point. The Democratic Party doesn't need its own Joe Rogan - they need a nationwide network of local outlets, sponsored by the party, committed to *never* enshittifying, bringing relevant, timely news to a nation in desperate need of it.
eof/
Chuck Munson
@pluralistic From what I understand, American media a century ago was the same way. Hundreds of newspapers, some cities had a dozen or more. They mostly wore their politics on their...mastheads. People knew they could read something that matched their political tastes.
Chuck Munson
@pluralistic Hasan Pike has been put forward at the Left alternative to Joe Rogan, HasanAbi has talked about this on his streams this week. He shared an interesting observation about the departure of Brett Cooper from the DailyWire. While the Right has millions to fund their channels, they wanted to bottle the authenticity of Hasan and other left streamers for their outlets. Cooper's faux, astro-turfed "streaming" studio stream was a more successful channel for them.
Yet another Josh :donor:
The Democrats' message these days is "uhhh we're not as terrible as Trump".
Biden endorsed and furthered Trump's original tariffs, extended Trump's previous EO's, and basically did a 'softer version of Trump'. The China hate still reigns, with Tiktok ban still happening any day now. Palestine is still an ongoing genocide, paid for by US weaponry.
And Harris shows up last minute and goes "lol nothing is different with me".
The leftists I know (myself included) look at the democratic party as elitist sycophants that will actively harm real positive change for the masses. Not only that, but "Democrats" are some of the most undemocratic in their organization and structure.
First-passed-the-post voting means we're basically stuck with them. Or, with Republicans winning, just the worse option.
Glad I don't have children. I wouldn't want to raise them in this world.
cerement
Biden’s original “Nothing will fundamentally change.” and his current “This will be the most peaceful transition ever.”
Preston Is Not My Real Name
@crankylinuxuser @pluralistic "Not only that, but "Democrats" are some of the most undemocratic in their organization and structure. "
I keep hearing this and it confuses the shit out of me. Aren't most political parties in most countries 100% undemocratic? Frankly the idea of primaries baffles me and I can only understand it in light of the two-party system - and neither of the major parties is responsible for inventing FPTP, as it's enshrined in the Constitution.
Yet another Josh :donor:
It's crazy, but here's some things of recent note that I say the Democratic party is undemocratic:
And this is a long form account from someone who turned anarchist after volunteering for the Nevada state Democratic party. https://post-goldfish.ghost.io/i-became-an-anarchist-while-working-for-the-nevada-state-democratic-party/
"Having a physical separation (of Democratic HQ professionals), by around a 15-minute drive, is a perfect metaphor for how the professional class of the Democratic Party sees themselves compared to the ordinary people of the field staff. We weren’t let in on any strategy discussions, we weren’t told any inside information (because they were certain we’d leak it), we weren’t even allowed to physically be around them."
Daniel T 🌻
@crankylinuxuser @pluralistic Democrats can be bullied into doing the right thing, Republicans can't
This also means that Democrats can be bullied into doing the wrong things, it's a competitive landscape
Angus McIntyre
@RandomDamage @crankylinuxuser @pluralistic You don’t actually have to bully Democrats into doing the wrong things. You can just tell them that if they do the wrong things, then the Republicans will like them.
This is, of course, not true, but it works nonetheless.
Cory Doctorow
@WhistlerInTheDarkAges No, I'm thinking of local news outlets.
WhistlerInTheDarkAges
@pluralistic We definitely need this counterprogramming. Is Meidas anything like what you’re thinking of here?
Ed Hurtley
@crankylinuxuser @pluralistic What pisses me off as someone who used to be a "rank and file Democratic Party volunteer at the county/state level" is that the overwhelming majority of the PARTY are way more "left" than most of the elected officials.
And a lot of the people who run are far more "left" too. It feels like once people win and are sworn in, they get cowed by the not-left elected officials at the highest rungs and shift "centrist".
It is supremely annoying to see people decry "Democrats are just as bad as Republicans!" - no, DEMOCRATS aren't. The few elected officials at the highest rungs of power who got elected on a Democratic ticket are.
I wish I knew how to change this. (This disillusionment, plus some local party infighting caused me to stop being actively involved years ago.)
I'm thinking of digging in again and becoming actively involved to see if I can help "push the needle". Thankfully, my district/state is "safely left" - which also makes me wonder why I should bother...
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