The State of the Media Landscape Pt. 1
The powers that be may be struggling to control the flow of information, but they are still attempting to silence dissent wherever they can.
This article is the first part of a two-part series. Read part two here.
Over the last few weeks, several noteworthy developments have occurred within the media landscape. These include, among other things, the typical bullshit situations that many of us have come to expect like internet censorship and corporate media melodramatics, as well as attacks on journalists and free speech in general that are surprising even for the climate of censorship we already live in.
All of these recent stories share a common theme. Namely, the politicians and oligarchs who run this country, as well as their lackeys in the corporate press, are becoming increasingly brazen in their attempts to stifle what’s left of our freedom of speech. That may be disconcerting, but it also has a silver lining: It reveals that the establishment is flailing to maintain the status quo and desperately trying to keep its control over an information ecosystem that is becoming more and more decentralized.
These developments have taken place within both corporate news outlets and on social media platforms, and they all have their own implications and consequences that society will have to grapple with sooner or later. We’ll discuss corporate news outlets in the first part of this series, and the second part will focus on social media.
Corporate Media
Legacy Newspapers
NYT Exposes Pentagon Leaker
At the beginning of April, the corporate media began reporting on leaked documents from the Pentagon, some of which contained top-secret information. The documents were leaked onto the social media platform Discord and had been circulating on the internet for weeks prior to gaining mass media attention. In response to the leaks, journalists at a Pentagon press briefing berated Pentagon spokesperson Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder about how the Department of Defense (DOD) plans to prevent leaks like this in the future.
One would think that journalists — who are ostensibly supposed to report on truthful information that’s in the public interest and hold the powerful to account — would’ve confronted Gen. Ryder about the actual substance of the leaked documents rather than calling for tighter security measures and less transparency, but one would apparently be wrong.
Shortly after the corporate press began reporting on the documents, the White House encouraged media outlets not to report on the leak — because hardly anyone in the government even pretends to care about supporting freedom of speech anymore. Some might argue that the White House was just offering a suggestion and not dictating an actual mandate, pointing out that there was no clear infringement of the First Amendment. That is true, however, just because the White House technically maintained the letter of the law, that doesn’t mean it upheld the spirit of it.
The alleged leaker of the documents was eventually discovered to be 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsmen Jack Teixeira, who has since been arrested. Regardless of one’s opinion on leakers and whistleblowers, the way in which Teixeira was discovered to be the source of the leaks should concern anyone who values transparency in government and a free and open press.
It’s very probable that reporting from The New York Times, in collusion with Bellingcat, led to Teixeira’s arrest. Rather than protecting a source from the government — as is standard journalistic practice — the Times did the opposite and tracked down and outed Teixeira, indirectly aiding the federal investigation into the leaks. Adding insult to injury, not only did the Times expose Teixeira as the leaker, but it and other legacy papers like The Washington Post used the documents for their own reporting while simultaneously smearing Teixeira as a racist and an extremist.
https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1647051461803806721
This recent leak has also led to more calls for government regulation of social media platforms, which has caused some to speculate that Teixeira is simply a patsy for a deliberate leak that was intended to manufacture support for legislation like the RESTRICT Act (a bill that would vastly expand the government’s control over the internet which we’ll discuss in more detail in the second part of this series). I don’t personally have a strong opinion for or against that theory, but I will say it seems like something our government would do.
Digital Outlets
Bellingcat Defends Terrorism
While we’re somewhat discussing Bellingcat, the Western intelligence front’s news site’s lead Russia investigator, Christo Grozev, recently defended an act of terrorism that took place on April 2 of this year at a cafe in St. Petersburg, Russia.
The attack, which was presumably conducted by Ukraine or a pro-Ukraine group or government, wounded tens of civilians and killed a pro-Russian war blogger named Vladlen Tatarsky, who was most likely the intended target. While talking to Sky News, Grozev referred to Tatarsky as a “legitimate target” and downplayed the attack by implying that the cafe where it took place was not “purely civilian”.
Grozev’s remarks highlight the extreme mental gymnastics that Western journalists and politicians have to perform in order to portray the war in Ukraine as a simple binary between good and evil. In reality, every side is capable of heinous acts during war, and the morality of such acts does not change based on who is behind them. Regardless of how one feels about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or Tatarsky’s coverage of it, attacking journalists and civilians is never justified. It is literal terrorism and should be viewed as such.
The Death of Buzzfeed News
Another very notable development in the digital media space is that Buzzfeed News is shutting down. The outlet regularly toed the establishment line on most topics, and it gained notoriety for publishing the now-discredited Steele Dossier that was used to try and smear former-President Donald Trump as a Russian asset. However, it also published somewhat decent reports on topics such as Anthony Fauci’s emails as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) deep involvement in the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer back in 2020.
(Those reports still leave much to be desired, however. The report on Fauci’s emails specifically is essentially a puff piece that talks about what a “courteous, low-key, and empathetic” communicator Fauci is, but it still contains important information.)
According to Axios, Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti implied that one of the reasons for shutting the digital news site down was its over-reliance on social media distribution. Many people do get their news from social media platforms, so it makes sense that a lot of news sites, specifically digital media outlets, would rely on that approach.
In an article for Reason, Robby Soave discusses how social media companies’ decisions to limit links to news sites helped lead to the end of Buzzfeed News, and he makes the case that the corporate press played a major role in pushing social media companies to make those decisions.
“Any story that attempts to explain the abrupt collapse of the online journalism model must reckon with the media's starring role in its own demise,” Soave wrote. Later on in the article, he elaborates:
Media outlets in the post-2016 landscape sang a clarion song: The unrestricted, unmoderated nature of viral content on Facebook is a social hazard, and the world will come to an end unless Zuckerberg stops his users from reading and engaging with so much unapproved information. Then they got their wish—Facebook changed the feed to prioritize content from friends and family and punish offsite news links, and that was that. A massive drop-off in traffic for countless online news sites ensued.
The death of Buzzfeed News highlights some of the unintended consequences of people within the media advocating for increased internet censorship. I wouldn’t expect anyone in the corporate media to learn any lessons from this situation, however.
Cable News
Tucker Carlson Leaving Fox News
One of the most significant news stories having to do with the media landscape recently is that Tucker Carlson and Fox News “have agreed to part ways,” according to a statement put out by Fox. Carlson was the network’s most popular primetime anchor whose show was viewed by over 3 million people each night.
Although I don’t agree with everything Carlson has ever said — in fact, there are plenty of things I disagree with him on — he was one of if not the only cable news hosts to question establishment narratives on things like the US’s involvement in the war in Ukraine or the continuing persecution of Julian Assange, to name a couple of examples. I think it’s a shame that his critical views on such important topics will most likely be entirely absent from primetime cable news going forward.
It’s still unclear exactly what caused Carlson to be ousted by the news network, but that hasn’t stopped people from speculating on the situation. Many people have claimed that it was likely due to Fox recently settling a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million over Fox’s coverage of the 2020 election. That speculation misses a key fact, however, which is that Carlson was one of the only hosts on Fox News to point out the lack of evidence for Trump’s and his lawyer’s conspiracy theories about that election.
A similar situation occurred at CNN with Don Lemon, who was fired at practically the same time that Carlson was let go from Fox. Lemon’s ouster has gained much less attention, however. This isn’t only because Carlson’s viewership dwarfed Lemon’s, but also because none of Lemon’s opinions differ from any other liberal media pundit’s views in any meaningful way, whereas Carlson regularly departed from the establishment consensus. Lemon’s replacement having more or less the same exact views as him is basically assured, but Carlson’s replacement will most likely parrot establishment talking points much more often than Carlson ever did.
Carlson will likely find a new home somewhere in conservative media, or he could continue his career independently, where he will hopefully be able to express his opinions with fewer corporate constraints. Who knows, maybe Carlson and Lemon will end up collaborating on a new project together.
https://twitter.com/DanMancini/status/1650552583709229056
Medhi Hasan Debates Matt Taibbi
Carlson and Lemon both getting fired caused quite a bit of drama at Fox News and CNN, respectively, but over at MSNBC, waves were made when Mehdi Hasan recently sparred with independent journalist Matt Taibbi over Taibbi’s reporting on the Twitter Files — internal documents from Twitter that revealed, among other things, the national-security state’s massive amount of interference in social media content moderation (a.k.a. censorship).
Hasan pointed out that Taibbi made an error in one of the tweets from one of the earliest reports on the Twitter Files (for those who aren’t aware, the reporting was originally done through Twitter threads). Taibbi had mixed up a couple of acronyms, one of them was the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a sub-agency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the other was the Center for Internet Security (CIS), a private nonprofit. Taibbi conceded that he made that mistake and subsequently corrected it, but Hasan claimed that Taibbi made the same mistake while testifying to Congress back in March.
In an article for his Substack, investigative journalist Lee Fang (who also reported on the Twitter Files) explains how Hasan is wrong to claim that Taibbi committed perjury during his congressional testimony. Fang also points out that even the actual error in question was essentially irrelevant, as both CISA and CIS worked in tandem to promote censorship on Twitter. However, Hasan refuses to acknowledge this reality and incorrectly maintains that a simple error he discovered in one of Taibbi’s tweets debunks all of the reporting on the Twitter Files as a whole.
Hasan’s claim that Taibbi lied to Congress is bad enough on its own, but it led to a much more worrisome situation. Shortly after the debate between Hasan and Taibbi, Representative Stacey Plaskett, a delegate who represents the Virgin Islands in the US House of Representatives, wrote a letter to Taibbi where she essentially called for him to be arrested and jailed over his nonexistent mistake.
It should go without saying that elected representatives calling for the jailing of journalists is a dangerous violation of the First Amendment. It would be dangerous even if Taibbi truly made the supposed error, but the fact that his congressional testimony was factually correct just makes the entire situation that much more glaring.
Honorable Mention
“Weaponized” Free Speech
There’s another situation that recently occurred that, while in a similar vein, is even more worrying than Rep. Plaskett calling for Taibbi to be jailed over his reporting. A couple of weeks ago, the Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) charged four US citizens “with roles in a malign campaign pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda,” according to The Washington Post.
Whether these four individuals were actually “pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda” or not, the DOJ is essentially criminalizing speech the Biden administration disagrees with. In fact, Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen even said that “Russia’s foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights,” which highlights that speech is the real issue at the center of these charges.
“Under the First Amendment the government is forbidden to abridge anyone's freedom to speak however they want and associate with whomever they please,” journalist and commentator Caitlin Johnstone recently wrote, “which necessarily includes being as vocally pro-Russia as they like and promoting whatever political agendas they see fit, whether that happens to advance the interests of the Russian government or not.”
This situation will have far-reaching and very dangerous ramifications, yet for some reason, it has been largely ignored. That may be because the four individuals who were charged are all avid leftists, so many on the right may not care about this indictment as much as they should, and the liberal left in America long ago abandoned any real support for free speech.
Conclusion
It appears as though our media landscape is currently going through some major shifts. One can only hope that the end result will be for the better, but some of these developments do not bode well for the future. The powers that be may be struggling to control the flow of information, but they are still attempting to silence dissent wherever they can.
In part two of this series, we’ll discuss the current changes and developments taking place on some of the most popular social media platforms, and how all of these stories are connected by a commonality: the freedom to speak one’s mind, how that freedom is being undermined, and the inconveniences that the right to free speech often inflicts on the powerful.
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Excellent summation of the recent top news stories. And thank you for sharing my article, I appreciate that.