#off message

[mockingjay2026]

Meme-ify Trump's Failures

Make it harder for him to deceive, evade, and rewrite history

(full piece requires subscription. Intro gives the important conepts.)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Yes, Democrats Should Still Care How Real Journalists Cover The News

Just because most mainstream news consumers are already Biden voters, doesn't mean big problems with mainstream news coverage don't seep int

Brian Beutler at OffMessage:

Six years ago, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders attended a dinner at a Virginia restaurant called the Red Hen. By 2018 Sanders had established herself in politics as an accomplished liar and an accomplice to an administration that was in the midst of orphaning migrant children, using cruelty as a deterrent. Her presence perturbed the staff, who alerted the owner, who in turn politely asked Sanders to leave and comped her companions for the food and drink they’d already been served.  Nobody heaped abuse on Sanders. So far as we know, nobody filmed the confrontation, and if anyone did, it never found its way to the internet, which would’ve compounded Sanders’s embarrassment. Democratic leaders in Congress did not applaud the Red Hen. Neither did Barack Obama or Joe Biden. It’s likely that the whole episode would’ve been forgotten quietly, lost to the mists of time, had Sanders not exploited it herself to whip up right-wing outrage and get revenge.  [...]

Some people no doubt heard about the story from Sanders’ feed directly, and from Trump-loyal Twitter users who passed along her recounting. But that’s not the only conceivable way people with light or non-existent media footprints might have learned about what happened at the restaurant. If influential mainstream news figures treat something as important, others follow. Their individual audiences may be modest, but they are quite large in aggregate, and their cultural influence is vast. What a political media herd decides to pursue will diffuse through society, becoming received knowledge even of people who don’t take much interest in politics. What goes viral on social media or YouTube or around the water cooler is not in any way disconnected from what people in the journalism industry focus on as real news. Likewise, the front page of the New York Times is not hermetically sealed from non-traditional media.  How did low-information swing-voters who never read the New York Times learn about Hillary Clinton’s emails? About Hunter Biden’s laptop? It’s clearly not all coming from right-wing content creators.  [...]

Consider an analogy to the differences between progressive political media and right-wing political media. The latter is much larger, and more consolidated. There are outlets and creators of all shapes and sizes on the right, but there’s also Fox News. A single email from the News Corp C-suite can change the message blaring into millions of households, gyms, and offices that have televisions tuned to Fox News. And from there, it will be amplified further by lawmakers, pro-Trump influencers, talk radio hosts, the hosts other right-wing cable news channels, and maybe, eventually, more mainstream sources. 

Progressive media has no mechanism like this. It is highly fractured and balkanized by issue-area. Even if the audiences for progressive and right-wing media were of similar size, it would be difficult if not impossible for anyone to feed the progressive audience talking points or marching orders a small handful of ideas to focus on.  Directly influencing the vibe on social media, where millions of users compete for eyeballs and ear canals, is similarly daunting. Even the social media companies that aren’t run by right-wing fanatics have throttled professional political news, and the political news that does break through is almost all framed to get people’s hackles up. Tens of thousands of atomized liberals can not counteract these effects. The Biden campaign could in theory stand up a troll army to post on-message content all day, but there’s likely a reason it has not. By contrast, influencing the handful of people who control the editorial consensus in the news industry is much simpler. Democrats don’t have a Fox News, at least not yet, and they don’t control the New York Times. But they can exert influence over mainstream news, and thus what diffuses through the culture, in two ways: 1) by mounting sustained media criticism; 2) by getting a handle on the kinds of things elite journalists understand to be newsworthy—novelty, conflict, scandal—and making or uncovering more of those things. 

Brian Beutler’s Off Message Substack hits at the mainstream media’s role in amplifying bad-faith right-wing outrage-bait.

The conservative media apparatus is highly organized, while the progressive media apparatus is much more balkanized, explained by this quote: “Progressive media has no mechanism like this. It is highly fractured and balkanized by issue-area.”