Wikileaks and 4chan vs. the NY Thymes and CNN: The competition for our democracy. (2 part series)

Wolverine vs. Sabretooth, we may not know it, but everyone
sees themselves on the right side of
America's culture wars. (Matt James --
Deviant Art).

Part I: What is the alternative media, who loves it, and who loathes it?

If you're even reading this segment, it's because we've arrived at a point where the American public is being pulled in a virtual tug of war for its attention. If you want to use a metaphor, a nerdy metaphor, media conglomerates are participating in the electoral process with the same attitude as comic book heroes and villains. Notice that a character like Logan AKA Wolverine must have his own personal nemesis, Victor Creed AKA Sabretooth.

Well, everyone in this country today has a view of who their "superheroes" are, and who the "supervillains" are.The problem is that everyone's comic book universe is different. I often get into virtual screaming matches with people over not the topic at hand, but over which source is legitimately reliable. I've already heard from a number of friends that they are fine with a source that is unabashedly in favour of one side in an argument. That's fine, but do you realize that by showing that card the credence of your argument is framed differently depending on your audience? By walking into a discussion and declaring subjectivity we raise flags, both ours and those of the others present.

If someone's on the way out. . .

Dr. Fredric Wertham became a real-life
villain, to comic book fans, editors, and
publishers.

Unfortunately, we now see a war between the "establishment" media, and the "alternative" media. Or rather, that war has come to the fore after years of it being in the background. Until the advent of the internet, so-called fringe movements were forced to communicate by such mediums as AM short-wave radio or newsletters. The alternative press became a major factor on the left in the 1970s, whereas until then it had been the domain of, believe it or not, comic book and science fiction writers. Unsurprisingly, the comic books was not just attacked by the establishment once it was deemed a source of indecency. Psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent in 1954 at the height of the Red Scare and claimed comic books were filled with lurid sexual and political messages aimed at corrupting the minds of children. This runaway best seller led to the adoption of the Comic Book Code that same year. Among the accusations posed at the time by Dr. Wertham were that Batman and Robin as well as Wonder Woman are all gay.

The Wertham book, congressional hearings, and the adoption voluntarily by publishers of a Comics Code Authority based on a censorship code remain a stain on America's social history. So how did America respond?

Life Magazine, July 7, 1967

What changed in that era was that their mainstream media, consisting of news magazines catering to an established crowd such as Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post failed to see the new developments in society. Those media were disconnected from the Rock and Roll era of the 1950s even though they did cover it, and they never fully adjusted to the curve, not that they didn't try. Consider the  Life cover at left, concerning President Lyndon Johnson, who by that date had simply lost the trust of wide swathes of the American public.


Similarly, entertainment magazines were very often trawling way behind the trend line. People magazine, now known as a clearinghouse for light celebrity gossip, was notably very behind the times in this 1978 cover that featured country singer Pat Boone and his daughter Debby. It's not to say that what they were doing was wrong or stupid. However, it is notable that at a time when punk, disco, funk, and hard rock were dominating the music scene, people reached for a readership that was probably above the age of 40 even then.And just look at the copy of Seventeen at right. That image of young women would seem out of step even for 1973.

Ironically, what happened to the old alternative "media" when the new counterculture movements like feminism addressed them? They were condemned this time for other reasons, such as projecting chauvinist and regressive images. The most notable example is when feminist icon Gloria Steinem attacked a feminist-themed story arc by Wonder Woman writer Samuel R. Delany, himself an icon in gay literary circles as being unsupportive of feminism. It would lead to DC comics dumping Delany.

. . . Then someone will take their place.

We do know however that while the established mores prior to the 1960 were still being promoted in magazines, TV, and film, alternative media was burgeoning. Nowhere was this more evident than in music, although the audience often had to seek them out. But it was very easy for them to find these musical artists, because they looked so obviously NOT like the established art and media forms. Sly and the Family Stone's cover for Ain't But the Only Way. 

Evolution of the news media

In a like manner we have to understand the media today. There is a war going on between the press and the alternative NEWS media. As mentioned above, prior to the advent of the internet, the alternative NEWS media was confined to fringe source like newsletters or "zines", AM radio, but when they did log on they suddenly had AOL chat rooms, and then similar mediums. More importantly they could build web pages that could reach anyone without the need to physically transmit a signal or send a piece of mail.

Was it inevitable that news media would migrate to the internet? The fact is that news reporting didn't used to be on cable television at all; that was Ted Turner's vision that transformed his dad's billboard business into a massive media conglomerate that would eventually buy out MGM/United Artists and own several cable TV stations one of which was Cable News Network, better known as CNN. Other entrepreneurs like Rupert Murdoch (Fox News Channel in 1996) and Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg News in 1994) would go on to create their own massive media networks that would thrive on cable.

Legacy media on the defense, as always
With every advance, the legacy media struggled with the idea that their audience stability was going to plummet. It has nothing to do with politics; MTV's first aired music video was The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star". They were poking music radio in the eye. The print media has scrambled since the internet took hold to shift to the on-line format. It's actually wrecked the financial stability of numerous reputable papers. Afterward, much of America's local press was consolidated by the following conglomerates:

• Gannett Co. (Tysons Corner, VA) -- Over 100 dailies and nearly 1,000 weekly papers. Total value: $2.427 billion in assets and $1.058 billion in equity.
• Advance Publications (Staten Island, NY) -- Over 30 dailies and the massive Condé Nast magazine publishing empire as a subsidiary. Total value: $8 billion.
• Hearst Publications (Manhattan, NY) -- 18 dailies and numerous magazines and TV networks.

The Washington Post has been owned since 2013 by mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos (Amazon). Although unfairly called "Pravda on the Potomac" for its left-leaning editorial line in the past, the Post is now led by Fred Ryan, head of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. It is therefore a paper that publishes the opinions and views of the liberal elite while being managed by conservative elites. Similarly, the New York Times is a publicly traded corporation 17% owned by Mexican mega-billionaire Carlos Slim. Its editor is a great journalist Dean Baquet, but it is still officially published by members of the mega-rich Sulzberger family. Is it any wonder that youth audiences don't really feel those papers speak to them? Even journalists with credible careers like Baquet and Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. are having a hard time responding to the changes, because the on-line blog media is suddenly on a virtually equal footing to them despite being smaller and more modestly funded. Why? Because the internet has equalized the distribution racket. The Times and Post used to have greater circulation and thus they attracted more advertisers. The decline in print media has made that advantage virtually irrelevant.

The YOUTUBE Revolution and Breitbart

Indie band HAIM has made it big,
and MTV has very little to do with it.
(Naked Underground)

In 2005 Youtube was launched and immediately set itself apart as a user friendly platform for uploading videos by individuals. The effects of having it as a tool have been felt profoundly by not just CNN and news TV stations, but also by pop culture channels like MTV and the History Channel. At a certain point towards the end of that decade many networks began to cater to "reality TV", a strategy that is far more scorched earth than what Donald Trump is doing right now. In the case of MTV, following the lead of network TV shows like Survivor, they put on Teen Mom and Jersey Shore and then sat back in contentment as the rest of society pretended to feel moral indignation at two shows that promoted teenage promiscuity and irresponsible behaviour starring empty-headed self-absorbed idiots. This worked for only so long, as at a certain point nobody cared anymore what MTV was doing, and they continued to try to replicate the success of both of those shows. Meanwhile people wanting to watch new music videos could simply hop onto Youtube or a few other sites like Vimeo and just watch it as many times as they wanted. MTV had through its own bloodhound hunt for viewers relinquished control of the music media market to the internet. 

The result? MTV's ratings have begun to tank, as shown by stories in both Rolling Stone and Billboard documenting how the Video Music Awards are attracting record low audiences and the network is ditching reality TV in exchange for live action dramas. MTV is also not breaking new music trends; it is basically a sunbathing mirror for the music industry's establishment, including such industry moguls as Jay-Z and Beyonce, Katy Perry, and Coldplay. Whereas it had been true in the late 1990s that for a new act to crack into the mainstream they required the exposure of MTV or BET, nowadays new acts seem to have plenty of alternatives. This is not an easy metric to obtain, so I will not try. But remember Psy, the Korean sensation of Gangnam Style fame? He was a Youtube sensation, MTV had nothing to do with popularizing his video. Haim, an LA-based band of sisters, were able to attract attention largely from live performances at South by Southwest and other festivals. Kings of Leon ironically made it big in the UK by getting acclaim, like Haim by the way, from the New Musical Express (NME). MTV has become just one more venue instead of THE source for music media.

Alternative media on the internet -- Daily Kos, Breitbart

MoveOn.org began as a grassroots progressive
organization to "move on" from the Clinton scandals
involving Monica Lewinsky, but has been effectively
coopted by the Democratic establishment.

The other result of this DIY revolution started by Youtube is that independent media has spiked, a second stage begun by the internet and now continued by better tools on the internet. This did not begin with conservative media, in fact Moveon.org, a left-wing that sprouted in defense of Bill Clinton during investigations of his affairs in the 1990s, had a profound effect in the 2004 Democratic primary season by organizing grassroots support for insurgent candidate Howard Dean against front-runners like John Kerry and John Edwards. Since then Moveon.org has lost much of its credibility as an alternative media source due to its knee-jerk support for the Democratic Party as a whole. Other online news magazines from the same era such as Salon.com have succeeded in entrenching themselves more successfully.

However, there were many alternative news sources that started out later, after the 2000 election when Democrats cried fraud over the Florida recount. It was only strengthened by Bush era issues like the USA Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind, and most of all the War on Terror, Iraq War, Guantanamo and related topics. Such blogs that were founded in this era and mushroomed into major forces in internet media or DailyKos (2002), ThinkProgress (2005), Huffington Post (2005) and in the Obama era, Mic.com (2011). News aggregator RealClearPolitics was founded in 2000, while conservative news aggregator Drudge Report was begun in 1995 and has enjoyed a number of periods of thriving activity. Andrew Breitbart began to gain a major following towards the end of the 2000s when he founded Breitbart.com and became the HuffPost's arch-nemesis. Other so-called independent on-line sources are actually not: Daily Beast claims to be one, but in reality is owned by the IAC media conglomerate, worth $3.23 billion and traded on Nasdaq. On the board of IAC is none other than Chelsea Clinton. Another one, ThinkProgress, is run by the Center for American Progress, a heavily pro-Democratic think tank chaired by Tom Daschle, former Senate Majority Leader and its president is Neera Tanden a Hillary Clinton staffer since her days running for senate in New York. So ironically there is plenty of tampered media masquerading as "alternative" media.

De-Legitimizing on-line media often feeds its appetite and creates a boomerang effect

What has been interesting is that news media has casually accepted the HuffPost and other liberal blogs while claiming that Breitbart, Drudge, Infowars, and other right-oriented news outlets are not credible or even conspiracy kooks. The reality is somewhere in between. In 2009 Breitbart was a key player in funding and distributing the ACORN video project of conservative investigative journalist James O'Keefe. Whereas at first the media was loath to acknowledge the significance of the tapes and would eventually dwell on the legality of them, once it became clear that there was a landslide of indignation concerning the organization, it became accepted that this was a real news story. What ended up happening was that CNN and other outlets re-framed the story such that they removed the real problem: That a non-profit organization was offering to help a person who was openly claiming to be committing a felony (running a prostitution ring) by ignoring the crimes and actually subsidizing them. Few took the bait, and in fact it was a major factor in gaining more attention for Breitbart.

Breitbart, INFOWARS and the failure to uproot them

Andrew Breitbart was a pest to the establishment media
from the right. . .

Breitbart would go from strength to strength after the ACORN scandal, climbing into the national consciousness by exposing the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal of 2011. Infowars has grown from a group of fringe right conspiracy theorists into a real factor in communications. Both of these groups are now accused of being elements of the alt-right. Despite Infowars' association with loopy stories like that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged, in the past couple of years it has been able to build an audience from a youth backlash towards the "Social Justice Warrior" (SJW) and the politically correct culture, particularly in the different levels of the American education system.

While Amy Goodman continues to be one from the left.

Progressives have a hard time processing the success of these media sources, but they themselves have counterparts: the more mature and explicitly socialist Democracy Now! as well as The Young Turks (TYT). They have a cult following, and have built their credibility on being the progressive alternative media. Both the alt-right and the progressive alt-media troll each other regularly, unwilling to acknowledge that they almost need each other to survive. Recently Infowars' Alex Jones crashed a TYT broadcast at the Republican National Convention with a Bill Clinton rape tshirt, and goaded TYT founder Cenk Uygur into a violent confrontation during which TYT's Jimmy Dore got caught spitting in Jones' and Roger Stone's faces.

These groups have put themselves at odds with the main-stream media (MSM). It used to be just the right that condemned the MSM, but that's no longer the case. How did it come to be defined? Look at these groups that are largely acknowledged to be MSM standard bearers:

• The old broadcast alphabet networks: CBS, NBC, ABC. FOX local does not have national news broadcasts.
• Newspapers: New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and other major newspaper group conglomerates like Gannett and Hearst. 
• Most major magazine publishers like Condé Nast which are to be fair not really that separate from the newspapers.
• Major cable news outlets CNN, MSNBC, and to some extent also CNBC and Bloomberg TV. Fox News Channel technically also fits the bill although they eschew the editorial line of other MSM outlets on their opinion shows such as Hannity, Kelly Files and The O'Reilly Factor.

The MSM is the front phalanx of an elite, disconnected world of journalists that are tuned are tuned in to part of American society, the cutting edge tech-savvy part, but not to another one. In the concluding part of this series I will address directly why these so-called communications leaders have positioned themselves for complete failure by pretending that only their vision of the world is the relevant one.