America’s Right-Wing Propaganda Problem Might Be Terminal

America’s descent into mass delusion isn’t happenstance. The demise of courageous journalism isn’t a happy accident. Its replacement with engagement-chasing infotainment and propaganda isn’t an error. It’s a global assault on reason and informed consensus, and corporations and authoritarian bullies like Donald Trump are both architects and benefactors.

For decades, academics warned anybody who’d listen that the death of your local newspaper and broadcast consolidation was creating local “news deserts,” where residents have no access to reliable, accurate local news. 

Stanford researchers have shown that this dearth of quality local news has resulted in a less informed and more divided electorate, empowered local corruption, and measurably shifted electoral outcomes. A recent study out of Northwestern University found that Trump won 91 percent of “news desert” counties by an average of 54 percentage points. 

A healthy media ecosystem and diverse, well-funded independent journalism is the bulwark against right-wing propaganda. Instead of addressing the problem head on, policy leaders rubber-stamped problematic mergers, treated media policy as an afterthought, paid empty lip service to quality journalism, and normalized Republican propaganda.

As a result, corporatist media has lost the trust of the public thanks to feckless, ad-engagement-chasing “view from nowhere” journalism. This is journalism that prioritizes clicks, access, and the interests of the ownership class, while a right-wing disinformation machine, built over the last 45 years, convinces impressionable Americans to celebrate their self-immolation. 

Both problems have taken a hatchet to the fading vestiges of informed consensus, sending the already-shaky American experiment reeling into a new post-truth, facts-optional reality. As the last election made clear, artifice, vibes, gut feelings, and the incoherent ramblings of c-tier comedian podcasters now trump anything resembling informed debate.  

To be clear, millions of Americans adore the racism, sexism, and authoritarianism Donald Trump is selling. They applaud the vitriol, mockery, and trolling of their ideological enemies. Millions of Americans signed up for Trumpism with clear eyes about the vast horrors to come. Trump supporters should, in no way, be declared free of agency.

But to be just as clear: Untold millions of Americans voted for Trump with a violently distorted understanding of who the candidate is, what he supports, what his policies will actually accomplish, and how severely his second term will hurt them and those they love.

Trump’s election win can be attributed to no shortage of factors, be it racism, sexism, stale Democratic messaging, inconsistent Dem policies, or a general post-COVID anti-incumbency wave among voters angry at high consumer prices. But America’s toxic news and information is indisputably playing a starring role cultivating a new era of mass delusion.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Post-election, there’s been no shortage of handwringing about how the electorate had deep thoughts about inflationary policies. But in a country where 54 percent of adults operate at a sixth-grade reading level, public polling indicates that the public was violently and intentionally misinformed on subjects like the economy, immigration, crime, and the economy.

These distorted and patently incorrect opinions aren’t manifesting in a vacuum. They’re the direct result of a coordinated assault on education standards and independent journalism, fused with a campaign to fill the heads of the electorate with pebbles, mashed potatoes, and a rotating platter of ad engagement bait and distraction.

Whether it’s lowering the tax rates of billionaires, stripping away consumer-protection standards, destroying the environment, or decimating labor rights, Republican policies historically aren’t very popular. Which is why Republicans have spent generations undermining academia, education, journalism, and expertise itself. 

While right-wing propaganda has its roots in the 1930s, it wasn’t until the ’70s that Republican thought leaders truly began seeding the notion that any media criticism of Republican policy exhibited a “left-wing bias” and should be discarded as unreliable. In reality, as media critic Parker Molloy notes, most mainstream U.S. journalism skews center-right.

Discrediting criticism of right-wing ideology wasn’t enough to convince the electorate to repeatedly rally against their own best self-interests. So by the 1980s, Republicans dedicated themselves to building their own alternate reality, pseudo-journalism media empires.

Talk radio stars like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck were pioneers in building this new right-wing delusion bubble. The Reagan and Clinton eras’ abandonment of coherent federal media policies and media-consolidation standards then paved the way for broadcast television to join the fray, making right-wing American pseudo-news all pervasive.

From the ashes of the abandonment of responsible federal media governance rose Sinclair Broadcasting, which now leverages 294 television stations across 89 U.S. markets, to beam unabashed right-wing propaganda into the living rooms of millions of Americans.

It also culminated in the creation of Fox News, one of the most effective right-wing propaganda empires ever constructed. Fox News—routinely treated as a legitimate news organization by Democratic and Republican officials alike—joins Sinclair in blaming the entirety of U.S. societal ills on one thing: a failure to adequately coddle affluent white male power. 

Republicans also leveraged what was left of the country’s dying newspaper industry to amplify their manufactured grievance politics. Many U.S. newspapers have been either stripped for parts by hedge-fund ghouls or replaced by so-called “pink slime” fake newspapers, custom built to disguise local right wing agitprop as legitimate local news. 

Pri Bengani, a senior researcher at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, studied the phenomenon in 2022 and found that there were 1,200 bogus local newspapers around the country, most of them run by Republican operatives.

Now there are three times as many fake newspapers since 2019, which roughly equals the number of real journalism organizations in America. In many instances, fake news organizations are significantly better funded than real journalism, which continues to see record layoffs as the extraction class pivots away from the public interest and toward hollow infotainment.

Affluent Republicans have routinely purchased prominent brands like Newsweek, and turned them into so-called “zombie” brands amicable to right-wing ideals. All while CBS, Vice Media, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and CNN responded to authoritarianism by softening their criticism of Republicans, hiring more Republicans for “diversity,” and further amplifying right-wing voices under the pretense the ideology was somehow under-represented.

Preemptively appeasing authoritarianism (or “obeying in advance”) makes everything worse, but modern media outlets, keen on protecting access, advertising reach, and the interests of affluent white male ownership, aren’t incentivized to learn the lesson.

The Internet and the Troll

Nothing supercharged Republican information warfare efforts like the modern internet. Adopting the virtual pugilism of 4chan and the Gamergate harassment campaign, Republicans quickly cultivated a vast interconnected ecosystem of grievance merchants feeding their audience a 24/7 slurry of outrage and controversy designed to agitate, distract, and divide.

Instead of debating the reasons corporate power has decimated environmental standards and the middle class, the Republican gibberish machine has Americans fighting over the sexuality of candy marketing. Instead of debating the destruction of consumer protection standards, Republicans have the public fighting over long established vaccine science. 

Authoritarian propaganda isn’t just designed to mislead. It’s designed to pour lemon juice in the wounds of cultural divisions, distract from corruption and unchecked corporate power, and construct a permission culture for cruelty. It’s designed to confuse and disorient, making it impossible for the average voter to locate true north in a tsunami of information overload.

Much of “new media” isn’t any better. Recent data from the Pew Research Center found that 40% of Americans under 40 now get their news from online influencers. More than half of those influencers are right-wing men, in part because there’s plenty of money to be made telling millions of people that greed, racism, and sexism are decidedly good things.

Republicans have long since cultivated a massive Spanish-language propaganda apparatus Democrats have no answer for. They’ve leveraged sophisticated new methods to target swing-state voters with highly targeted online ads and disinformation. They’ve purchased Twitter and turned it into a right-wing propaganda mill full of the latest authoritarian memes.

Meanwhile the Democratic Party establishment, stale gerontocratic messaging in hand, is still trying to figure out where it left its pants. Democratic media regulators can’t even acknowledge that anything out of the ordinary is happening. The Republican assault on informed reason has been largely met with abject fecklessness by Democratic officials.

Ultimately there’s no real ideological center to Trumpism. It’s not a movement genuinely interested in ideas, free speech, honest debate or discourse. Trumpism is the laziest of lies and the ultimate culmination of America’s longstanding obsession with artifice. It’s the end result of decades of failed media policy, corruption, and unaddressed institutional rot. 

Trumpism barely tries to convince the public because it barely has to do so. A vast unopposed web of well-funded bullshit artists have spent decades doing all the heavy lifting. After all, there’s plenty of money to be made in exploiting valid public anger at widespread institutional failure to further befuddle, distract, and confuse the American electorate. 

The Way Out Is Through

There’s no simple fix to a problem generations in the making. As the benefits from Democratic ARPA and infrastructure bills made clear, quality policy (when it actually does materialize) isn’t enough in the post-truth era. Reality desperately needs a better PR department. That begins by recognizing that we’re under a well-funded, well-coordinated information assault.

Pluck any random piece of political or polling journalism from the newswires and see if they even mention, at any point, that the country’s news and information ecosystems are a toxic slurry or propaganda and corporatist drivel. Being honest about the problem, then putting real effort and money into building structural alternatives is the first step, media scholars say.

“The tricky part is that we need to build our own infrastructure,” Victor Pickard, an American media scholar at the University Of Pennsylvania tells me. “Overly relying on existing corporate and commercial-driven social media platforms has continued to pose major constraints for progressives. But there is no easy fix for that, obviously.”

We can try and detach U.S. journalism from the corrosive nature of advertising engagement. We can take a cue from Finland and shore up our education standards with an eye on media literacy and combating propaganda. We can encourage FCC regulators to restore media consolidation limits and protect diversity in media ownership.

We can embrace public funding for journalism, given data indicates public journalism funding helps protect democracies. Democrats can completely retool their feckless public messaging efforts with an eye on simplicity, redundancy, creativity, and brutal repetition. Activists and consumer groups can do a better job exploiting social media virality to reach young Americans. 

We can build decentralized social-media platforms more resilient to the whims of erratic billionaires. We can restore trust in institutions by fighting corruption. We can find, fund, and amplify ethical journalists and influencers of conscience wherever possible. We can embrace antitrust reform and local alternatives to consolidated corporate power.

We can exhibit greater personal discipline when it comes to amplifying outrage engagement bait on social media. We can stop pretending that authoritarians are interested in a good faith debate on policy. We can stop watching cable-TV news empires that threw the public welfare under the bus a quarter century ago. We can realize we’re under attack and act accordingly.

America’s descent into propaganda-fueled authoritarianism will provide no shortage of actionable experience, assuming our hot mess of an oligarchic kakistocracy makes it through the long dark tunnel intact.