This is no right-wing takeover, it’s a media reset

The tech titans are at war with mainstream media.

A darkening storm is rolling over the landscape of the western media and liberal democracy itself. The great trusted sources of authority in news and information, the pillars of our very democratic way of life - the BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN - are being subverted and replaced by Donald Trump’s Big Tech and media acolytes.

Elon Musk is whipping up a frenzy about ancient stories of gang rapes in English cities and using it to call for the removal of the prime minister and even the overthrow of Nigel Farage from Reform. Mark Zuckerberg has announced he is abandoning Facebook’s conscientious efforts to block misinformation and disinformation on its platform, and will now let every right-wing nut and conspiracy theorist loose on an unsuspecting world. Jeff Bezos is transforming The Washington Post from the paper that exposed Watergate and brought down a Republican president into a mouthpiece for everything a Republican president wants before he even takes office.

Ann Telnaes, a cartoonist for the Post, captured the dire state of affairs brilliantly in an editorial cartoon last week, depicting Zuckerberg, her boss Bezos and other media chiefs presenting tribute at the feet of a statue of the imperious Trump. What more chilling proof could we have of the truth of her art than the fact that it was killed before publication by Bezos’s timorous editor, prompting her to resign from the paper?

“As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable,” she declared in a post-resignation statement on Substack. “For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, ‘Democracy dies in darkness’.”

"The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump," Ann Telnaes declared in a post-resignation statement on Substack.

Brava! As some courageous souls in the media have been warning for years, democracy itself is in peril. State-friendly media now control the public discussion. Dissent is marginalised or actively quashed.

What absolute rot. First, the recent shift in the stance of some media platforms and organisations represents only a small rollback of the hegemony exercised by the left’s voices over most of the English-speaking media. In the US especially, for decades it has been almost exclusively a handful of platforms owned by the proprietor of this newspaper that have been able to break through the phalanx of left-leaning papers and TV networks that have controlled most of the political and cultural narrative.

You doubt me? Perhaps you think that may once have been true but surely in the past few years the US media have become more heterogeneous? Well if you want to see what state-adjacent media actually looks like, take a look at what a great job the press did for the past four years covering for an increasingly senile Democratic president who was, as we are only now learning, steadily less capable of doing the job week by week.

And that “killed” Washington Post cartoon? Dozens of big news organisations (apparently strangely uncowed by fear of the incoming authoritarian regime) reported extensively on the cartoonist’s heroic self-immolation, publishing the picture itself hundreds of times across many platforms, and ensuring it reached more people by many multiples than any Washington Post cartoon has ever reached in history. That scarcely suggests dissent is being snuffed out in Trump’s America.

In any case a quick perusal of X, Facebook or the Post will prove that none of them is suppressing left-wing voices. A little rebalancing of the media, a little more variety in the choice of news and the way it’s reported, a little more representation of the views of at least half the population of this and other western countries might not be such a bad idea - and that’s what these tech and media honchos are promising. None of these resolutions represents even the slightest threat to the myriad voices that will continue to be heard loudly across the political theatre.

But second and more importantly, if it’s true - and it surely is - that we now live in a world in which alternative information, much of it of dubious reliability, is widely available and consumed by audiences, who is responsible for that?

The collapse in trust in the legacy media has been brought about not by unscrupulous and politically submissive tech villains undercutting the traditional news providers but by the traditional media themselves.

Here are a few articles of truth the trusted and authoritative media on which our democracy has relied for so long has brought us in the last decade: Trump colluded with Russia in order to get elected and as president was a de facto agent of Moscow; any suggestion that Covid may have escaped from a Chinese laboratory was a racist lie and needed to be suppressed; women can have penises and men can chestfeed babies; all white people are collectively guilty for the historic oppression of minorities; reports that Hunter Biden used his position as the son of the then US vice-president for his own lucrative and possibly criminal ends were the work of a Russian intelligence campaign; racist police officers across America have been murdering black people in vast numbers; thousands of indigenous Canadian children had been abducted by Catholic schools, suffered early deaths and were buried in mass graves.

These are not stories of marginal interest propagated by some fringe voices. They are just a few of the biggest and most resonant stories of their time, promulgated as unchallengeable truths. If you did dare challenge them you were labelled an agent of misinformation (or sometimes of an enemy power).

We do not now suddenly have a right-wing, state-controlled media. What we do have is certainly unhealthy for democracy - an infinitely expanding fog of information of uncertain provenance, with no trusted authority that can adjudicate for us its truth or validity. But as we try to feel our way through the miasma, let’s not forget who got us here.

The Times