I am a Democratic legislator in Vermont and we are constantly being told to use Facebook etc to promote ourselves in the next campaign. How can we maintain our values by rejecting these platforms and still be able to reach voters and get re-elected?
"The future of media is smaller, independent outlets fueled by creators you know and trust — journalists and writers who aren’t owned by a billionaire, don’t have a corporate parent nervous about angering Trump, and aren’t going to soften their coverage to smooth a regulatory approval."
Don't get me wrong -- I think it is a good idea to try to build small-scale media outlets such as Message Box by pointing to the vulnerabilities of corporate media. At the same time, this is dangerously incomplete political analysis.
We are unlikely to rebuild the health of American democracy without media reform that includes larger-scale outlets. And that may take a "whole systems" approach that includes Democrats developing a strategy for supporting the growth of larger-scale media outlets that are less vulnerable to authoritarian takeover.
And where Democrats do have political power, they arguably need to prioritize supporting journalistic independence, such as through antitrust, tax and even education policies. This would ideally happen at the federal level, but blue states can also take meaningful steps (particularly if they start to collaborate).
It's no accident that other advanced democracies have stronger independent media than the US. Their political class didn't just leave it to the "magic of the market."
And there are state Attorneys General now contemplating antitrust litigation to either stop, modify, or constrain the Paramount-Warner Bros deal. CA is farthest along with its investigation. There are myriad reasons for objecting: streaming dominance, content control, distribution leverage, and labor effects.
A multi-state suit is a possibility and could force concessions. Perhaps even spinning off its news organizations into an independent corporation.
Now that our faux POTUS King has moved on to foreign domination and war, decapitating or kidnapping leaders of sovereign countries, killing civilians including children, he's hell bent on owning the whole world.
As Americans, we can and do feel totally humiliated. As world citizen we are terrified.It's like we've had a horrible juvenile terrorist for president, mostly focused on destroying Democracy in America but who morphed into Dr. Strangelove and somehow escaped to destroy world peace and the global economy.
Since the GOP has, unsurprisingly, abdicated responsibility for reigning in the monster, we can hope near term public opinion which is running +65% against the war, will soon end Trump's international reign of terror.
Sorry for sharing my night sweats, but here we all ar
If you add in Sinclair & Nextar the right owns not just a majority of the national media but local news as well. It’s very, very bad.
Since the GOP has set precedent here, maybe the next Dem administration can use their power to break up the giant that is now owned by Ellison, force the sale of a couple of social media platforms to their preferred buyer as well as threaten how the news gets covered the way this regime has.
In addition to the Message Box, I am a paid subscriber to Meidas Touch Network, the Dworkin Report, Hopium Chronicles, Ground News and the Atlantic.
I also donate to NPR and PBS.
I also subscribe to the NY Times, which needs to step up, and the WSJ, which, honestly, is an excellent newspaper. Reading other points of view is fine.
I absolutely do not watch CNN, CBS or any cable news. They are all garbage IMO, peddling in fear and obsessed with Trump.
Substacks, podcasts, and small online outlets have brought energy and independence back into public conversation. That is a healthy development, and we should want more of it.
But there is a quiet assumption sometimes embedded in the enthusiasm—that these outlets can replace the large news organizations that report national and international events.
That assumption deserves a closer look.
The central problem in journalism has never really been distribution. Getting news to readers is now the easy part. The internet solved that problem long ago.
The hard part is reporting.
Reporting requires reporters. It requires editors, legal review, travel budgets, institutional patience, and organizations willing to support work that may take months or years to produce.
The major broadcast networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—together employ well over a thousand journalists. NPR and PBS together employ roughly another thousand. CNN employs many more. The Associated Press employs thousands of reporters around the world. Even after recent downsizing, The Washington Post still maintains several hundred reporters and editors.
These organizations maintain foreign bureaus, cultivate sources over many years, verify documents, and conduct investigations that sometimes unfold slowly and quietly before suddenly becoming visible to the public.
A famous example remains the Watergate scandal. The reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein depended not just on two persistent reporters but on editors, researchers, and a newsroom at The Washington Post willing to back them through months of uncertain work.
That kind of reporting requires institutions.
Most Substacks and podcasts do something different. They interpret events, analyze them, and often argue about them. Many do this very well. Some—Dan and Crooked Media, for example—are careful to identify where their information comes from.
But if you encounter a genuinely new fact in those spaces, it almost always originated with a reporter working inside one of the larger news organizations.
The ecosystem depends on someone doing the digging.
There is, of course, a fair objection here. Large media organizations make mistakes. They can be timid, conventional, and sometimes captured by corporate or political interests. Many readers have lost trust in them, and not without reason.
Independent outlets have emerged in part because of those failures.
But even critics of large media organizations usually rely on reporting produced by those same institutions. The facts being debated—the documents, the interviews, the investigations—almost always originate with reporters working inside organizations large enough to support that work.
The problem, in other words, may not be that large reporting institutions exist.
It may be that too few of them remain.
Some of these organizations are owned by large corporations or wealthy individuals. That is not ideal. But history offers a guide. Franklin D. Roosevelt did not attempt to abolish wealth or corporations. He attempted to govern them—using regulation, taxation, and legislation to prevent great wealth from automatically becoming great political power.
That approach still has merit. The country periodically reconsiders the relationship between wealth and power, and we may be entering one of those moments again.
But if we weaken the institutions that produce the reporting itself, we may discover that the problem was never that there were too many reporters.
Today’s Substack by Timothy Snyder of Yale, a leading authority on Central and Eastern Europe, makes a compelling case that Trump is setting the country up for an Iranian terrorist attack which he will then use an excuse to hijack the midterms. Absolutely frightening. Please comment on this. You have a big voice, Dan.
Dan, I have enormously appreciated The Message Box and your clear-thinking contributions to Pod Save America for the past couple years.
I was also glad to see this Substack piece by Susan Wagner of The Grassroots Connector (DEAR PUNDITS / WE NEED YOUR ASSISTANCE ) about Independent Media telling only of the horrors we're undergoing, while rarely, if ever, mentioning the enormous and successful efforts of grassroots actions and our leaders. Beyond periodic promotion of Vote Save America, that's been a noticeable gap on POD SAVE AMERICA.
I have looked for, but not found, a way to send comments to Crooked Media so I'm writing to you here. Wagner offers names of many dynamic, articulate grassroots leaders who'd make ideal subjects of interviews on the Pod. Hope you'll take a look at Wagner's essay!
We have started using BBC America in addition to PBS and NPR. CBS has started to shade the news (I.e. CBS morning news never mentioned the Colbert-Talerico interview event).
As a side note, completion of this merger will be a catastrophe not just for (to borrow a conservative phrase) viewpoint diversity in this country.
It will also be disastrous for entertainment consumers, who will lose choice and pay higher prices as streaming channels consolidate. And for show creators, and all of us who work in or whose businesses depend on the film/TV industry, as fewer movies and shows are greenlit for production.
I’m very hopeful that CA AG Rob Bonta will be able to stop it in its tracks.
I am a Democratic legislator in Vermont and we are constantly being told to use Facebook etc to promote ourselves in the next campaign. How can we maintain our values by rejecting these platforms and still be able to reach voters and get re-elected?
David Ellison truly has a face for radio.
Boycott CBS! Listen to: PBS, MSNOW, CNN, BBC, DW, CSpan.
Read: The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, Reuters, The AP.
"The future of media is smaller, independent outlets fueled by creators you know and trust — journalists and writers who aren’t owned by a billionaire, don’t have a corporate parent nervous about angering Trump, and aren’t going to soften their coverage to smooth a regulatory approval."
Don't get me wrong -- I think it is a good idea to try to build small-scale media outlets such as Message Box by pointing to the vulnerabilities of corporate media. At the same time, this is dangerously incomplete political analysis.
We are unlikely to rebuild the health of American democracy without media reform that includes larger-scale outlets. And that may take a "whole systems" approach that includes Democrats developing a strategy for supporting the growth of larger-scale media outlets that are less vulnerable to authoritarian takeover.
And where Democrats do have political power, they arguably need to prioritize supporting journalistic independence, such as through antitrust, tax and even education policies. This would ideally happen at the federal level, but blue states can also take meaningful steps (particularly if they start to collaborate).
It's no accident that other advanced democracies have stronger independent media than the US. Their political class didn't just leave it to the "magic of the market."
And there are state Attorneys General now contemplating antitrust litigation to either stop, modify, or constrain the Paramount-Warner Bros deal. CA is farthest along with its investigation. There are myriad reasons for objecting: streaming dominance, content control, distribution leverage, and labor effects.
A multi-state suit is a possibility and could force concessions. Perhaps even spinning off its news organizations into an independent corporation.
Now that our faux POTUS King has moved on to foreign domination and war, decapitating or kidnapping leaders of sovereign countries, killing civilians including children, he's hell bent on owning the whole world.
As Americans, we can and do feel totally humiliated. As world citizen we are terrified.It's like we've had a horrible juvenile terrorist for president, mostly focused on destroying Democracy in America but who morphed into Dr. Strangelove and somehow escaped to destroy world peace and the global economy.
Since the GOP has, unsurprisingly, abdicated responsibility for reigning in the monster, we can hope near term public opinion which is running +65% against the war, will soon end Trump's international reign of terror.
Sorry for sharing my night sweats, but here we all ar
If you add in Sinclair & Nextar the right owns not just a majority of the national media but local news as well. It’s very, very bad.
Since the GOP has set precedent here, maybe the next Dem administration can use their power to break up the giant that is now owned by Ellison, force the sale of a couple of social media platforms to their preferred buyer as well as threaten how the news gets covered the way this regime has.
In addition to the Message Box, I am a paid subscriber to Meidas Touch Network, the Dworkin Report, Hopium Chronicles, Ground News and the Atlantic.
I also donate to NPR and PBS.
I also subscribe to the NY Times, which needs to step up, and the WSJ, which, honestly, is an excellent newspaper. Reading other points of view is fine.
I absolutely do not watch CNN, CBS or any cable news. They are all garbage IMO, peddling in fear and obsessed with Trump.
Independent media is having a moment.
Substacks, podcasts, and small online outlets have brought energy and independence back into public conversation. That is a healthy development, and we should want more of it.
But there is a quiet assumption sometimes embedded in the enthusiasm—that these outlets can replace the large news organizations that report national and international events.
That assumption deserves a closer look.
The central problem in journalism has never really been distribution. Getting news to readers is now the easy part. The internet solved that problem long ago.
The hard part is reporting.
Reporting requires reporters. It requires editors, legal review, travel budgets, institutional patience, and organizations willing to support work that may take months or years to produce.
The major broadcast networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—together employ well over a thousand journalists. NPR and PBS together employ roughly another thousand. CNN employs many more. The Associated Press employs thousands of reporters around the world. Even after recent downsizing, The Washington Post still maintains several hundred reporters and editors.
These organizations maintain foreign bureaus, cultivate sources over many years, verify documents, and conduct investigations that sometimes unfold slowly and quietly before suddenly becoming visible to the public.
A famous example remains the Watergate scandal. The reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein depended not just on two persistent reporters but on editors, researchers, and a newsroom at The Washington Post willing to back them through months of uncertain work.
That kind of reporting requires institutions.
Most Substacks and podcasts do something different. They interpret events, analyze them, and often argue about them. Many do this very well. Some—Dan and Crooked Media, for example—are careful to identify where their information comes from.
But if you encounter a genuinely new fact in those spaces, it almost always originated with a reporter working inside one of the larger news organizations.
The ecosystem depends on someone doing the digging.
There is, of course, a fair objection here. Large media organizations make mistakes. They can be timid, conventional, and sometimes captured by corporate or political interests. Many readers have lost trust in them, and not without reason.
Independent outlets have emerged in part because of those failures.
But even critics of large media organizations usually rely on reporting produced by those same institutions. The facts being debated—the documents, the interviews, the investigations—almost always originate with reporters working inside organizations large enough to support that work.
The problem, in other words, may not be that large reporting institutions exist.
It may be that too few of them remain.
Some of these organizations are owned by large corporations or wealthy individuals. That is not ideal. But history offers a guide. Franklin D. Roosevelt did not attempt to abolish wealth or corporations. He attempted to govern them—using regulation, taxation, and legislation to prevent great wealth from automatically becoming great political power.
That approach still has merit. The country periodically reconsiders the relationship between wealth and power, and we may be entering one of those moments again.
But if we weaken the institutions that produce the reporting itself, we may discover that the problem was never that there were too many reporters.
It was that there were too few.
I hope Dems can stop the transaction but I’m not counting on it
https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-desire-for-terror?r=9qmqg&utm_medium=ios
Today’s Substack by Timothy Snyder of Yale, a leading authority on Central and Eastern Europe, makes a compelling case that Trump is setting the country up for an Iranian terrorist attack which he will then use an excuse to hijack the midterms. Absolutely frightening. Please comment on this. You have a big voice, Dan.
From Susan/Chicago
Dan, I have enormously appreciated The Message Box and your clear-thinking contributions to Pod Save America for the past couple years.
I was also glad to see this Substack piece by Susan Wagner of The Grassroots Connector (DEAR PUNDITS / WE NEED YOUR ASSISTANCE ) about Independent Media telling only of the horrors we're undergoing, while rarely, if ever, mentioning the enormous and successful efforts of grassroots actions and our leaders. Beyond periodic promotion of Vote Save America, that's been a noticeable gap on POD SAVE AMERICA.
I have looked for, but not found, a way to send comments to Crooked Media so I'm writing to you here. Wagner offers names of many dynamic, articulate grassroots leaders who'd make ideal subjects of interviews on the Pod. Hope you'll take a look at Wagner's essay!
We have started using BBC America in addition to PBS and NPR. CBS has started to shade the news (I.e. CBS morning news never mentioned the Colbert-Talerico interview event).
As a side note, completion of this merger will be a catastrophe not just for (to borrow a conservative phrase) viewpoint diversity in this country.
It will also be disastrous for entertainment consumers, who will lose choice and pay higher prices as streaming channels consolidate. And for show creators, and all of us who work in or whose businesses depend on the film/TV industry, as fewer movies and shows are greenlit for production.
I’m very hopeful that CA AG Rob Bonta will be able to stop it in its tracks.