Stuart Thompson has monitored right-wing media since 2020. He watched 47 hours of video on Rumble for this article.
As soon as President-elect Donald J. Trump won the presidential race, influencers on Rumble, the right-wing alternative to YouTube, flooded the platform with a simple catchphrase: “We are the media now.”
The idea seemed to capture a growing sense that traditional journalists have lost their position at the center of the media ecosystem. Polls show that trust in mainstream news media has plummeted, and that nearly half of all young people get their news from “influencers” rather than journalists.
If Rumble was the media now, I wondered what it would be like to consume an all-Rumble diet. So on Nov. 18, about two weeks after the election, I deleted my news apps, unsubscribed from all my podcasts and filtered all my newsletters to the trash. And for the next week, from early morning till late at night, I got all my news from Rumble.
…they fixated on a cast of perceived enemies to blame for America’s troubles — from Democratic politicians to TikTok personalities to Republican adversaries.
Just a few hours into the experiment, it was clear that I was falling into an alternate reality fueled almost entirely by outrage…
I received a statement from Tim Murtaugh, a representative for Rumble who was also Mr. Trump’s communications director for his 2020 campaign. He said: “The New York Times and its fellow legacy media outlets have lost their monopoly on deciding what information people can have, so of course they’re rushing to attack Rumble, a key alternative in the news marketplace.”
‘You’re going to become part of the show.’
After watching Rumble nonstop for days, I realized this very article was likely to fuel its own cycle of outrage on the platform. But I was surprised when that happened before it was even published.
I wrote to everyone mentioned in the article to ask for their perspective about Rumble and its popular shows, but few replied. Instead, people like Russell Brand, the former actor turned political commentator, took one of my emails and made an entire segment out of it. Mr. Bongino called me “public enemy No. 1” and claimed my story would focus on Rumble’s fringiest voices in a bid to get the site banned.
“Don’t ever email us,” he warned. “Don’t. Because you’re going to become part of the show.”
Mr. Pentland, the co-host of “The Roseanne Barr Podcast,” posted the email I sent him to his X account. Rumble’s chief executive reposted it, then Elon Musk reposted that to his more than 200 million followers.
P.S.: Glenn Greenwald discussed this article, so I decided to share it with y’all.
We’re so fucking-fucked until the people who follow this bullshit get with reality and realize they are just constantly buttchugging lies from these people. This isbt even information warfare anymore, it’s an out in the open manipulation of the people who either don’t care enough to think critically, or too lazy to believe logic.
The ridiculous part isn’t dropping MSM, which is unequivocally captured by the plutocracy and anti-consumer/worker interests, but the fact that people are switching to “influencers” and pundits who are not journalists and frequently know-nothing morons at-best; psychological warfare operatives at worst.
jimmy dore is a moron.
Honestly, I think even that is being too generous.
Cool.
Thanks for your thoughts on the topic at hand!
Stuff like this made me take a break from it all for a while. I figure, as exhausted as I am, best be resting up bc this is the last chance for a bit of peace and quiet for the next 4 years or whatever. Still feel the gut punch daily though.
Greenwald is one of those people some thought was about good things, like privacy and freedom, but turns out he’s like elon in his freeze peach absolutism.
https://reason.com/2022/09/04/glenn-greenwald-on-corporate-media-and-identity-politics/
Edit2: format, wording; quotes added
“The ultimate test of a society’s freedom is not how it treats its good, obedient, compliant citizens; it’s how it treats its dissidents.” - Glenn Greenwald
Greenwald is one of those people some thought was about good things, like privacy and freedom, but turns out he’s like elon in his freeze peach absolutism.
You compared Glenn Greenwald to Elon Musk on freedom of speech…
That is already enough to know that you do not watch his reporting directly; you just read or watch one side of the corporate media talking points when it comes to Glenn Greenwald.
FYI:
Glenn Edward Greenwald is an American journalist, author, and former lawyer. In 1996, Greenwald founded a law firm concentrating on First Amendment litigation. He began blogging on national security issues in October 2005, when he was becoming increasingly concerned with what he viewed as attacks on civil liberties by the George W. Bush administration in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. He became a vocal critic of the Iraq War and has maintained a critical position of American foreign policy. Greenwald started contributing to Salon in 2007, and to The Guardian in 2012. In June 2013, while at The Guardian, he began publishing a series of reports detailing previously unknown information about American and British global surveillance programs based on classified documents provided by Edward Snowden. His work contributed to The Guardian’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize win and he was among a group of three reporters who won the 2013 George Polk Award.
And then he became what he is.
People can be one thing and become another.
He has become something else.
One thing that has been an asterisk in my mind for some people who are of his ilk is why they all end up siding with Russia.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for exposing the shenanigans of illegal government operations, but it’d be good to also shed light on other nations doings. In the spirit of equality.
*edit; also, I wasn’t comparing in a sense of lireral equivalence on free speech.
I think what shifted was the increased identity politics and culture war talks within corporate media and politicians, so as to push more tribalism within the working class.
Instead of continuing the Occupy Wall Street protests, where it is the 99% versus the 1% (the owner class versus the working class), we continue to be divided by the establishment and the duopoly, so as to distract from addressing working-class struggles where most Americans agree on when we are polled.
People can come to the same conclusions without being “Putin puppets” or Russian bots.
Just learning about our military leaks on our forever wars would make many question the United States role in mass murder and the continued funding and bombing of civilians so as to bring regime change wars and “democracy” to the Middle East.
Direct discussion with Glenn Greenwald and The Vanguard: https://lemmy.world/post/23147215
In this clip from our new interview with Glenn Greenwald, we discuss our differences of perspectives concerning the Libs of Tik Tok account and the Trans Rights movement.
I’ve been seeing an uptick of RW propaganda on
soevery lemmy instances with which I’m registered except one. We’ve got a lot of work to do.Edited: I don’t understand autocorrect this time.
I’m convinced a major reason legacy media is so despised is because of the phony balcony “objectivity” standard. Holding journalists to an impossible standard just results in them lying to our faces day after day, for years.
This is especially obvious during Christmas because they all have to pretend to believe in Santa and it’s exactly the same vibe.
It’s probably more to do with the legacy media being caught several times being wildly biased while pretending to be neutral.
Biden’s mental decline is one of the more recent big ones, but it’s been a consistent thing for a long time. The Internet just makesnit faster to find the lies and half truths.
