The restructured MSM; Tales from the capitalism crypt; Public distrust rising

The American Prospect writes about the reality of the modern MSM and the critical importance of independent news media:

Democrats Lost the Propaganda War

The intra-Democratic argument over what should be done following their loss in 2024 goes on. Bernie Sanders is arguing for working-class populism. Matt Yglesias has been flogging a “Common Sense Manifesto” arguing for Bill Clinton–style triangulation.

I have my own thoughts on messaging topics. But all this is putting the cart before the horse. Democrats are missing something that is arguably a prerequisite for ideological messaging to have any effect whatsoever: a media apparatus that can get these messages in front of swing voters. The content of the message doesn’t matter if voters never hear it. An obvious place to start would be to build up straightforward reporting operations in news deserts in critical states, and to stop making traditional election broadcast ads the core focus of campaign spending.

If advocates of “popularism” like Yglesias are correct, how did Donald Trump win with such wildly unpopular proposals and behaviors?

I believe two things happened here. First and most importantly, there is a vast and exceptionally well-funded right-wing propaganda machine that pipes Republican messaging directly into tens of millions of homes, day in and day out, influencing people both directly and through conversations with families and neighbors.

Second, the mainstream media, for a variety of sociological and political reasons—including outright meddling from Trump-supporting billionaire owners—refused to give Trump the full-blown scandal treatment, with many consecutive days of inflammatory headlines and articles, no matter what he did. Democrats have relied on the MSM to do their messaging for them, but they did not and will not do it. As Josh Marshall writes, “Democrats need to organize their future politics around the simple reality that the establishment media is structurally hostile to the Democratic Party.”

As a result, most swing voters simply did not hear about Trump’s platform, or did not believe it if they did. .... In a large chunk of the country, there is no local paper even available, and in a much larger chunk the few papers that remain are private equity–gutted carcasses with little aside from Associated Press reprints.

A recent study by Paul Farhi and John Volk at Northwestern found an even more stark gap in the worst-off counties. Trump won 91 percent of “news desert” counties—where there is no local coverage of any kind—by an average of 54 percentage points.

Absent any action, Trump is likely to make this worse. His antitrust authorities are going to be far more lenient than their predecessors in the Biden administration. That ensures significant media consolidation, which if history is any guide will deprive large parts of the country even further of real news and information, in favor of hot takes and ideological scandalmongering.

This all suggests an obvious opportunity: Democratic funders could set up new local papers in strategic counties, or buy up some of the remaining husks and staff them up. ....

To drive home the importance of real news reporting in a democracy, DJT is suing a newspaper in Iowa because it published poll data just before the election that turned out to be wrong. His lawsuit alleges “brazen election interference” for a poll published shortly before the election that showed Ms. Harris leading in Iowa by three points. DJT said, “I have to do it. We have to straighten out the press.”

By straightening out the press, he means getting killing it and turning the corpse into a giant authoritarian propaganda, lies, slander and crackpottery machine, just like Putin did to Russia and the Chinese government did to China.

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When a lot of money is involved, capitalism tends to become shockingly callous to human life and the environment. Capitalism tends to be loaded with seething hate of government, business regulations and protections for consumers and workers if any of that might get in the way of profits. Profit threats have to be obliterated. Project 2025 is quite clear and explicit about these priorities. The NYT published (not paywalled) an on-point article about drug industry callousness toward human life in ruthless pursuit of profit:

Giant Companies Took Secret Payments 

to Allow Free Flow of Opioids

Drugmakers including Purdue Pharma paid pharmacy benefit managers not to restrict painkiller prescriptions, a New York Times investigation found

In 2017, the drug industry middleman Express Scripts announced that it was taking decisive steps to curb abuse of the prescription painkillers that had fueled America’s overdose crisis. The company said it was “putting the brakes on the opioid epidemic” by making it harder to get potentially dangerous amounts of the drugs.

The announcement, which came after pressure from federal health regulators, was followed by similar declarations from the other two companies that control access to prescription drugs for most Americans.

The self-congratulatory statements, however, didn’t address an important question: Why hadn’t the middlemen, known as pharmacy benefit managers, acted sooner to address a crisis that had been building for decades?

One reason, a New York Times investigation found: Drugmakers had been paying them not to.

For years, the benefit managers, or P.B.M.s, took payments from opioid manufacturers, including Purdue Pharma, in return for not restricting the flow of pills. As tens of thousands of Americans overdosed and died from prescription painkillers, the middlemen collected billions of dollars in payments.

The P.B.M.s exert extraordinary control over what drugs people can receive and at what price. The three dominant companies — Express Scripts, CVS Caremark and Optum Rx — oversee prescriptions for more than 200 million people and are part of health care conglomerates that sit near the top of the Fortune 500 list.

Money talks and corpses walk, sort of.

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Gallup reports about the state of public trust in the courts. It is low.

This year marks the first time on record that judicial confidence among those approving of U.S. leadership has ever dipped below 60%, and the first time that confidence in the courts has been below 50% among both those who approve and those who disapprove of U.S. leadership, a double whammy pushing the national figure to its lowest in two decades.