Mo Better When We Blue
The press didn’t learn from 2016, says a phrase we heard often throughout this past election cycle. That observation aims the lens in the wrong direction though. We the people didn’t learn about our media. That’s the tragic failure we’re suffering. We witnessed all the same forces behave almost identically and then, perhaps because we had noted their previous flaws, we somehow anticipated a difference. That’s not how change is achieved. Name and shame is rarely an effective strategy, and certainly had no chance of impacting our media in the aggregate. Our inaction allowed enemy propagandizing momentum to increase in power.
I’m participating in the great twitter migration, one of millions reestablishing a network of follows in the bluer skies of Bluesky. This act is providing all my mutuals a feeling of real change. We’ve abandoned the obnoxious abuse Musk engineered his platform to become, and gifting ourselves a fresh, coherent, nearly unpolluted conversation on the state of the world. This may be a good example of learning a lesson, taking real action to achieve a better result. It may also still be defeated. Bluesky is owned by some Crypto bros that could easily sell their interests to Elon or attempt to become like him, steer us back toward the hellish noise of what we now refer to as that other place. But for now we’ve freed our minds and discourse, and changed the momentum.
Additionally, I’m part of another media migration that may also be significant in size, but unlike with Bluesky there are no new account creation counts to illustrate. I’ve stopped consuming all corporate media that normalized the orange creature. My muted television plays sports all day, while my Sonos plays music. I try to never click on a NYT or WaPo link or touch any billionaire owned platform. I used to monitor all of these sources with intent to battle their propagandizing influence. Now I’ve decided my pushback was less impactful than a piss in the ocean and the effort was only damaging my sanity. My heightened awareness of their mendacity served no end. Sure it was fun to laugh at the New York Time Pitchbot on twitter, but the old grey lady never seemed even aware of being mocked.
I still consume news, but do so selectively, seeking independent voices who are research based, academic, committed to journalistic principles.
Now I have no way yet of knowing whether my small actions align with thousands or even millions, but I am hearing cable news ratings and corporate media clicks have fallen substantially. It’s too early to tell whether this is just a post-election lull or a real force of change, but we should hope for the latter. We should hope bluer skies extend beyond social media to a bright, crisp, sunnier paid media with journalistic value and integrity.
We need to learn from 2016 and 2024. We the people lost our minds in the mind-war. Disinformation programmed us to elevate our enemies and undermine our futures, enrich the kleptocrats and subvert our civil rights. That republic, we failed to keep it. These are information war times and the battles lost in our information spaces become the loss of everything.