If this was 1990 — when TV news was four networks and most cities had a center-center-left newspaper and a center-right-center one — I might write a piece called “Media Gatekeepers Have Too Much Power”. There would have been a bunch of correct points in that piece. It was weird to have a few powerful people at a handful of gigantic news outlets shaping our national dialogue. Even a small amount of bias from powerful figures like Dan Rather or Arthur Sulzberger had huge impacts. Nobody elected these people, commerce was inevitably part of every decision they made, and it was hard to even know what ideological alternatives existed because the available viewpoints were basically this:
If I had written that article in 1990, where would I have published it? The internet back then was a guy at Stanford exchanging Uhura-based erotic fiction with a guy from MIT. Cable TV was Green Acres reruns and kids getting slimed for minor grammatical infractions. I would have had to type the article in WordStar, print it out on a goddamned dot matrix printer, and then stand in front of Ace Hardware passing out copies. People would have thought “What a nut”, and they’d be right: A guy distributing a self-published article in front of a hardware store is basically handing out a flier that says “BREAKING: I Am Going Through Some Stuff”.
Today is very different from 1990. Independent sources have eclipsed legacy media. The AP recently ran an article about how podcasts, social media accounts, and digital news sites have boosted left-wing “anti-establishment” candidates like Zohran Mamdani, Graham Platner, and Abdul El-Sayed. The article tracks how a media ecosystem that started with The Young Turks and Chapo Trap House became Breaking Points, More Perfect Union, Drop Site News, and Hasan Piker. This is, of course, the mirror image of what happened on the right, where the split with mainstream media started in the ‘90s and now exists in the form of Breitbart, Newsmax, Tucker Carlson, and others. If you want hard data about how our news comes less from capital-“e” Establishment figures and more from capital-“r”-and-”j” Random Jagweeds, here you go. But did you really need the data? We all know that many people — especially young people — get their news from some shit called Hollow Point Truth with Déjändricôn Orgasmica, which airs exclusively on an app that you’ve never heard of.
