(2024-12-12) Doctorow A Democratic Media Strategy To Save Journalism And The Nation

Cory Doctorow: A Democratic media strategy to save journalism and the nation. 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.

The right has an extremely well-funded media ecosystem of high-paid bullshitters

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

Meanwhile, the Democrats have historically relied on the "traditional media" (MSM) 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. 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.

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 unserious

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.

Ryan Cooper proposes a solution to the Democratic media gap: sponsoring explicitly Democrat news outlets. 2024-12-12-DemocratsLostThePropagandaWar

The average normie voter doesn't know what a "tariff" is

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?

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.

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

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.

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. As a writer, it's profoundly satisfying and liberating, because all I have to care about is whether people engage with my ideas.

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).

The Democratic Party doesn't need its own Joe Rogan – they need a nationwide network of local outlets, sponsored by the party.