Tell the news.
It's nice to link to an article, or do more in depth analysis, but I really appreciate it when people who I trust and who are knowledgeable (especially in areas I know less about) summarize news and events.
Even if it's very local stuff. Especially the local stuff.
Big newsrooms are dying. The editor of the paper or producer of a "news hour" used to do this job, and it a powerful job with tremendous responsibility.
Social media is taking the place of editorial control.
This is why powerful people have been striving to capture social media networks. Why Musk bought twitter, it's why Russia has blocked the internet, why China has a firewall.
It's doesn't matter if reporters are reporting your propaganda, somehow you need people to think those stories are important.
Social media suggests an organic and wildly democratic way of doing this and I think it scares some powerful people to death.
They have been mostly successful retaining control.
But, at the same time I see reason for hope. The fact that Russia has basically decided that it just can't deal with people having access to the internet anymore means that even the deeply propaganda filled and regulated internet was *still* having a destabilizing impact on the centralization of information and ideas.
This also applies to US media. And there was a time when many would scoff at this comparison. But I think people see what's happening to networks and they get it.
The nightmare of the powerful is a media landscape that is entirely organic. Where what is news is decided in the way that ants make decisions, every ant makes her own choice and the decisions are emergent.
Emergent editorial control.
So, it's important to me what articles you choose to share and what you have to say about them. It's helpful when you explain who the big actors in your local news are, who you identify, how you identify them.
I do still think there is a role for pundits, but now all pundits are freelance.
This is why so much money and power focused on Joe Rogan. He's essentially a kind of pundit and the hope is that here is one place where it's possible to centrally control what is and isn't "the news" -- but, even Rogan faces backlash if he can't keep it feeling authentic.
Sometimes my liberal friends say it makes them sad that in the US we don't all watch NBC and CBS news hour anymore. The chaos is scary.
I understand what my liberal friends are sad about when they are nostalgic about the media centralization of the past, but they are forgetting the way that massive lies were propagated and never questioned in that environment.
It is true that when Dan Rather did the news some things we see today would never fly... but I have spent my whole adult life unlearning the lies about US history that kind of news propagated.
We each must take some responsibility and 'Tell the news' ourselves.
As an outsider watching, the number of people who seem to believe they can "fix" things by just voting the dems in again is utterly horrifying. The sheer lack of awareness is unfathomable.
It's nearly as bad in Canada when it comes right down to it. Just quieter and with less gestapo. Trump's bullshit ignited an instant push of nationalism which meant people voted for anyone the liberals (Can) shoved down their throat and most of them don't even realize who he is and what he's doing. We will sure feel it when we suddenly need to protest and realize that corporations have more human rights than we do now.
People don't want to be aware of the machine they are inside of. Things don't just suddenly happen like a light switch turned on and off. That's the stuff of fairytales. It's the desperate symptom of societal arrested development and mindlessness to try to believe that they do.
What's worse is the people who refuse to use the democrats as a pathway to fixing things.
BTW, I've never heard anyone say "all we have to do is get the D's back in and it will all be okay". Admittedly I don't have a super-diverse set of people I discuss politics with, but I'm beginning to wonder if such people actually exist.
@jztusk @RobotDiver @futurebird
As somebody who spent nearly 4 decades working in local government, I really do want to hit people over the head with a 2x4 when they say the two parties are the same. By their actions, they are so far apart that they’re not even on the same planet. When Democrats are in power (and they are very rarely unfettered) things actually can progress. When the Republicans are in power, the best you can ever hope for is indifference.
@KanaMauna @jztusk @futurebird
Not once did I say the two parties were the same, but as a disabled person with very few spoons I don't have time or energy to explain the perils of neoliberalism to anyone these days.
Suffice to say, the sleeping on concrete wrapped in space blankets without adequate food or health care, the corporatization of the US prison system, the separation of children from their families, the loss of their documents, the cages, all came pre Trump. The lack of checks and balances to protect the most vulnerable from having their basic human rights revoked - pre Trump. He's just a villain who turned the volume up on a pre existing system.
What looks like progress, can sometimes be standing too close to the wall to see the horizon while wearing comfortable shoes, but same as it ever was. Thanks for the threat of violence.
@RobotDiver @KanaMauna @jztusk
I do think there is a foundational and important difference between Democrats and Republicans. They are not as far apart on matter of policy, but they do relate to holding power differently.
Democrats believe in elections, so much so that they will let Republicans win even when they have the power to stop them. They believe in norms. You can't eat norms but I still think it matters.
At least with Democrats you can effectively fight them within the system.
@RobotDiver @KanaMauna @jztusk
I understand why some people don't feel like the ability to enact change by working within the system counts for much. Especially when democrats cheerfully allow the right, who doesn't care about norms or the system to use the same levers to enact abuse.
But I have been able to win more material victories when I could use the system to our advantage. It's not a total solution but this? this mess we have I don't even know how to fight it.
Strategically speaking i think both the US and Canada are dealing with the same gutting issue of centrism. You have republicans and what has slowly crept into republicans lite to try to capture voter division. The lack of progressive representation guts the entire system slowly over time. We have a very similar situation with the conservatives and liberals here.
If you look at both Biden and Harris on paper without identifiers, they still read astoundingly republican.
@futurebird @RobotDiver @KanaMauna
There are also different varieties of Democrats. There are some who are doing what they can to work within the system, and some are self-interested power grabbers who will sell us out in a second - Tulsi Gabbard and that guy from WV were both "Democrats".
We all agree that stuff is bad. And we're all having times of despair. But people who go from there to shitting on those who are trying to use the tools we do have just get muted by me now.
@futurebird @RobotDiver @jztusk
No, I seriously have to disagree. The difference between the parties are vast. EVERY single time Rs took control of the fed or state we had to sharply cut services. They’d even try to stop you from spending your own money helping welfare clients they disliked. They may give lip service about saving children but their plan for foster children is strangle agencies with paperwork and then defund them.
@futurebird @RobotDiver @jztusk
Every time there was a party changeover we had a huge change in funding and mandates. Democrats may not give you everything you want (and they probably couldn’t anyways because of all the poison pills written to the law) but they’re not adversarial to local governments nor do they defund programs for jollies.
@futurebird @RobotDiver @jztusk
Virtually none of this stuff ever makes it into the media. People like to say that Biden was just the same as Trump. Fuck no, we never had to sue Biden just to get our legally obligated reimbursements. We definitely never had to have meetings discussing which categories of clients we were gonna have to cut. Anyhow, just my two cents coming from 36 years in the trenches.
@futurebird while it’s not my gift to do that, I _do_ attempt what I can for the social justice groups I serve. (We use old fashioned listserves. Not Google, of course.)
You can’t bury folks under a sleet of horror stories—you have to balance those with action steps that can be taken and stories about the wins, yet without hiding the stark truth that this _is_ fascism, and it really is as bad as we think.
It’s not exactly telling the news. But I am told it makes a difference.
@futurebird If there is a single assignment from college that has influenced me the most, it was being given two first-hand accounts of a 12th C. priest. One was used to argue for his sainthood. The other was a complaint about what an awful person he was. And we were told to describe the *real* person behind both accounts.
Such a valuable skill to actually sort through contradictory info.
(FWIW, he got the saint gig: he's the patron saint of Iceland now)
I think I qualify as one of those liberals. I've done the "cut off from CBS, NYTimes, WaPo, ..." part, and am now looking for better sources.
I miss the feeling of being informed, but I figure it's better, at least for the moment, to be ignorant than to be deceived.
@futurebird I love the hope in your vision. The problem with the news environment is that fact gathering is slow, "flood the zone" is fast, and attention is finite.
It is hard to demonstrate object permanence in this environment, and not everyone, or even most people, are far enough from precarity to have the space to form and maintain thoughts over time. If you don't stop and think, but just emoji and move on, you become a wind sock in your information environment.
I think the desire to not feel flooded is why we each gravitate to people who offer summaries, who make connections between events and facts and produce a bit of a coherent story about what is happening.
What is happening in the world now?
I would say "As we all ignore climate change the rich and power nation, America is returning to its more fascist roots: the US has been like this before. Billionaires capture public outrage over social liberalism: eg. women having rights, the decline of racism etc. to protect their fortunes from taxes, and to protect their power over government priories. They fear a world where the government serves the people with competent social programs."
1/
"As the memory of the horrors of WWII fade, nations are forgetting why it was important to spend political capital opposing things like war crimes. Everyone is aware of the problem of climate change and some of this response is a bunker mentality, rather than meeting the problem and solving it some very powerful people are seeking only to survive and maintain their control over others."
That's my new of the year.
@futurebird I miss the community of voices I followed on Twitter before that billionaire destroyed it.
I miss the community of friends I had on Facebook before Meta got into the business of selling vulnerable users to custom tailored psyop houses ("AI induced psychosis" but before AI).
I miss the open web. We didn't safeguard what we had from bad actors. We couldn't.
It was far from perfect, but I'm going to miss America.
So many billionaires have destroyed online social spaces I loved I'm starting to feel like I must be very dangerous.
livejournal was bought by a Russian company who destroyed it
blogger was mysteriously imploded just when it was getting good
facebook was turned into an unusable hell hole of ads and non-chron feed
twitter... we all know what happened to twitter
tumblr ... lives on in a way
but now I'm here.
Generally the billionaires seem to be in the business of destroying every ladder they ever climbed.
Better to rule in hell on earth than to compete fairly in heaven, I suppose.
@futurebird local news is the hardest to follow, isn’t it? Even for those of us who have a locally owned and controlled newspaper.
I confess, I get so much more news from social media—from that friend on the school board or who is a city manager two towns over—than from official news sources, which can be so blandly uninformative it’s impossible to figure out what’s going on.
And joining a lobbying group is good—though you’d kind of wish you could be informed ahead of that… 🤷🏻♀️
@futurebird look, the concept of nightly news used to be seen as a 'prestige' thing each network did to maintain visibility of their network and, to whatever actual extent this part of it was realized, to provide a public service.
Now, everything's got to sell the commercial space and bring in a return. The concept of noblesse oblige, if you will, has been lost. Everything is about engineering the audience.
A dozen years ago, maybe more, the stat was that for every one person with a comms or journalism degree working in public media, there were six working PR for companies, doing essentially the same job but with no accountability to truth or obligation to serve any form of greater good. That was back then. I shudder to think what it is now.
The message is the medium and the medium is the message these days and both are being aimed and calibrated by billion dollar enterprises and trillion dollar interests. There will be no return to a concept of an altruistic nightly news broadcast unless something wholly new arises to provide it.
@capnthommo @futurebird this may be a chicken and egg matter; you have to ask what factors led turner and cnn to jump into that gap and create that space in the first place. And of course a lot of it was peculiar to the situation, but I think the advent of chyron news is more of an aggravating symptom than a root cause
ymmv :)
In countries with a public broadcaster, like most in Europe; who gets to decide what is covered, how, and by whom, has always been political. Sometimes this is overt, sometimes there is a veneer of impartiality.
Any veneer of impartiality has been eroded significantly, especially at the BBC.
this depends on one's definition of politics (which is a word everyone has their own definition for), but sure. I think it's safe to say that any system that features powerful interests is one where you'll see the local journalism reflecting those interests.
The way it was put to me once is that it's human nature for editors to consider who will be happy, and how happy, and who will be angry, and how angry, if the story goes to print. Because this is news media it is seen as an inherently political decision by others, but really it's just an extension of how most people gauge social considerations when deciding what they should do and how they should act. In this model it is the aggregate of such small banalities that constitute the force that you sum up as political.
@futurebird this is why I start every day with Jay Kuo’s The Status Kuo and with Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American. They don’t just comment; they inform.
I also rely a lot on non-profits like RAICES—the folks who provide lawyers to children caught up in our mass deportation machine—for detailed news as well as analysis of the issues I follow most closely.
I’ve been seeking and winnowing alt news sources like it was my part time job since November of 2024.
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