Sultan Knish
There have been suggestions floating around that some of the bigger
donors should buy a newspaper, a television network or a women's
magazine to counter the media's grip. There was a time when a powerful
media outlet could be bought or created by conservative owners and
function and wield influence over national policy. Time Magazine in the
Luce era is one example. But that was when the media was a patchwork of
publications and radio stations where powerful owners often set the
tone.
Today the media is more of an integrated beast that is mostly localized
on the internet. It's a giant echo chamber for talking points developed
by left-wing think tanks and memes popularized by social media mobs.
NBC News these days is less relevant than Buzzfeed. You could buy NBC
News, but then what would you have? A white elephant operation whose
dwindling viewers are older and either share its biases or don't care.
If it shifted to the right, it would have exactly the same image as FOX
does, no matter what its standard of programming was. If it tried to be
genuinely non-partisan, there would be the difficult task of finding
staff who are honestly non-partisan. And its image would constantly be
under attack by the left every time it dissented on a major story.
Imagine if Donald Trump bought the New York Times. The New York Times
doesn't derive its influence from the quality of its content, but from
the quantity and scope of it. That quantity and scope seem dizzying to
those who don't know any better, much like Thomas Friedman's familiar
mentions of three countries and their airports in one paragraph makes
him seem like a man of the world who must know what he's talking about
because he has been to so many countries.
The New York Times influences other papers and outlets to adopt its tone
on a variety of topics from musicals to foreign affairs. That makes
them, in current ad jargon, Thought Leaders, which is just as Orwellian
as it sounds. That cements the Times' place in the culture. But it's a
position that would vanish in a second if Donald Trump took over and
began influencing content. All that would be left is an expensive and
unprofitable white elephant without any of the influence.
What we think of as the mainstream media is an integrated whole. It's
not really a series of outlets, but a culture of left-wing activists and
more mainstream liberal reporters and pundits who provide content to
those outlets. Buying one of the outlets would punch a hole in their
content network, but only a partial hole because the outlet would still
likely be reliant on wire services and would mostly cover the same
stories that are driven by that same network, but occasionally from a
conservative angle. It would essentially be another FOX News.
The content distribution network would reform around it, shut it out, as
it has shut out FOX News, though many of its members would still work
for it, and continue driving the tone and content of the media's
coverage of any issue. And it's the content network and its culture that
is the real enemy.
This isn't just true of official news outlets, but any tastemaker
outlets, such as women's magazines, which would once again be shut out,
ridiculed and marginalized as the media culture works to wipe out the
credibility of rival opinion-makers and the cool of rival tastemakers.
And since both news and fashion depend on consensus, trying to challenge
it with a single outlet will only make a limited difference. It will
have an impact. FOX News certainly has. But that impact will be limited,
unless, like talk radio, it becomes a culture of content creators
creating a consensus across different outlets.
What we are battling is a consensus creation machine. That machine spews
out news stories and memes always making sure to integrate the
consensus into as much of its coverage as it can. That way the latest
consensus on gun violence can be rolled out everywhere from snarky blogs
to drive time news to network news to magazines and sites catering to
women, car owners and science fans.
Each group will have the consensus targeted to their demographic. NBC
News will talk about the dangers of school shootings. Blogs will
describe gun owners as psychopaths. A site aimed at women will talk
about how often abusive husbands shoot their wives. The science site
will discuss the latest technology for gun locks thought up by a 9th
grader from San Francisco. Most of you have already seen this consensus
manufacturing and distribution machine in action.
The good news is that the internet has allowed the right to develop its
own form of consensus distribution. The problem is that it's mainly
ideological. Conservative news sites and blogs create and pass along a
consensus, sometimes right and sometimes wrong, but it doesn't tend to
go any higher up the ladder than FOX News or Talk Radio. Buying a major
outlet would give it another place to go, but it wouldn't fundamentally
change the uneven balance in the media culture war.
The Breitbart approach of directly attacking the consensus by creating
stories that the media is forced to acknowledge, thereby shaking its
consensus, is invigorating. But the left's success has largely come from
the creation of a media consensus culture. Challenging it is not
impossible, but it will take a lot of work over a long period of time,
rather than a quick fix solution.
Buying an old media outlet, like a magazine, a newspaper or a news
network is a poor value. These outlets have an aging readership and a
white elephant infrastructure. Their only truly valuable part is their
brand. And the brand will begin taking a vicious beating the moment it
drops out of the left's consensus network. The brand does have value.
Newsweek in conservative hands would have been a useful weapon, but not a
consensus-killer.
The consensus is a swarm, it's a mob. Fighting it with one outlet is
like trying to fight off bees with a baseball bat. Some bees will be
swatted and you'll be stung and the outcome will depend on whether you
can absorb more venom than you can kill bees. It makes for a nice last
stand, but not much else.
Countering one consensus with another is a problem that requires crowd
solutions. And they already exist. The conservative consensus of social
media, blogs and news sites is the talk radio of the net. Conservative
news sites already distribute that content, and while they could use
better designs, the basis structure of the consensus is in place. The
next step is to begin expanding the consensus into the non-political
sphere to target not just low-information voters, but people that are
not strongly political.
Buying a woman's magazine is of limited use now. Communities of
interlinked conservative fashion bloggers whose content is indexed and
collected by professional front end sites can have the same result at a
fraction of the price and while turning a profit. Apply the same
approach to everything from science, Latino, local and car sites, and
you suddenly have something that is becoming a match for the mainstream
media and its culture of consensus. And all this can be done at a
fraction of the cost of buying Cosmo or NBC News or the New York Times.
We aren't fighting media outlets, we're fighting people. You can't fight
people with money. You can only fight them with people. And the people
are here. We just have to use them.
The Romney Campaign's big mistake was relying on big dumb sledgehammer
media tactics, spending more money to do less, while neglecting the
people on the ground. If the Republican Party is to compete, then it has
to learn from that at every level. Think small. Look at the individual.
Bring together committed individuals into organizations where they
cooperate and make things happen, instead of viewing them as piggy banks
for end of the year donations. That is what made the Tea Party work. It
is the only thing that has any hope of revitalizing the Republican
Party and the right.
A culture war is a shouting match. It's not so much a war of ideas as a
war of slogans that are embedded in everything. The left has too much
top-down control to be directly beaten at that level. It can be
challenged and occasionally humiliated, as Breitbart had done, but it
still remains in place. If the left is going to be beaten, it will be
from the bottom up by empowering the people who want to fight, rather
than just building more expensive operations while ignoring the ground
game.
Conservatism will only win out by empowering committed people and giving
them the tools to organize in various ways and on various levels to
challenge the consensus. It is the organization part that is most
important and it is the place where the establishment can do the most
good by providing the framework and the tools to package individual
contributions into a professional group package.
Creating an alternative media is as simple as channeling the
conservative consensus into segmented professional outlets through
brand-creation, web design and a certain degree of start-up funding,
much of which can be supplemented by advertising for successful sites.
These sites need not be and should not be competitors for existing
political sites, rather they would be general topic sites that would
target specific demographics, with relevant content for their group,
whether it's video gamers or people looking for reality show coverage,
while also embedding a certain political worldview.
Rather than trying to compete with a single major outlet or with a
hundred conservative political outlets all targeted at the same base,
the goal would be to expand that base and influence opinions across a
wider range. It would be easiest to start with those groups that are
already leaning our way, for example young white men and women, and
expand an existing lean into a consensus. Similar efforts should be made
with Chinese-Americans and Indian-Americans, two groups that came out
big for Democrats and whose population share is growing, but whose
interests lie with us.
All this is feasible. It's just a matter of shifting from frustrated
attacks against mainstream media to becoming the mainstream media. The
licenses and print distribution networks that make the media so powerful
and that account for much of its sunk cost are becoming less relevant
in the age of the mobile internet readership. All that's left are brands
supported by an integrated content distribution consensus. And brands
are based on content and can be challenged with content. The content
exists, so does the talent, all that is needed is to package and channel
it into our own media.
Note: This is the first of two stories to examine the New York Times' coverage of the Muslim Brotherhood.
