Musk's Twitter Purchase Furthers the Media Concentration that Harms Democracy
NOVEMBER 21, 2022
BY MARK WEISBROT
Social media has gotten a bad name in recent years, much of it deserved, as it has played a sizable role in the spread of right-wing backwardness and even authoritarianism in much of the world. This includes, most prominently, the reach and especially staying power of the most powerful politician in the world’s most powerful country, Donald J. Trump.
But first, to avoid exaggeration or a misleading picture, we must recognize that the problems of misinformation and disinformation that enable twenty-first century politics to “build a bridge to the 19th century” are bigger than Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, and Tik Tok. The traditional media has also failed us in important ways.
To take just one example, a poll by Data for Progress found that voters in West Virginia — one of America’s poorest states — supported the landmark Build Back Better legislation proposed by Democrats in 2021 by a margin of 43 percentage points. They supported its individual components by similar or larger margins: investing in long-term care, expanding Medicare coverage, paid family and medical leave, universal pre-K, extending health insurance subsidies, and clean energy investments. This bill would have changed the United States arguably as much as the New Deal, which put Democrats in power nationally for almost all of 1932 to 1980. And it would have transformed the lives of West Virginians, like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security did. But their senator, Joe Manchin, blocked it.
This outcome is possible because the vast majority of West Virginians — like most of the country — did not know what was in that legislation. The biggest media outlets did not mention very much; what most people heard most about the bill was its price tag, $3.5 trillion; which, over the decade that it would take effect, is about 1 percent of national income.
More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/11/21/musks-twitter-purchase-furthers-the-media-concentration-that-harms-democracy/
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