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For as long as anyone can remember, the media didn’t just report politics. They shaped it.
News anchors decided what was newsworthy, often ignoring stories that did not fit their narrative. Newspaper columnists fed us opinions. Politicians, to be successful, found they needed to cultivate the media in order to get a fair hearing. Conservatives were demonized. When digital media first emerged twenty years ago, I wrote a book about how this might change. Rather than being spoon-fed our opinions by an Ivy League elite, we might see a democratization of opinion forming.
Tragically, big tech spent most of the past decade colluding with government and the old media to clamp down on the digital revolution. Algorithms were programmed to suppress ‘wrong’ opinions. Twitter banned people for saying there are only two genders. They even took down the account of a sitting US President. Facebook closed the accounts of people who questioned the effectiveness of Covid lockdowns. Rather than dispersing knowledge, for a while it looked as if bad actors would be able to use digital tech to centralize control, China-style.
Then Elon Musk bought Twitter/X – and fired the leftist activists that had been censoring it. This is perhaps the most significant political event in decades, even if few yet realize it. Twitter/X is now the number one news source in most Western countries and growing rapidly. Able to host video and live broadcasts, Twitter/X is forcing other dishonest digital platforms to change their ways, or lose audience share. YouTube no longer feels so hostile to conservative views.
We saw the immediate impact of this during the recent Presidential election. The legacy media and corrupt digital platforms could not suppress and misrepresent the way they used to. Attempts to distort what Trump or JD Vance had or had not said no longer worked. Instead of relying on brazenly partisan news anchors to cross question candidates, candidates could go on long form shows, like Joe Rogan, and set out in detail their stance. Fifty million people watched Trump on Rogan alone. For decades, politicians have been able to get away with speaking in meaningless soundbites. Talking in soundbites no longer pays when you are doing deep dive interviews on a podcast.
Team Trump understood this. Long form podcasts were a key part of their election strategy. Kamala never engaged to the same extent and came second.
Here at MCPP, we like to think we have been ahead of the curve on this. While we don’t have the resources of a Rogan or Patrick Bet David, we do produce a weekly video and podcast in our humble studio, which gets tens of thousands of views a month. So far this year, what MCPP has posted online has been seen by MILLIONS (YouTube 200,000 plus, Twitter 22 million) – and that doesn’t include content we produce hosted by other platforms, like PragerU and others.
The counter reformation by the tech elite has failed. As Elon Musk says, we are the media now. Opinion forming is being democratized. Conservative think tanks have an unprecedented opportunity to win the battle of ideas. 2025 is going to be awesome!
Douglas Carswell is the President and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy
MageeNews.com is the online news source for Simpson and surrounding counties as well as the State of Mississippi.
