A few months ago I did an AMA on what it's like to work in mainstream local news in the US. TL;DR: It's not great.

Now I'm back to tell you it's only getting worse.

Part of working for a mainstream news outlet is understanding, even if you can't articulate it, that you write for boomers. This is true for the big corporate stations like Fox and MSNBC, but also for the podunk community papers like I work for. And as boomers get older and more stubborn and more terrified of everything that moves, the already-tight restrictions on actual journalistic inquiry in this shitstain country are only getting tighter. The range of acceptable viewpoints, hell, even what's acceptable to write about, is shrinking by the day.

Editors in the newsrooms are contemptuous of the far right but terrified of even the center-left. This morning I was reprimanded for re-tweeting a twitter take pointing out the hypocrisy of the US' condemnations of Russia, given its own imperial history. A coworker almost got fired last week for saying on my station's podcast that reporters deserved a union.

The monopoly on public thought is slipping from news CEO's hands and from the hands of their lapdog star reporters-turned-overpaid editors. Expect ever-more boogeymaning of socialists and even progressives from MSM as it lets out its long death rattle.

  • TheFreshestHell [he/him,any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    It's bad news for everyone in the short term. Even if you think that the current era of reactionary backlash will end within your lifetime, that backlash is going to be made a lot worse by panicking news publishers doing their utmost to portray anyone left of Obama as a traitor to civil society.

    • Awoo [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I welcome the mask off. Its effect will not only be to raise reactionary activity but it will also radicalise those of the soft left. They can not take this action without it also having a direct effect on the left itself.

      The more the soft left is attacked the more they become the hard left. They will help build the foundations of what will destroy them. Here in the UK our media called Corbyn a communist, said he'd destroy the country and openly discussed whether the option to coup him was possible. The effect of this was to turn social democrats into principled socialists and socialists into revolutionaries and occupiers.

      • TheFreshestHell [he/him,any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I can't speak for the UK but applied to the US this is an idealist take. Bernie voters aren't going to become Black Panthers because the news their grandparents read called them mean names. If anything it just lets them perpetually pose as the cool rebel kids while still enjoying the material benefits of living in the imperial core.

        What it will do is inspire those Bernie voters' parents and grandparents to push for ever-more money going to three-letter agencies, police and reactionary lawmakers.

        Edit: which I guess itself is an incidental phenomenon to the collapse of the empire and imperial policies being turned inward. But it gives that brutality the facade of public support.

        • Awoo [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Half the american communists on this site were soft-left liberals before they got shit all over by the neoliberal establishment and its media apparatus causing them to become communists out of pure spite.

          Negative focus from the media causes a political group to harden. It isn't idealism, it is the direct experience of class struggle and witnessing a weapon of the bourgeoisie in use against them and having to deal with the material effects of it when interacting with others about their ideology, it causes the group to harden and harden.

          The left is forged and hardened in struggle. Smarter media goons play the deplatforming game and marginalise the left through mass control and centralisation of the media environment. The smart media avoids engaging the existence of the left at all because doing so aggressively feeds the struggle. American media is not smart however, it is inexperienced and uneducated in the left as a result of no left existing for so long.