Category: Media

Who’s Promoting A Civil War? The Media.

We Need a New Media System
If you sell culture war all day, don’t be surprised by the real-world consequences

The moment a group of people stormed the Capitol building last Wednesday, news companies began the process of sorting and commoditizing information that long ago became standard in American media.

Media firms work backward. They first ask, “How does our target demographic want to understand what’s just unfolded?” Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to emphasize.

It’s why Fox News uses the term, “Pro-Trump protesters,” while New York and The Atlantic use “Insurrectionists.” It’s why conservative media today is stressing how Apple, Google, and Amazon shut down the “Free Speech” platform Parler over the weekend, while mainstream outlets are emphasizing a new round of potentially armed protests reportedly planned for January 19th or 20th.

What happened last Wednesday was the apotheosis of the Hate Inc. era, when this audience-first model became the primary means of communicating facts to the population. For a hundred reasons dating back to the mid-eighties, from the advent of the Internet to the development of the 24-hour news cycle to the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the Fox-led discovery that news can be sold as character-driven, episodic TV in the manner of soap operas, the concept of a “Just the facts” newscast designed to be consumed by everyone died out.

News companies now clean world events like whalers, using every part of the animal, funneling different facts to different consumers based upon calculations about what will bring back the biggest engagement kick. The Migrant Caravan? Fox slices off comments from a Homeland Security official describing most of the border-crossers as single adults coming for “economic reasons.” The New York Times counters by running a story about how the caravan was deployed as a political issue by a Trump White House staring at poor results in midterm elections.

Repeat this info-sifting process a few billion times and this is how we became, as none other than Mitch McConnell put it last week, a country:

Drifting apart into two separate tribes, with a separate set of facts and separate realities, with nothing in common except our hostility towards each other and mistrust for the few national institutions that we all still share.

The flaw in the system is that even the biggest news companies now operate under the assumption that at least half their potential audience isn’t listening. This leads to all sorts of problems, and the fact that the easiest way to keep your own demographic is to feed it negative stories about others is only the most obvious. On all sides, we now lean into inflammatory caricatures, because the financial incentives encourage it.

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Missouri Media Blaming Gun Laws For Violence

Everywhere you go, you tend to find violence exploding in this country, The violence surge isn’t isolated to one or two places; just about every major city has seen an increase. Almost no one is reporting a reduction in violence over the year, and that’s despite months of people being locked down in their homes. That suggests that when they got out, they made up for lost time.

In Missouri, they’re having the same problem as most everywhere else. That’s not surprising. St. Louis, for example, is a city that’s been plagued by violence in recent years.

Yet, it seems that once again, the media has to trip over themselves to lay at least some of the blame on gun rights.

To understand the full scope of gun violence across the state, The Kansas City Star interviewed experts, gathered information about dozens of shooting victims from families and obituaries, and analyzed data from police and the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks gun incidents across the country. Because no complete official record exists, the numbers are preliminary, sourced from thousands of media outlets and public agencies.

The effort was undertaken as part of the Missouri Gun Violence Project, a two-year, statewide solutions journalism collaboration supported by the nonprofits Report for America and the Missouri Foundation for Health. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has also been a part of the collaboration.

In an extraordinary year, the people across the state grappling with violence — criminologists, health care professionals, violence interrupters, law enforcement officials — say the coronavirus pandemic’s disruptions aggravated gun violence, putting individuals more at risk and hampering prevention efforts.

But even before the pandemic, Missouri was primed to see worse violence after more than a decade of rolling back gun restrictions and a longstanding lack of trust between police and the most at-risk communities in the state’s largest cities.

Yet the publication acknowledges that the violence in Missouri is primarily driven by St. Louis and Kansas City, their two largest municipalities.

The problem I have is that if gun laws were the problem, then why wasn’t the problem more spread out? Why wasn’t it a problem for much smaller communities? These towns were under the authority of the exact same gun laws, after all. If the gun laws were responsible, then you’d think you’d see an uptick in violence across the board.

Before 2020, you didn’t.

In 2020, most people did acknowledge that the pandemic played some kind of role in the increased violence. It would be impossible not to acknowledge that fact simply because it’s right in front of our eyes.

But elsewhere, we didn’t see the problems being associated with gun laws anywhere else until the pandemic. If lax gun laws are the culprit, then we should see an increase across the board, and we simply don’t.

What that tells me is that it’s not the gun laws that are the problem. Again, if they were, the problems would be everywhere and they’re simply not. No, the problems reside somewhere in the cities themselves.

Yet the media prefers to scapegoat gun rights and gun ownership because it’s convenient and their readers lap it up. Heaven forbid they ever try to look a little deeper at the issue.

Unfortunately, it’s 8 bucks a month if you want the ability to upload videos.

Gab Launches YouTube Alternative Gab TV

Gab, that is known as an alternative and free speech social network, has decided to make a foray into video sharing.

CEO Andrew Torba says the goal of the new platform is to represent new media that belongs to their independent creators and users, with free speech as the center.

The decision to launch GabTV comes amid what is referred to as the tyranny of Big Tech but also of legacy, corporate media whose censorship is aimed at promoting those behind them and suppressing all other voices.

NBC Edits Video of Restaurant Owner Exposing NBC Comedy’s Catering.

Over the weekend, a video of Angela Marsden, the owner of the Pineapple Hill Saloon & Grill of Los Angeles, protesting the city shutting down outdoor dining with no scientific basis went viral. The video showed Marsden’s emotional plea for help as she exposed how a similar set of tents and tables were set up in the same parking lot to cater a film production approved by the city.

Only part of Marsden’s comments made it onto NBC’s Sunday Today. But reporter Meagan Fitzgerald deceptively edited out Marsden pointing to the hypocrisy with the tents and tables. Worse yet, NBC covered up the fact that the catering was for NBC’s comedy show, Good Girls.