Websites, radio stations, podcasts, and so forth ought to be stood up by party members with access to money—the Harris campaign and associated groups, by the way, spent about $5 billion losing this election—particularly if they can replace genuine local news that has been gutted by private equity and Facebook, or if they are centered on subjects typically neglected by liberals like sports or gaming. The core strategy is to set up publications with progressive views but likely to have broader appeal. Honest partisanship should be the standard, rather than a pretend above-it-all “objective journalism” that in practice means bending reality completely beyond recognition to benefit Donald Trump.
They were always corporate and in the tank for conservatives.
I just want to emphasize that to set up a truly independent and unpaywalled piece of media, you probably need to abandon hope of it being even a viable side hustle. Quasi-independent media on, say, YouTube or Substack can make some money, but you’re then stuck on those corporate platforms. If you want to do your own website or podcast or whatever, that’s more independent, but you’re still dependent on Google if you run ads, or on Patreon if you do that sort of thing. The lesson of Twitter should make pretty clear the danger inherent to that ecosystem. Even podcasts that seem independent can easily get into huge trouble if, say, Musk were to buy Patreon or iHeart.
I’ve been writing on my website for over two years now. My goal has always been to be completely independent of these kinds of platforms for the long term, no matter what, and the site’s popularity has frankly exceeded my wildest dreams. For example, I’m the #1 google result for “anticapitalist tech:”
But I make no money. If I wanted this to be anything but a hobby, I’d have to sacrifice something that I think makes it valuable: I’d have to paywall something, or run ads, or have a paid discord server, or restrict the RSS feed. As things stand now, I don’t know my exact conversion rate because I don’t do any analytics and delete all web logs after a week, but I did keep the web logs from the most recent time that I went viral (top of hackernews and several big subreddits). I made something like 100 USD in tips, even though the web logs have millions of unique IPs. That’s a conversion rate of something like 0.00002 USD per unique visitor.
Honestly, if I got paid even $15/hr, I would probably switch to doing it at least as a part time job, because I love it. Compare that to the right wing ecosystem, where there’s fracking money and Thiel money just sloshing around, and it’s very very obvious why Democrats are fucked, much less an actual, meaningful left. Even Thiel himself was a right wing weirdo before he was a tech investor, and a right wing think tank funded his anti-DEI book. He then went on to fund Vance. It’s really hard to fight that propaganda machine part time.
You can always add a donate button without paywalling anything. There’s nothing wrong with having one at the end of each post. It’ll only push users away if you make it flashy or sticky.
Label it “buy me a coffee” and it signals it’s more of a tip than an attempt to monetize.
This is a major issue.
X is Elon Musk.
Facebook/Meta/Instagram is Zuckerberg.
Washington Post is Bezos.
LA Times is Patrick Soon-Shiong, a billionaire who is deeply tied into the tech world’s startup culture.
Reddit is … Reddit.
When we are talking about the missing 10-million votes for Kamala, it starts with media. The media wasn’t on our side this time around, and it showed. It was impossible to get Kamala’s messaging out, and Trump’s messaging always got screentime. It wasn’t an accident.
To rebuild means getting solid news sources, solid online / social networks. It was no accident that the Elon Musk loving Cryptobro billionaires in charge of tech-companies, social media, and (now) are so rich that they’ve bought our old News Institutions.
This is where we start rebuilding. Lemmy.world is a small piece of it but it needs to be bigger. We absolutely need an independent location to organize online and counter-program the public.
Local news in the US is all owned by Sinclair.
The propaganda machine started running 12 years ago, and nobody stopped it. Nothing to stop it for another 4 years either.
It started a lot longer ago than that, with the likes of Fox “News” and Rush Limbaugh. It’s been getting worse the whole time.
Those are national and syndicated.
Unfortunately, places like Instagram, X, and Facebook are where all the late-deciders get their political messages from. My wife completely non-political because she didn’t grow up in a democracy and she is constantly surprised and in disbelief when i mention what Trump is up to. She’s used to periodic meme’s about Biden causing inflation and her general takeaway is “Trump is good for economy” even though she knows he is a horrible person who cannot be taken for his word on anything… almost purely thanks to me. Sometimes she thinks I’m the one that has gone extreme and am just talking crazy until I bring the receipts.
At work, she speaks to a lot of customers who are mostly the same. If they get mobilized to vote…they are doing so off similar information avenues.
So i think we should be careful about building ALL our information around sources that are essentially preaching to the choir, and make sure to still actively post to other media even if its not the main/trusted source so it’s not just a firehose of unchecked Republican talking points.
Elon Musk will never let leftist memes rise in popularity in X/Twitter ever again.
And I’m convinced that Gaza/Free Palestine was a TikTok disinformation campaign designed to tear Democrats/leftists apart.
We cannot trust any media. Indeed, we must assume they are working against us.
Building new, mainstream media, that allows our viewpoints to be heard is step#1. Do not rely on Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, Threads, BlueSky, WashPo, local newspapers, local Sinclair news, LA Times.
We got like, TheAtlantic, The guardian and maybe PBS Frontline. Not exactly a powerful set of media to spread out viewpoints but it’s a start.
Lemmy.world and Mastodon seem like they are okay. But as noncorporate entities they will never be mainstream.
It’s easy to feel like X is just a fascist wasteland, but guys Medhi Hasan still frequently reach millions of people. Even if we’re yelling into the firehose of BS the reach is still orders of magnitude higher than platforms like this. I still prefer here much greater, but we aren’t the ones that need to hear this stuff.
We will not win the meme war when Elon Musk can silence our memes and outreach on Twitter through algorithmic manipulation.
It’s just like how Ukrainians keep getting censored on Twitter. It’s simply not a fair fight, the owner and algorithms are literally against you, and you likely have teams of internal Twitter programmers being commanded to tailor make algorithms to fight us.
We need social media we can trust. Lemmy is one of them but is too small. But we are somewhat safe here.
The goal is not to win, but to simply make it clear that counter-arguments and opposition do exist so people are not as quick to take those posts as established fact and make up their minds based on poor information.
And you think you can do that when your opponent literally controls the outreach of your messages?
There is a +Elon Musk boost to Elons messages on Twitter. Furthermore, all the pro-Ukrainian posts systematically become NSFW and hidden from the timeline. Even when it is totally safe to view (like cute cat videos being shared by Ukrainian soldiers).
How the fuck do you get your message out on Twitter when Twitter specifically is being used to suppress your message?
Do what? Reach more people than we would if we stick purely to our little safe spaces?
Yes. It’s trivially provable:
10M views:
https://x.com/tayrilivia/status/1854207409717428564
16M views:
https://x.com/RoseSensu/status/1854215333243949203
94M views:
https://x.com/BarackObama/status/1854284022731669530
Etc. Etc.
Those 2 posts have probably gotten more views than everything you and I have ever posted online combined.
Again, it’s not about being louder than Elon Musk and whatever bullshit shenanigans, it’s just about not 100% conceding the information spaces like because they aren’t fair. Nothing is going to be fair for the next 4 years, but that doesn’t mean we give up.
NPR Morning Edition is my jam. Tells the truth, still leaves me with enough hope to go on. And PBS News in the evening.
Of course they’ll probably lose funding because the Wrong Wing sees them as a threat… Fortunately they mostly operate on individual donations, so I’ll keep sending my little bit in monthly.
You’re telling me that the billionaire owned media didn’t want people to know she had a plan to tax billionaires?
meh… I think we need to start firebombing their residences. Then when we’re all in Prison we start crazy orgies so the churches will want to shut them down because they’re spawning grounds for demons. Once we’re out, start firebombing again.
It’s so nuts it just might work.
When a WB executive flat out said they bought CNN to turn it into Faux News for “moderate” Dems, it was time.
When all those CNN journalists resigned over the changes, it was time.
It’s still time now, and it’ll be time next week too.
It’s just fucking frustrating to see people “realize” this over and over for years and act like because they just figured it out, no one else has.
Yep, I stopped watching MSNBC over Net Neutrality. Despite being a huge issue for months it was completely ignored. It could not have been more obvious that Comcast would not allow any coverage of the issue.
I’ve been saying this for years.
why is it that there’s no liberal media distribution network? take a look at free streaming services for example like plutotv. last I checked there were 4 or 5 right wing free propaganda networks right there available to anyone with a stream stick, smart tv, or internet browser. know how many I saw for left wing viewers? one. and it’s production quality is night and day to the other side, as in the right wing nets were the day and the left wing one was somewhere above a good cable access show.
there are many liberal minded people who go on these “friendly” cable news shows and complain endlessly about fox, and outlets like the daily wire, oan, newsmax, and content creators on the various streaming outlets. but you know what my major fucking issue is with those people?
THEY ALL HAVE THE MONEY TO COUNTER ALL OF THIS. MANY OF THESE PEOPLE ALSO HAVE THE MEDIA EXPERIENCE TO MAKE IT WORK.
I’m sorry, but I am sick and goddamned fucking tired of a bunch of liberal elitists who go around removed to everyone who will listen about how bad democratic messaging and talking point distribution is and refuse to lift a fucking finger to do something about it. in my mind they are as culpable of the right wing disinformation era we’re in right now just as much as those who spread it. until they themselves do something about it they are dead in me. get out and do some work yourself or just shut the fuck up since that’s essentially what you have been doing.
and don’t talk to me about air america radio. the idea was sound but executed extremely poorly if you call that execution at all. at the start of the network, run by not-radio people, it had more writers on staff than they did on air talent, including the people who read the news at the top and bottom of the hour. it was a venture doomed to failure because the people who owned and ran it had no idea what they were doing.
so because the people who know how to or know the people who know how to get the message out in a 24/7 manner chose to literally not put their money where their mouths were, we will descend into right wing religious race based fascism. but don’t worry. they’ll still advocate for us on that famously well known liberal media from the comfort of their homes in their gated communities.
why is it that there’s no liberal media distribution network
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Things like Fox are backed by billionaires who don’t care what it costs or if it’s profitable. They are ideologically driven like no one else. So ad free radio, whatever. Listening to mainstream is excruciating because they have so many god damn ads.
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Left media is simply not as good. Right wing will lie straight out and propagandize everything they can. They don’t care. Left wing media is beholden to the truth. They can try to copy some of the sensationalization but it doesn’t hit nearly as hard, it’s just reacting to the right wing nutso because they can’t make their own nutso.
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Hate and anger are easy emotions. The right wing media loves this. On the left side you have to think and analyze issues which is much harder.
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Get an American to do something? My fat arse. Good luck with that, y’all–I tried it.
No just Democrats but also democrats.
