Hellscape 2020: A New American Journal graphic by Walter Simon [Art Market Place]
The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
COULTERVILLE, Calif. – When I tell you that funding a new kind of media is critical if there is to be a future for American democracy, I am not making this up.
We are at a critical point in the development of this new brand of non-profit media. As you may have heard, federal grant programs are being looted by the current administration in Washington.
Federal Judge Agrees with States that White House Misused Policy to Revoke Grant Funding
Trump Administration Used Keyword Screening to Kill Billions in Federal Research Grants
We have applied for every grant we can find to fund YosemiteRadio.Org and our new Yosemite Arts and Crafts Center. But it seems all the grants are going to those who make campaign contributions to certain politicians or buy crypto meme coins of the current occupant in the White House (see my recent comment on the New York Times story on Facebook).
When I retired from covering daily news and politics nearly a year ago and moved to California, we vowed to avoid getting in the middle of the partisan political fights in Washington and to focus on the history and plight of national parks, the needs of our community, to follow trends in the music business and spend more time playing and listening to great music. But after nearly a year of thinking about this, something else needs to be done.
Since the Trump administration and this Congress shuttered the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, numerous local public radio stations have gone under all over the country. Radio stations like KQED in San Francisco and CapRadio in Sacramento are going through the motions, running basic fifth grade level news stories and playing the same music playlists they have been relying on for years.
Even the management of National Public Radio can’t seem to understand that no matter how much positive coverage they give this president all day long every day, he will never lift a finger to save them. Destroying the objective news media is the point. That is how authoritarian dictators thrive.
So if I have to come out of semi-retirement mode to cover this story myself, maybe that’s what I will do.
Since moving to California, I have surveyed the landscape of the news media in this great big state with the fourth largest economy in the world behind only the United States, China and Germany. On a per capita basis, California’s GDP is greater than all of these countries.
When I was growing up in the news business in the 1980s and ’90s, The Los Angeles Times was right up there with the New York Times as a national newspaper worth paying attention to. It is now mostly useless and the digital paywall is not worthy of what they are trying to charge for it. The Washington Post came into its own in the early 2000s and was a must read for many years, until Jeff Bezos destroyed it during the final year of the Biden administration.
Social Media
It is clear as day now that no social media program is even trying to fill this gap to inform the public in a democratic society. Untimely garbage fills up the feed, compounded even more by the polluted content being stolen from traditional media and collated by Artificial Intelligence data centers and bots.
For members of the public who still bother to read news online, you can find a nugget of truth here and there on platforms like Substack. But for most people, it seems, waisting time all day watching sensational, crazy podcasters and funny videos has replaced reading and any attempt at creative, abstract thought.
In many ways this is the end of the world as we knew it, for those of us who came of age in the great 20th century.
The 21st century got screwed up from the very beginning, when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Conner cast the deciding vote to hand the 2000 election to George W. Bush over Bill Clinton’s Vice President Al Gore. If the recounts in Florida had been allowed to continue, Gore would have won that election and we would be living in a very different world today. The magazine Vanity Fair had the best coverage of the Supreme Court on this story, and before she died, O’Conner admitted she made a big mistake.
At the turn of the century, I was in Knoxville, Tennessee publishing one of the first online magazines and partying like it was 1999 at the Sassy Anne’s blues bar. It was 1999, after all, and back then, we still knew how to work hard and party. The dot com bubble went bust, however, and sent everyone “Reelin’ in the Years,” like Steely Dan sang.
“The things that pass for knowledge I can’t understand.”
We thought search engines like Google and the internet and World Wide Web would help save democracy and the planet. But it is crystal clear now that Google just got turned into a greedy, selfish evil empire.
When social media came along, mainly Facebook and Twitter, people like Ariana Huffington thought we could use this technology to help. But reeling from all the media criticism about the problems with Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg retreated and decided to screw the news media by programming the Meta algorithm to ignore news and news links. When Elon Musk took over Twitter and turned it into black, fascist X, the social media party was over.
Now the bots are taking over, and they are simply amplifying the same misinformation they were trained on.
When Bush left the White House after getting us into a war based on faulty intel in Iraq and then nearly crashed the global economy with deregulation and tax cuts for the rich, his public approval was well below 30 percent. As a Senator, Barack Obama saved the world, literally, from a global recession by negotiating the financial bailout. Yes, it was unpopular, and led to the Occupy movement as well as the Tea Party.
But he won the presidency twice in landslides, and kept our democracy alive for eight years. We could sleep somewhat peacefully at least, not worried about waking up every day with more crazy pronouncements on social media out of the White House. He couldn’t get much through Congress, however, because of Senate Minority and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
No one gave this Batman Joker Donald Trump a chance of winning the presidency in 2015 and ’16. But David Underhill and I saw him coming from the vantage point of a newsroom within walking distance of where he held his first big stadium rally in Mobile, Alabama. We were the only media pundits to predict his victory, next to Michael Moore’s comments on MSNBC.
In the runup to the 2020 election, we urged Democrats to put aside their petty, selfish differences and unite to stop Trump’s reelection in a mass act of altruism. That’s exactly what happened, and we celebrated Joe Biden’s victory with much relief and shots of vodka by a fire in the suburbs of Washington.
But it was a short-lived victory. The violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 set the stage for four years of wall-to-wall coverage for Trump. The president himself could barely get a word in edge-wise in the media and on social media.
Now here we are in the great, dark nothingness on the verge of taking over the world like the dark force engulfing the wonderland world of Fantasia in “The NeverEnding Story” or the dark threat to Middle Earth in “The Lord of the Rings.” Or maybe it’s like the Enemies of Man in “Da Vinci’s Demons.”
I am certainly no Atreyu, Frodo Baggins or Leonardo Da Vinci. But I do know a thing or two about accurately framing news stories so at least some members of the public might know the facts on which to base their activism. And I have a long history to prove it, with many success stories published in a memoir on Amazon.
Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again
Admittedly, it may be too late to save this world, the planet or American democracy. But with adequate funding, I am willing to try one more time. If it is not funded, all hope may be lost.
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