Think it was this image that left a comical imprint in my mind of what right news is. It's I think why Trump has invited Musk over and on the phone call with Zelensky. He isn't in any way significant like say a politician with experience, but he did help flood the zone with more garbage via X LOL. I do believe the left contributed to distrust, but the game plan was to marginalize and replace them with crap.
Legacy media must compete against a choose-your-own-adventure reality.
www.theatlantic.com
>>>“You are the media now.” That’s the message that began to cohere among right-wing influencers shortly after Donald Trump won the election this week. Elon Musk first posted the phrase, and others followed. “The legacy media is dead. Hollywood is done. Truth telling is in. No more complaining about the media,” the right-wing activist James O’Keefe posted shortly after. “You are the media.”
It’s a particularly effective message for Musk, who spent $44 billion to purchase a communications platform that he has
harnessed to undermine existing media institutions and directly support Trump’s campaign. QAnon devotees also
know the phrase as a rallying cry, an invitation to participate in a particular kind of citizen “journalism” that involves
just asking questions and making stuff up altogether.
“You are the media now” is also a good message because, well, it might be true.
A defining quality of this election cycle has been that few people seem to be able to agree on who constitutes “the media,” what their role ought to be, or even how much influence they have in 2024. Based on Trump and Kamala Harris’s appearances on various shows—and especially Trump and J. D. Vance’s late-race interviews with Joe Rogan, which culminated in the popular host’s endorsement—some have argued that this was the “
podcast election.” But there’s broad confusion over what actually moves the needle. Is the press the bulwark against fascism, or is it
ignored by a meaningful percentage of the country? It is certainly beleaguered by a conservative effort to undermine media institutions, with Trump as its champion and the fracturing caused by algorithmic social media. It can feel existential at times competing for attention and reckoning with the truth that many Americans don’t read, trust, or really care all that much about what papers, magazines, or cable news have to say.
All of this contributes to a well-documented, slow-moving crisis of legacy media—a cocktail whose ingredients also include
declining trust,
bad economics,
political pressure,
vulture capitalists, the rise of the internet, and no shortage of
coverage decisions from mainstream institutions that have alienated or infuriated some portion of their audiences. Each and every one of these things affected how Americans experienced this election, though it is impossible to say what the impact is in aggregate. If “you are the media,” then there is no longer a consensus reality informed by what audiences see and hear: Everyone chooses their own adventure.<<<