It’s been more than a year since the publication of “Mandate for Leadership,” the 900-page book of policy proposals also known as Project 2025. The book outlines how a future Republican president should navigate an administrative transition. Media has painted the book as a harbinger of what’s to come rather than the culmination of a decades-long plot to undermine democracy.
I just get kind of triggered whenever any media in today’s fractured media landscape uses “Main Stream Media” especially in a headline as loaded as this.
I think people forget that Alex Jones was one of the original people pushing the phrase “mainstream media” back in the Bush years…
…back then nobody thought anything of it because we had evidence that the NYT was sitting on damaging stories for the Bush admin (like the warrantless NSA spying) for years to protect them.
But the attitude and name for it was a bad way to present it then, and it’s a bad way to present it now, because it amounts to: You know that those big media companies that are mostly trustworthy lie to you sometimes or speak on issues in a way that aren’t entirely truthful, but you know what’s better these no-name media groups that are funded by foreign governments that are definitely lying to you!
Another great example was CNN and their relationship with weapons manufacturers in the 90s.
CNN has a weird history, because there’s been a lot of conspiracies that have been debunked from that period, too.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22170/did-cnn-fake-footage-during-the-gulf-war-purporting-a-live-gas-attack
They were accused of faking a live shot during the Gulf War because of a weird background that seems like it actually is an exterior shot of a building there. I specifically remember Alex Jones claiming 20 years ago it was proof CNN was liars. A lot more evidence that he was the liar.
But, unlike me (and those in that thread), a lot of people never were willing to keep looking and find more evidence one way or the other and not take the rantings of someone like Alex Jones as gospel.
(If it isn’t clear, in the early 2000’s I had a coworker/neighbor who was leftist who was into Jones because Jones was against Bush at the time, which he erroneously thought that meant that Jones must be right about something because Bush was so duplicitous. I think he was also smart enough to move on from that, thankfully, of course. Too many aren’t.)
I know this response is way too late, but I remembered the term that mattered. CNN effect. If you look it up you’ll see a lot of old articles about what a 24-hour News Network did to basically change the way people absorbed information and how that changed perceptions.
Never too late to share information. Thanks, I hadn’t heard of the term!