As Old Media Dies ...
Alternative new media ecosystems rise
The final, agonic death rattle of Old Media was never going to be pretty. The impact of legacy institutions like MSNBC are now minimal compared to, say, a Tucker Carlson, a Ben Shapiro or even a meathead like Jake Paul. The Washington Post, which has lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers and esteemed columnists over their non-endorsement in 2024, announced the Third Newsroom initiative to help increase its reach “in a rapidly changing media landscape.” And just today, warhorse Jim Acosta announced he is leaving CNN, for now, to Instagram. A not insignificant event, wrought with hints of “obeying in advance” on the part of the network for exiling Acosta — a MAGA bête noir — to the broadcast Siberia of the midnight to 2am shift. In the end, however, does anyone really even care?
The zone, incidentally, is duly being flooded. It is a cynical strategy calculated to rasp — and disorient — the Establishment, who, according to the ascendant manosphere, are Democrat elites, wholly out of touch with the working class. Once upon a time the Democrats were the party of people making under $100,000 a year, but those have dealigned. So how is Old Media, never a working class profession now in freefall, coping with its increasingly obvious post-Election Day fragility? By seeking to absorb some of the new into its methodology (good luck with that). In the last few weeks, in two different Times podcasts, the Gray Lady interviewed two major players in the new tech libertarian media universe: Mark Andreesen (for Matter of Opinion) and neo-monarchist Curtis Yarvin. Ted Gioia of Honest Broker weighed in on the absorption of the new, while keeping intact its journalistic principles:
Times interviewer David Marchese pushed back aggressively—their dialogue soon resembled more a debate than an interview. The conversation was testy and in-your-face, and that made it fascinating to watch.
I’ve never seen this kind of rough-and-tumble journalism before from the New York Times. Sure, they’ve always known how to play hardball, but usually in subtle Ivy League-ish ways.
If they didn’t like you, you were just excluded from the country club. Mr. Yarvin would get turned away at the front door. But not anymore.
Now they’re inviting alternative voices into the boxing ring, rolling up their sleeves, and throwing punches.
You should expect more of this in the future. It will probably be the role model for people who want a “leftist version of Joe Rogan.”
Which is something one hears a lot of in Progressive circles nowadays. Can we have a leftist version of Joe Rogan? Can we have an alternative media ecosystem for Progressives? All solid questions, to be sure, particularly when you consider the fact that Democratic party leadership, after the fashion of Joe Biden, is showing marked signs of decline.
What about Congress? Yashar Ali made a great point on X.com today about the lack of vitality on the part of Democrat leadership in the legislative branch. He wrote: “The Democratic Party thinks it’s running against Bob Dole and Mitt Romney instead of Donald J. Trump and his MAGA coalition,” in reference to a bland tweet sent out by the party. And, we cannot fail to note, that the legislative branch is the only part of government (with the exception of some noble judges) where Progressives have any real impact in the face of the zone flooding. Incidentally, generational change on the Oversight Committee might actually have begun this Congress had Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez not been thwarted by the deft political maneuverings of Nancy Pelosi. What Pelosi has against Ocasio-Cortez eludes me entirely. So instead of AOC, House Democrats went with the Pelosi-backed Representative Gerry Connelly, a 74 year old with cancer. Seriously — what the fuck?
The Democrat Party appears to be moving at frontal cortex-speed, in the slow motion of a well-argued, logical and deliberate NYT Opinion piece. And as wonderful as such a thing as a NYT Op Ed once was, it no longer appears to have as much — if any — influence in the new digital media universe of bro podcasts and YouTube prank videos that now dominates. Our collective American media tastes have undergone a sea-change, in part because the inequalities in education were allowed to reach such a critical mass of algorithmic manipulation and in part because the youngs, who are the future, have organically absorbed and adopted the new media option, hook, like and sinker.
But consider the finger-wagging of the former class presidents, valedictorians and salutatorians at CNN and the Washington Post, decrying the now-President’s lawlessness(!). Think of all the hundreds of hours MSNBC and old liberal media organizations spent explaining in prime-time on the various (and quite righteous) investigations into Trump that came ultimately, entirely to naught! And in the evaporation of those charges — charges like his strange relationship with Putin; the top secret documents case; the Georgia election heist; January 6th — the network’s credibility fell and Trump’s outsider-ish projection of manly, raw survivalist instincts rose in the hearts and minds of persuadable and irregular voters. Such are the perils of moving at frontal cortex speed in an amygdala-influenced, testosteronal mirror-universe where only the rapid detection and elimination of threat is rewarded in the final arena. In the 2024 election, MAGA was (and still is) moving at the primordial speed of the lizard-brain, the part controlling our core impulses, like fight-or-flight and sex. And the reptile-brain, it must be noted, is more fundamental to masculinity than race, which would explain the numbers of Latino men under 40, particularly, but also to a far lesser degree, the African-American men that veered MAGA this election cycle. Pop Quiz: Guess which side is kicking which sides ass?
Bloomberg's Davey Alba, Leon Yin, Julia Love, Ashley Carman, Priyanjana Bengani, Rachael Dottle and Elena Mejía have done a fantastic job in this must-read article The Second Trump Presidency, Brought to you by YouTubers. The post combines data science and actually listening to hundreds of hours of the nine biggest influencers in this new masculine information hub game. The combination of science and experience grant these Bloomberg writers some fascinating insights into Trump’s victory, how he absorbed the mindshare of the audiences of nine of the biggest YouTube influencers — with audiences far bigger and more loyal than any most cable networks, magazines and newspapers — with little or no pushback from the Biden or, ultimately, even the Harris campaigns.
There is a lot of cross-pollination of guests in the YouTube mansophere ecosystem — as seen in the image above. The top guest by number of views across the Bloomberg network of manosphere YouTube influencers was Trump (no surprises there), who, it should be known, was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation against E. Jean Carroll. Trump is immediately followed by Andrew Tate, who happens to be under investigation by Romanian authorities for allegations of money laundering and trafficking in minors. Tucker Carlson was third. Fox News paid out $12 million to settle a former producer’s lawsuit alleging that the Tucker Carlson show was an abusive workplace. There’s a bit of a running theme going on here …
In this new amygdala-infused, testosteronal bizarroverse, the cruelty is casual. And the fear that communities of color are presently experiencing appears to be intentional. Trump and these “rebel radio” broadcasts of the manosphere seemed to be a natural fir. “On the shows, hosts connect to their audiences using humor and vice, and provide a framework for viewers on navigating their world, including their relationships with women, work and popular culture,” the Bloomberg article states. “They challenge institutions, reinforce old-fashioned gender roles and glorify men who appeared to have fallen out of favor with the public.” Sound familiar?
But Trump didn’t so much cobble together from scratch this YouTube influencer manosphere majority, as much as his campaign absorbed it from his defeated competitors in the gladiatorial fundament. From Vivek Ramaswamy; from RFK, Jr. When they — and others — endorsed Trump, TrumpWorld gained from some of the audiences that they had cultivated. As late as August 9, Joe Rogan said he wasn’t endorsing, but if he were to do so, it would probably be RFK. Jr. By the end of August, RFK, Jr had suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump. By mid-October, Trump appeared on Rogan in its most viral episode ever. His running mate Vance then made an appearance on Halloween, right before the election, sealing the deal. Neither Harris nor Walz appeared, though invited — a podcast with more than 500 million all time streams.
From the article:
Men, and particularly white men, have long made up Trump’s core support base. But in November’s election, young men swung especially hard to the right. More than half of men under 30 supported Trump, according to the AP VoteCast survey of more than 120,000 voters, though outgoing President Joe Biden won the group in 2020. Exit polls have shown that Trump received more support from young men than any Republican candidate in more than two decades.
“We definitely helped with the young male vote,” Kyle Forgeard, a member of the Nelk Boys, said in an interview. “On the podcast, we just speak our mind, try to be true to ourselves and say what we think.”
Above all, the broadcasters described American men as victims of a Democratic campaign to strip them of their power — a comforting message to a disspirited audience. These days, young men are lonelier than ever, with those aged 18 to 23 the least optimistic about their futures, and having the lowest levels of social support, according to Equimundo’s 2023 State of American Men report. Trump and his allies showed up for young men in the places where they were already spending their time — and supplied them with answers.
Trump is expected to continue prioritizing the broadcasters once the administration gets underway, treating them like an “alternative press corps,” said Aaron Ginn, CEO of AI infrastructure startup Hydra Host, and co-founder of the Foundation for American Innovation, a center-right think tank for conservatives in Silicon Valley.
At least trump is telegraphing what comes next. He is building an “alternative press corps,” while, I suspect, he simultaneously continues to wear away at the dying Old Media. In light of that admission, I would suggest that Progressive influencers seriously consider the promotion of other progressive influencers in the on going project of a media ecosystem to counteract Trump’s own “alternative press corps.”
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Finally — let’s look at Michigan, where Trump won the 2024 election over Kamala Harris with just under 100,000 votes. Michigan Dem Sen. Gary Peters is not running for reelection and rumors are swirling around former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigeig might fill the void. Buttigeig is a competent, ambitious and serious pol. But perhaps too serious for the age of digital media candidates. Does America still elect Student Body Presidents and Valedictorians? Or has Trump, our first Digital Media President, broken the wheel forever as to what type of candidate can win the popular vote nowadays. Are we now into heterosexual, white, Reality TV-show type candidates that speak in the cruel-casual MAGA shorthand to which we are becoming accustomed?
It will certainly be an interesting two years in the Wolverine state for Democrats, as the Governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General and the mayor of Detroit are also all up for grabs.
“One of the many first things President Trump did on his first day was muzzle communications from all thirteen divisions of the Department of Health and Human Services. The blanket order to shut down communication was so abrupt and so sweeping that researchers, scientists, medical personnel, federal public health officials, and their counterparts in state and local communities were literally in the midst of meetings when they were told to hang up their phones, or leave Zoom calls, or pack their briefcases and leave the room. No reason was given, leaving local public health officials baffled and worried, and federal researchers unsure of the status of funding for ongoing projects, or who they were supposed to call if, heaven forbid, a health emergency erupted that needed to be communicated to medical personnel and the American public. (Like: we currently have an escalating bird flu crisis in this country). The blackout memo was signed by acting HHS Secretary Dorothy Fink and stated that it would remain in effect until an ‘incoming Presidential appointee’ (that’s Bobby ‘Brainworms’ Kennedy to you and me) decided what to do. News of this insane, mystifying act was reported, but no journalist, as far as I know, has yet extracted or published an explanation from the new regime. On the contrary, reporters who cover national politics are too busy trying to keep up with the ‘flood the zone with shit’ strategy that Project 2025 promised, and which has now overloaded the neurons of people tasked with paying attention to daily blizzards of Trumpish commands, which range from wacky and pandering to cruel and consequential. Allow me to offer an educated guess.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“No one really knows what DeepSeek’s long-term game is. As you may know by now, DeepSeek was created by a 10-year-old Chinese quantitative hedge fund named High-Flyer; Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek’s CEO, is also a cofounder of the fund. High-Flyer developed AI algorithms for use in trading; in 2023, it started a lab to build AI tools unrelated to its core business. Over the next year or so, it made a series of technical innovations in building large language models. Its stated mission, as posted on its X profile, is to ‘Unravel the mystery of AGI with curiosity.’ The company has committed to open-sourcing its models, and has offered them to developers at very cheap prices. For the moment, DeepSeek doesn’t seem to have a business model to match its ambitions. For most big US AI labs, the (yet unrealized) business model is to develop the best service and to sell it at a profit. To date, DeepSeek has positioned itself as a kind of altruistic giveaway. That could change at any time. DeepSeek could introduce subscriptions, or place new restrictions on its developer APIs. Zvi Mowshowitz theorizes that the company could take user data and give it to the hedge fund for trading insights. And at some point, the Chinese government will have something to say about one of its companies trying to give away powerful AI to anyone who wants it, including China’s adversaries. In the meantime, though, we can only guess what DeepSeek’s ambitions are. And that worries me, because in some very real sense we don’t know what we’re dealing with here.” (Casey Newton/Platformer)
“In its apology to (Prince Harry), NGN, without admitting to any wrongdoing, called its post-phone hacking actions ‘regrettable’—an adroit way to characterize the monster cover-up alleged by Harry’s lawyer: the erasure of 30 million emails, destruction of back-up tapes, and false denials. Harry wants further police investigations, but there is no appetite for them. Lewis can finally sleep easy. In the end, the prodigious $12 million settlement is a rounding error for Rupert and the deal circumvented what would have been a courtroom shaming of Murdoch’s UK enterprise. Not that Rupert (Murdoch) himself, now chairman emeritus of his news empire, particularly cares. After the scandal of the 2013 phone hacking trial, he was socially persona non grata in London for a year, but that soon passed. In the grand era of ‘cancellation,’ Murdoch is too big to cancel. There was no rescinding of invitations to Sun Valley power conferences, where he could be seen riding around on his golf cart receiving obeisance from fellow billionaires. In the narrative of The Apprentice movie, it is Machiavellian fixer Roy Cohn who is depicted as Donald Trump’s role model for lying and getting away with it. But perhaps it’s Murdoch who has most perfected the art of normalizing amorality in the corridors of power. Like Trump, Rupert has always thought that virtue is for suckers. (His derogatory expression for any reporting about human rights abuses is ‘bleeding heart journalism.’)” (Tina Brown)