IF WE BUILD A LEFT-WING MEDIA, IT NEEDS MORE THAN ONE ENEMY

Josh Marshall has a theory about Kamala Harris's loss and the American media environment.

... Harris performed best — that is, underperformed least — in the battleground states. In the places where her campaign flooded the airwaves with her messaging ... she did better than in most uncompetitive states, red and blue, that saw no campaigning at all....

That speaks to the reality that most of the country is awash in right-wing propaganda all the time. For the olds, it’s Fox News, conservative radio and Sinclair-owned local news; for the youths, it’s the right-wing manosphere podcasts and streams that Trump so assiduously courted all campaign long (plus soothing TikToks promoting retrograde gender roles, evangelical values and distrust of government regulation — think the trad wives and crunchy so-far-left-they’ve-looped-around-to-the-right content — aimed specifically at women).

As Marshall puts it, Harris did best where she "set up a temporary but pervasive media apparatus." He adds:

It’s a playing field that Republicans not only dominate; Democrats don’t even compete. They still depend heavily on traditional media sources that simply don’t operate the same way these right-wing PR arms do.

Marshall brings up the Pod Save America podcast -- which to him suggests a difference between right-wing and progressive/liberal/moderate audiences (and content creators).

There are structural problems with mimicking this right-wing content beat-for-beat. The Pod Save guys, while open about their political allegiances, often criticize the party and its politicians. It would be much more difficult to recreate the fawning adoration of Donald Trump Fox News and those podcasts produce for, say, Joe Biden on the left.

Maybe it would be a bad idea to create a fawning liberal equivalent to Fox News, but would it be difficult? By the end of his second term, George W. Bush was more unpopular than Biden is now, and yet Fox kept up its cheerleading for Bush and the Iraq War for as long as he was in office.

But here's the other thing Fox did then, and still does: When it's not cheerleading for the head of the Republican Party, it's attacking Democrats -- including low- and mid-level Democrats, as well as people its audience identifies with Democrats and liberalism (trans people, Hollywood celebrities, "Antifa," immigrants who commit crimes, people of color who use guns in gun-control cities, and so on). The focus on some individuals can persist for days, weeks, or even months. That's why what was intended to be a niche social media campaign for Bud Light involving a trans influencer named Dylan Mulvaney led to a national boycott by beer drinkers who were never expected to see the campaign. That's why every Fox viewer knows the name of Laken Riley, who was killed earlier this year by an undocumented immigrant in Georgia. That's why, twenty years ago, a Colorado professor named Ward Churchill became nationally famous after he referred to 9/11 victims in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns."

By contrast, liberal media outlets focus on Trump, Trump, and more Trump. Occasionally there'll be an alternate target, but usually it's a harmless-seeming figure of ridicule -- Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert. Especially outside of election season, the narrow range of targets conveys the impression that only some Republicans are crazy, that only some Republicans are dangerous, and that the dangerous illiberalism is confined to deep-red states or districts, as well as Trumpworld. On Fox, by contrast, the liberal menace is everywhere.

For years, the focus at MSNBC and at liberal podcasts has been not just Trump, but the legal fight to take down Trump -- a fight that's now ended in failure. Is that because this is the most important story? Or is it because these media outlets want an upmarket, highly educated audience that roots for lawyers?

A search for the name Jack Smith at MSNBC.com gets 17,100 hits. MSNBC has talked much more about Smith than about, for example, some of the dangerous candidates who ran for office as Republicans this year. Even Mark Robinson, the GOP gubernatorial candidate from North Carolina who called himself "a black NAZI" on a porn forum, gets only 730 hits. Other candidates who probably would have gotten saturation coverage on Fox if the parties were reversed have gotten even less coverage than Robinson at MSNBC. Royce White, the Alex Jones-backing, anti-Semitic Republican candidate for Amy Klobuchar's Senate seat in Minnesota who also said, "Women have become too mouthy," gets only 19 hits at MSNBC. Michele Morrow, the QAnon-backing GOP candidate for North Carolina school superintendent who has called for Barack Obama's execution, and who lost her election 51%-49%, gets only 9 hits at MSNBC.

And I haven't even mentioned the MAGA-friendly preachers or manosphere misogynists who get attention at sites like Right Wing Watch but rarely show up on MSNBC or in liberal podcasts. Fox knows how to create the impression that there are enemies everywhere, and that the ideas of these enemies are ridiculous but dangerous. Fox plucks many people from obscurity in order to argue this point. Liberal outlets, by contrast, imply that life might be just fine if Trump would go away.

My hunch is that millions of Americans don't like book banning, think QAnon is crazy, and don't want to live in a country run by theocratic conspiratorialists. I can imagine an approach to left-wing media that's almost tabloid in nature, with lots of villains. The message would be that the audience has simple decency and common sense, but we have to stop these dangerous, aggressive crackpots all across America who want to do us harm. That might work better than endless chitchat with well-dressed lawyers. And it would be the truth.