The Mainstream Media Is Dead

March 5, 2017 Hunter Wallace Discourse Poisoning, Lügenpresse, Mainstream Media, Narrative Terrorism, Politics 27

This new study confirms what I have long suspected:

“THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION SHOOK the foundations of American politics. Media reports immediately looked for external disruption to explain the unanticipated victory—with theories ranging from Russian hacking to “fake news.”

We have a less exotic, but perhaps more disconcerting explanation: Our own study of over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world. This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.

While concerns about political and media polarization online are longstanding, our study suggests that polarization was asymmetric. Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites. But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season. …”

The prevalence of such material has created an environment in which the President can tell supporters about events in Sweden that never happened, or a presidential advisor can reference a non-existent “Bowling Green massacre.”

A remarkable feature of the right-wing media ecosystem is how new it is. Out of all the outlets favored by Trump followers, only the New York Post existed when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. By the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, only the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh, and arguably Sean Hannity had joined the fray. Alex Jones of Infowars started his first outlet on the radio in 1996. Fox News was not founded until 1996. Breitbart was founded in 2007, and most of the other major nodes in the right-wing media system were created even later. Outside the right-wing, the map reflects a mixture of high attention to traditional journalistic outlets and dispersed attention to new, online-only, and partisan media. …”

” … events in Sweden that never happened …”

It also sheds new light on why President Trump has been so emboldened to violate the reigning taboos and ban several Lügenpresse outlets from the White House.

President Trump’s supporters distrust the mainstream media. They are increasingly getting their information from a thriving rightwing media ecosystem which didn’t exist as recently as a decade ago. The backbone of the network has grown through social media.

In the last six years, the number of American households without a television has doubled. It is still a small number, but the story is in the demographics. The group that consumes the least amount of television are people younger than 25 years old. The group that consumes the most amount of television at home are those older than 75. More significantly, the households which do own televisions are consuming less programming as they turn to the internet for alternative sources of information.

Within the rightwing media ecosystem, Breitbart is displacing FOX News:

“This sidelining of Fox News in early 2016 coincided with sustained attacks against it by Breitbart. The top-20 stories in the right-wing media ecology during January included, for example, “Trump Campaign Manager Reveals Fox News Debate Chief Has Daughter Working for Rubio.” More generally, the five most-widely shared stories in which Breitbart refers to Fox are stories aimed to delegitimize Fox as the central arbiter of conservative news, tying it to immigration, terrorism and Muslims, and corruption …”

As we have seen, the average National Review subscriber is 66-years-old. The average FOX News primetime viewer is 68-years-old. This leads to two observations:

1.) First, the culture we inherited from the late 20th century with all its various taboos – the -isms and the phobias that Boomers were raised on – is a legacy of the left side of the media ecosystem on display above. The late 20th century is remarkable for being an unusual time of mass media consolidation. In the 1960s, we all used to get our news delivered to us vertically from a handful of elite newspapers, major magazines and television networks which had the power and legitimacy to police discourse. Newsweek, for example, used to be one of the most prestigious national news magazines. In 2010, it was sold for $1 dollar to Sidney Harman and it spent 2016 publishing breathless Kurt Eichenwald stories that no one in the rightwing media ecosystem trusted or bothered to read.

2.) Second, the rightwing media seems to have gone through three distinct phases. In the beginning, there was National Review which had power to police the boundaries of “respectability” on the Right largely because publishing and distribution was so much more expensive than it is today. In the 1990s and 2000s, FOX News and conservative talk radio established their dominance over the Right. In the 2010s, it is internet saavy sites like Breitbart and Infowars which are rising in the age of the smartphone and viral clickbait videos. It is striking how fast even minor blogs like Gateway Pundit and foreign tabloids like UK Daily Mail have risen to become key nodes in the network.

Observing all of this, I have to channel my inner Johann Tetzel (skip to 4:05): the smartphone and social media are your passport to the terrestrial joys of the ethnostate.

About Hunter Wallace 12390 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

24 Comments

  1. To think there was a time not too long ago when Walter Kronkike and the Jew York Times had almost god-like powers. We should now fix our attention on dealing with those neo-liberal FAGGOTS Jack Dorsey and Marc Zyklonberg. Once they are gone the media will totally belong to us.

  6. Just about anything run by women gets run into the ground they are tactical Goliaths strategic children, all short term thinking, put them in duress even shorter time preference.

    I even bet the idiot lies about Trump tower gate the fems of the Left are saying today are crushed by Monday

  8. Mail on Sunday: The Kike is moving Tony Blair into The White House

    Revealed: Tony Blair’s secret White House summit as he launches astonishing bid to work for Donald Trump… as his Middle East peace envoy

    Blair attended a secret meeting at the White House to discuss working for Trump — Held talks with Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner this week — The former PM and Kushner have met three times in secret since September — Could setback Theresa May’s hopes of forging ‘special relationship’ with Trump

    By Simon Walters, Political Editor, Mail on Sunday, 4 March 2017 | Updated 5 March 2017

    Tony Blair has attended a secret meeting at the White House to discuss working for Donald Trump, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

    The former Prime Minister held talks with Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser [Kike] Jared Kushner on Wednesday with a view to becoming a Middle East peace envoy for Trump.

    This newspaper has learned that Blair and [Kike] Kushner have met three times in secret since September, including their three-hour summit in the West Wing last week.

    If Trump gives Blair the new role, it would mark an astonishing international comeback for the man whose reputation was left in tatters after the Iraq War.

    And it would be a major setback to Theresa May’s hopes of forging her own ‘special relationship’ with Trump, especially as former Ukip leader Nigel Farage is already a close confidant of the President.

    Blair’s wooing of the Trump family is also likely to re-open speculation about his close friendship with Rupert Murdoch’s ex-wife Wendi Deng, who is a friend of [Kike] Kushner’s wife, [Kike] Ivanka, Trump’s daughter.

    Blair and Deng were both present at a gathering of media and political powerbrokers in Aspen, Colorado, in September, where Blair first met [Kike] Kushner to discuss political issues. The event was organised by veteran US talk-show host Charlie Rose, who visited Trump at his New York HQ days after his election triumph. Former Chancellor George Osborne was a speaker at the Aspen event.

    Just days after Trump’s election victory in November, Blair and [Kike] Kushner met again when they dined at the £150-a-head Harry Cipriani restaurant in New York’s Sherry-Netherland Hotel.

    Blair has previously been a Middle East envoy for the so-called ‘Quartet’ of the EU, US, Russia and the United Nations – and his knowledge of the region is said to be attractive to the inexperienced Trump administration.

    The bombshell disclosure of his secret White House summit follows Blair’s decision three months ago to wind up his controversial business empire. Weeks later he announced a crusade against the wave of ‘new populism’ spreading across the world, but insisted that he had no intention of making a political comeback.

    At the time, his speech was seen as an attack on Brexit, though some also saw it as a swipe at the same wave of ‘populism’ that gave Trump the keys to the White House.

    Blair has previously been more direct about the rise of Trump, saying a year ago: ‘I look at politics today and wonder if I still understand it. I get really anxious when policy is being made by Twitter feed.’

    But he was more conciliatory after Trump’s victory. Blair admitted that the result was an ‘earthquake’ and that Trump’s rhetoric on immigration had shifted the political scene. He argued that Trump’s success was the beginning of a new ‘reality’ that politicians in the West had to come to terms with.

    Similarly, when Theresa May invited Trump to make a controversial state visit to the UK, Blair said: ‘I certainly don’t criticise the Prime Minister for reaching out to President Trump. It’s important that she builds a strong relationship.’

    Blair and [Kike] Kushner have discussed a role for the former Prime Minister in achieving what Trump has described as ‘the ultimate deal’ – peace in the Middle East. As a British citizen Blair would not be permitted to have a formal job in the US Government, but the President could give him a role as an adviser.

    Trump’s decision to put 36-year-old [Kike] Kushner in charge of efforts to revive the peace process, which collapsed in 2014, raised eyebrows in Washington as the property investor has no experience of high-level diplomacy. Middle East experts said [Kike] Kushner was almost unknown to Israeli [Kikestani] business and political figures and has had no dealings whatsoever with Palestinians.

    Trump denied his son-in-law’s appointment broke US anti-nepotism laws, saying [Kike] Kushner, an Orthodox Jew [i.e., Kike] who is the grandson of [#FakeHistory] Holocaust survivors [oy vey], ‘knows the region, knows the people, knows the players’.

    Blair was peace envoy for the ‘Quartet’ from 2007 to 2015. But he made little progress and was dogged by claims that he was ‘too close’ to the Israelis. When he stepped down, he was said to have been ‘frustrated’ by his limited role in helping the Palestinians.

    Blair’s appeal to the Trump administration is believed to be his vastly greater knowledge of the Middle East than [Kike] Kushner’s.

    A well-placed source said Blair’s role could be as [Kike] Kushner’s senior adviser: ‘Blair has been pitching hard for this job and Trump’s people are taking him very seriously.’

    A spokesman for Blair, who is currently in the Middle East, said: ‘We do not comment on private meetings.’

    If Tony Blair joins [Kike] Jared Kushner’s Middle East peace team, it will bring him into close contact with Mr Kushner’s wife, [Kike] Ivanka, Donald Trump’s powerful daughter.

    There will be one topic that Mr Blair will be keen to avoid in any dealings with [Kike] Ivanka: her best friend Wendi Deng.

    In 2013, The Mail on Sunday revealed that Mr Blair and Ms Deng, then married to media mogul Rupert Murdoch, had a series of meetings, including overnight stays at Mr Murdoch’s homes, without his knowledge.

    A furious Mr Murdoch filed for divorce after finding out about the meetings and a note, apparently written by Ms Deng to herself, which suggested she had ‘warm feelings’ for Mr Blair comparable to a ‘crush’.

    Mr Blair, happily married to barrister and part-time judge Cherie, and Ms Deng strenuously denied any improper behaviour.

    In August, [Kike] Ivanka posted a photograph of herself and Ms Deng on holiday in Croatia. The following month, they were together in the VIP box at the US Open tennis championship at Flushing Meadow.

    They sat beside billionaire music mogul [Kike] David Geffen, also a friend of Mr Blair. One of the meetings between Ms Deng and Mr Blair that enraged Mr Murdoch was on a super yacht owned by [Kike] Mr Geffen.

    The friendship between Ms Deng and [Kike] Ivanka is thought to go back several years. In 2008, Ms Deng, at the time still married to Mr Murdoch, reportedly intervened when Ivanka’s relationship with [Kike] Mr Kushner faced difficulties.

    According to a magazine, Ms Deng invited the couple to Mr Murdoch’s yacht Vertigo to help them patch things up.

    Mr Blair just avoided bumping into Ms Deng when he met [Kike] Mr Kushner at a gathering of media and political power brokers in Aspen, Colorado six months ago.

    A witness said: ‘[Kike] Jared, Wendi, [Kike] Ivanka and Blair were there but Tony and Wendi did not meet.’

    A photograph of a smiling Tony Blair, thumbs tucked in jean pockets, strolling alongside newly elected President George Bush at his Camp David retreat in 2001 came to define Blair’s Premiership.

    Just over two years later, the pair defied world opinion and invaded Iraq.

    It was a disaster which, arguably, destroyed the reputation of both. And many experts say it was a major factor in the rise of the so-called Islamic State terror group.

    Such history will make many despair at the idea Blair may be given a new role in ending the Middle East chaos whose flames he fanned.

    But the former Prime Minister has always been a political chameleon. And he has usually found a way of schmoozing his way into the White House.

    In 1998, he teamed up with fellow left-of-centre showman Bill Clinton before delivering his famous ‘liberal intervention’ speech in Chicago. Both were subsequently hailed as heroes when their military action ended the bloody Bosnian civil war.

    But the same doctrine ended in disaster when Blair and Bush attempted to intervene in Afghanistan and Iraq, amid claims that they lied about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

    By rights, Democrat Barack Obama was a far more natural political ally for Blair than Right-wing cowboy Bush. But Obama, keen to distance himself from his predecessor, kept Bush’s warmonger British pal at arm’s length.

    Despite pledging a $54 billion (£44 billion) increase in defence spending and vowing to wipe out IS, Trump has also said he intends to focus on rebuilding the US economy rather than getting involved in foreign wars.

    On her recent visit to the US, Theresa May went out of her way to echo Trump’s foreign policy move. She did so by disowning the ‘failed policies of the past’ – an obvious reference to Bush, Blair, Iraq and Afghanistan and the clearest possible public repudiation of Blair’s ‘liberal intervention’. Now the predecessor she publicly disowned in a speech to Trump’s supporters could be back in the White House advising the Trump team on foreign affairs. And doing it behind her back.

    Asked how she would get over personal differences with flamboyant Trump, vicar’s daughter Mrs May coyly replied: ‘Opposites attract.’ Wily charmer Mr Blair is more than capable of using precisely the same chat-up line to weave his way into the affections of Donald Trump.

    After all, following Brexit, Mrs May will no longer be able to act as a ‘bridge’ between the White House and Brussels. Blair is on first-name terms with most EU leaders including Angela Merkel. Having made millions from business dealings with all manner of super-rich world leaders, Blair will get on with Trump like a house on fire.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4282190/Tony-Blair-s-secret-White-House-summit-work-Trump.html

  9. They actually think that it is a beginning of anew golden age for them…ahahahahaha…no.

  10. Mr. Wallace, all the institutions and dates mentioned above will have to share the lime light of notoriety with the year of 2017 and Occidental Dissent.

    The breakaway mindset has been firmly rooted. We have broken through the controlled opposition of talk radio and Rush Limbaugh. What is old is new again, common sense.

    Alt-Right brings us closer to nature’s laws of action-reaction. Whereas all the above institutions denied that. They believed that because they formulated an action, they, in turn, could control the reaction. This turned out to be wishful thinking.

    On the other hand, Alt-Right, understands basic concepts of human interaction and doesn’t seek to subvert that. It moves itself within the natural framework action-reaction.

    Wishful thinking of the boomer generation is gone. The future is up to the like of you and your contemporaries. Those who understand that things are just as they are and no matter how you mould action, mthe outcome will always revert to

  12. Lugenpresse will continue screaming the anti-White narrative but fewer and fewer are listening. They’ve been by passed by social media and they know it.

  13. I am a 30 something who does not own a TV. I get my news from three sources: right wing sites on the internet (OD being high on the list!), the basically neo-con Fox News that I see hysterical snippets of as it blares from restaurant walls, and the rabidly left-wing Louisville Courier Journal that I find lying around a restaurant once a week or so. I agree that among intelligent young people, TV and the mainstream news media is a non-factor.
    https://putnamlibertynotes.wordpress.com/2017/02/03/neo-babelism/

    • Yes, Captain, Mr. Levin stepped up to protect Mr. Trump, just as Michael Savage stepped forward to make him known.

      I don’t know about you, but, at this point, anyone who helps press the dagger into the heart of the Democrats is welcome – Northerner, Southerner, Jew, Christian, Atheist, Negro, Hispanoick, & White.

      Hell, I’ll even applaud for the Muslim mayor of Montvale, New Jersey, who, just the other day, backt up Trump by resisting tremendous in-state political pressure to announce he community as a ‘sanctuary-city’.

      In an unexpected twist, he did not – he, instead, declaring it to be the contrary! – a town that would make no exception to the following of the law.

  15. Seems that the media now has two choices.

    1. Pretend that Obama would never spy on the leader of the
    Opposition…because that would be evil.

    2. Defend the spying by Obama on a domestic political opponent.

  16. 5 black thugs arrested for or in connection to murder of white college student

    http://www.twincities.com/2017/03/03/duluth-police-arrest-5-in-killing-of-st-paul-cops-son/

    DULUTH, Minn. — Five suspects are in custody in connection with the
    Feb. 14 shooting death of University of Minnesota-Duluth student William
    Grahek, Duluth police announced Friday afternoon.

    Grahek, 22, is the son of a St. Paul police sergeant.

    Deandre Demetrius Davenport, 21; Noah Duane Baker, 19; Noah Anthony
    Charles King, 18; Tara Rai Baker, 22; and Xavier Alfred Haywood, 26,
    are all being held in the St. Louis County Jail.

    Davenport, Noah Baker and King are being held on preliminary charges
    of second-degree intentional homicide charges; Tara Baker for aiding and
    abetting second-degree intentional homicide; and Haywood for aiding an
    offender.

    Noah Baker was arrested Feb. 17 on unrelated charges and remained in custody.

    The decision to arrest the five individuals was made in conjunction
    with the St. Louis County attorney’s office, police said. The arrests
    were made by the Duluth Police Department along with members of the Lake
    Superior Drug and Violent Crimes Task Force.

  17. Rumours of the mainstream media’s demise are exaggerated, to paraphrase Mark Twain. The mainstream media’s response to Obama’s alleged spying on the Trump campaign is proof they are not concerned with the rise of the alt-media as a competitor.

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