BYLINE SUPPLEMENT — Dangerous Media
My report today in Byline Supplement ‘Trump’s Media Enablers’ warns of social and legacy media’s continuous acceleration of autocracy
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The result of the all-nighter I pulled in Joshua Tree on Friday to write an investigation for Byline while stargazing landed today.
Here is that story:
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Here is an excerpt:
Driving to Joshua Tree, California, after seeing the world premiere of Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy at the Palm Springs Film Festival, I see a billboard advertising the extremist pro-Trump newspaper Epoch Times as being ‘#1 Trusted News’.
That ain’t true.
My mind was still processing how Bad Faith exposes the methodical and well-funded decades’ long plot to turn apolitical religious non-voters into weapons of mass democratic destruction. They did it by deploying a well-oiled and well-funded media machine of lies. These lies were deployed in churches, on AM radio, and fertilised in journalism deserts throughout the US. When I see that Epoch Times ad — with its churchy looking avatar of a pious young man, I wince. I also see what they don’t advertise — a dark-money base, which includes far-right religious extremists and conspiracy peddlers Falun Gong and US Christian nationalists.
Journalism Deserts
I think back to the time I was driving through another desert during the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was literally in the middle of nowhere on my way to Death Valley, and I stopped at a rare open restaurant — hungry from the long drive.
I walked into an outer limits hot dog joint and there was a jumbo TV screen playing Newsmax. The extremist propaganda channel’s anchor was spewing election interference lies, the kind that Fox News and Rupert Murdoch had to write out a near-billion dollar check over. My stomach growling, I walked out.
As my colleague Matt Bernardini reported, “more than 50 countries, and half the planet’s population, are set to elect leaders who will set the tone for the rest of the decade. With authoritarianism on the rise, and the climate crisis nearly at a boiling point, there couldn’t be more at stake.”
Obeying in Advance
But in the US, it’s business as usual — with legacy media calling the Biden-Trump horse race rather than continuous coverage of democracy’s five-alarm fire and the rolling insurrection of a GOP captured by Putin.
It would appear that legacy media is thinking more about self-preservation than about democracy preservation.
I documented the extensive losses of journalism in my report ‘Unmusked — How Elon Musk Is Using Twitter to Destroy the Concept of Truth’, which showed how authoritarians destroy media freedoms.
In the US, we appear to be obeying in advance.
Eight years after the assault on our election, Shadow Network author Anne Nelson — whose book the Bad Faith film is based on — said our weakest spot is still the Internet.
“I call it the porous frontier,” she told Byline Supplement. “We have been invaded by hostile interests. And nobody’s been defending the frontier. The United States electorate is being played.”
“It’s absolutely insane that we allow hostile dictatorships direct access to our citizens,” environmental activist Wes Clark Jr. told Byline Supplement.
“Going into the 2024 election cycle, you have to have a bird’s eye view,” said Italian disinformation researcher Livia Ponzio, who infiltrated a QAnon group in 2020 and said it was run like a military operation. “In this atomized conspiracy theory landscape used as a military weapon they are targeting very young people politically active in the Middle East conflict, they’re targeting people in the gaming community. It’s also becoming much more sophisticated.”
“We don’t have to play their game,” said Ponzio. “Don’t get lost in this sense of endless outrage — disinformation stunts are put in our social and legacy media all the time. It happens in America every day, and it happens in Italy and Europe, less frequently in Europe, but to win this, we don’t have to play by their rules. Truth is a very rare currency — sharp truths — are a very rare currency on social and legacy media going towards the 2024 elections. We have to be sharp and smart — we have to meet the moment.”
“We may lose our way of living for ourselves and our future generations,” she said. “Just like my grandfather fought to liberate Italy from fascism, now is our time. We have to believe deeply that our individual voice counts. We need to meet this moment together.”
“The autocrats are afraid of us. They wouldn’t invest this much money if they weren’t afraid of us.”
We will be hearing more from Ponzio in just a few minutes as she joins Bette’s Speakeasy zoom salon.
Thank you as always for your generous support of my work.
Onward and upward.
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