“The Mainstream Media is Dead! Long Live the Mainstream Media!”

The old mainstream media is dying, and has been for years.

This has only become more apparent  in the weeks since Donald Trump was re-(s)elected. News that CNN is firing half their workforce, that MSNBC’s ratings continue to slump and is probably being sold, or that The Guardian is leaving X and in financial trouble are greeted with celebratory memes.

Newspaper readership has been dropping for decades, and television news channels struggle to drum up the audience of a moderately popular YouTube channel featuring cute cat videos set to quirky music.

And you know what? Great. That’s all good stuff.

CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian – all of them – they deserve to go under. Digital communication has allowed people to undermine and overthrow decades-old propaganda outlets.

But does that mean it’s over?  Is  Elon Musk actually correct when he reassuringly declares on X that “YOU are the media now”.

Well the answer to that depends on whether or not you think the same forces that spent untold resources constructing this system of information control are just going to give up and go home when it starts to fail.

I mean – does anyone seriously think they would?

You don’t think it ‘s rather more likely they’ll just regroup, re-calculate, and go again?

Remember – newspapers and TV channels are functionaries of the establishment, not the establishment itself.

For several centuries they have been crucial to the selling of ideas and agendas, but they are a voice not a brain. They’re just a tool of control. And tools can easily be swapped out.

One way or another, the internet has replaced television as the media now, just as television replaced radio and radio replaced print.

This is the Darwinian selection process that flows with the development of technology. And while each step of that path has in some ways led to the democratization of the media landscape, each step also saw those in power adjust their methods to the freer flow of information.

The “free internet” is just as vulnerable to money and influence of the “elite” as the “free press” was before it, only the tactics change.

In short, the mainstream media isn’t so much dying as evolving.

Today, if you want to a sell a story to the whole world you don’t need blaring red “Breaking News” banners on the ten o-clock news – you can fund an “independent podcaster” to interview a “whistleblower” on a set decorated to look impromptu and stripped down.

You pay YouTube to boost the video, or make a few short clips go viral.

When it’s popular enough, other youtubers and podcasters will start repeating it or posting “reaction videos”. It doesn’t even matter if they agree or disagree, either way you’ve set the parameters of the discussion.

Instead of full pages ads in the New York Times, NGOs, think-tanks and corporations can spend the same amount of money on a few thousand social media influencers.

After a certain point it’s self-propagating. People want the trickle down advertising revenue, and nobody wants to be left out. Bot-filled audiences will post “Please give us your take on [current thing]” in the comments of channels or pages who don’t take part, until they cave and join the throng to please their “audience”.

Not only is this a relatively cheap method of narrative control, it’s also one that few people have learned to be sceptical about as yet. Of the growing numbers of “media consumers” who have become sophisticated enough to take legacy media stories with a pinch of salt, most will be inclined to be more trusting of seemingly organic trends voiced by seemingly ordinary people.

But, of  course,  though we are conditioned to believe a trending hashtag has an inherent organic sincerity that the front page of the Washington Post lacks, this is not the case.

They can both equally be media marketing strategies.

Don’t forget most social media platforms are owned by the same handful of financiers and hedge funds that own CNN and The Guardian and Fox News and all the rest.

They are advertising clouds hosting as many or more bought and paid for voices as real people.

Propaganda is no longer a case of one authoritative voice speaking to a captive audience, but rather a bird-swarm of bot-noise creating a potentially very manipulative  and manipulated  impression of consensus.

Alongside that we have the rise of major and well-funded “independent voices” that are almost certainly anything but.

Let’s actually take a look at the “alternative media” landscape right now:

At the top end we have Tucker Carlson broadcasting on XLive to a far bigger audience than has watched Fox News for years.

We have Joe Rogan accepting $250million packages from huge media conglomerates to broadcast his show to millions of people.

We have Nigel Farage on GBNews – a channel that didn’t exist five years ago – already surpassing the audience of Sky News and the BBC.

We have Russell Brand and Candace Owens and Rory Stewart and perhaps dozens of other “former mainstream” voices podcasting away, giving us their “personal takes” from their deliberately informal looking studios.

We have the richest man in the world supposedly devoting his time to posting memes to own the libs.

What do words like  “alternative” and “indy” even mean any more when applied to people like this?

I believe it was David Icke who coined the term “mainstream alternative media” to describe this phenomenon, but that phrase may already have aged into inaccuracy.

After all, if they already have more viewers than CNN and more money than The Guardian, in what way are they any longer alternative?

Haven’t they, in fact, become the new mainstream?

And membership of this new mainstream is going to be just as exclusive as it was of old. You can be sure that none of us in the lower “alt” echelons need apply!

They say “the medium is the message”, but they are wrong. The message is the message, the medium is just the medium. The delicious sugar coating that makes the blue pill so easy to swallow. Tucker Carlson can be paid to lie to you just as easily on Twitter as on MSNBC or Fox. Trending hashtags are just a new way to propagandize your brain that you haven’t quite caught on to yet.

The mainstream media is dead! Long live the mainstream media!