American democracy died on the day the supreme court overturned campaign finance restrictions. Since then US politics is a mere playground for billionaires and corporations.
Nah, America was on this trajectory from watergate. The day the other party decided they wanted to give up on bipartisan efforts, and started primary-ing their own for bipartisan behavior, you took a step down this path.
With the advent of Murdoch’s papers and news efforts, the infinite money and credibility glitch allowed for these specific circumstances to occur.
The question is whether the information economy is downstream of the political economy, or vice versa.
That's a different problem. Toxic bipartisanship has been around for a long time with supporters and opponents. But a single billionaire outright buying a candidate to the point where he can claim that the president would not be in office without him is madness.
This is madness from the perspective of a general citizen point of view.
The mechanisms which were broken, that let these events come to pass - these began with the decision to end bipartisanship by republicans.
This isn’t about toxic bipartisanship, which isn’t even an issue. Unadulterated partisanship as a political strategy, is the start.
The enablement is the news ecosystem that was set up to defend these actions, and eventually launched the conversations entirely out of the gravitational well of facts and norms.
This is misleading (it is approximately correct if you look only at candidate committee spending, but it excludes outside spending—where the advantage went the other way, and the outside spending in 2024 exceeded campaign committee spending.)
Even if the figure itself weren't misleading, basing the argument around it is. The problematic dynamic isn't that the most money makes for a guaranteed win - rather it's that whomever does manage to win will be inclined to work for their major sponsors, especially if they will be up for reelection.
That figure does not include outside supporters spending campaigns. It's disingenuous to not include dark money spending.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/final-price-t...
It's closer to 1.8 billion for Harris supporters versus 1.4 billion for Trump supporters in 2024. That also does not include various media outlets bought in the past decades, including One America News/Fox/Sinclair sandbagging for Trump for the last eight years, at this point, shouldn't one include the budget for Fox News and OAN and Sinclair not to mention the spiking of negative news stories/opinions by LA Times/Washington Post? Even CNN was bought in past year by conservative and the leading story last month for a while was Jake Tapper's book about Biden.
Strong upvote. The Murdoch succession drama is one of the most important things affecting the future of US democracy. There are a lot of smaller and even more radical networks, but I don't think they have the reach and influence of Fox.
FOX is indeed all in for Trump. But on the other side of the ledger, there is the media that was all in for Biden - NPR, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, NYT, etc., during the same time period.
Oh heck no! This is the error in comparison that is allowing an unfair competition between the left + center vs the Right wing information economies.
The whole point of journalism and freedom of speech was to create a market place of ideas that allows for competition between ideas.
The right side of the information sphere insulates its viewers from the left and center. They do not get punished by their own for platforming inaccurate or fringe theories. Instead they compete on getting the more viral narrative platformed, while voices that counter the inaccuracies do not get platformed.
They are a demagoguery machine. The political party and news media are the same entity.
The left and center are largely stuck with the ideas of being relatively true to facts, getting punished by members for getting things wrong.
There are people on the left which are trying to recreate the success of the fringe right, which has become the core base on the right.
They are starting a decades long process, that began around watergate.
The counterpoint is that there is no rational or sane defense of Trump. The rest of the media criticized Biden plenty, arguably way too much in their attempts to be seen as neutral. Meanwhile there is almost nothing good about Trump. So if they write like 90% stories that seem to be against Trump it means they're biased towards Trump.
Almost regardless of political positions it's hard to argue Trump is fit or qualified to be president. He is openly corrupt, persuing an economic policy the vast majority of Conservative economists think is idiotic, and has called our veterans losers. Has never held any other government post has no knowledge of government policies and worse doesn't care to learn. Even though his ignorance is causing a lot of damage including to his voters he doesn't seem to care to learn about how any policy stuff works.
To counter that you need media like Fox or worse OAN/News Max to put out propaganda because it's impossible for even the most partisan person to defend him if they're an honest and thoughtful person
I invite you to spend an hour watching Fox News and then an hour listening to NPR and still claim those are just two sides of the same coin. The level of bias, propaganda, and active misinformation is so much greater on Fox News and it’s not even close. They’re not even pretending to factually report the news anymore. Every single piece is straight propaganda for the Republican Party. The best example of this difference is how mainstream media responded to Biden’s disastrous debate performance. The New York Times and CNN were covering it pretty blisteringly from the get go. There was no sugar coating it. Compare that to how Fox News spins the daily depravity of the Trump administration, and it speaks for itself
