Media Whores

I furore broke out in the right-wing media space recently, with some right-wing guy named “Crowder” attacking a “Jewish last name” right-wing media host — probably by the name of Shapiro I am guessing. Shapiro apparently was offering Crowder a $\$50$ million contract over 4 years, but which had payments reduced if YouTube banned Crowder or if Crowder lost advertisers.

So what apparently happened is Crowder goes on some rant explaining how the Jewish side of the right-wing media is in league with “Big tech” and is out to stiff humble young millionaires like Crowder from getting their natural rights to the ad funds and billionaire oligarchs who fund right-wing media.

All a bit hilarious and sad. We just don’t get such laughs in New Zealand, poor us.

A breadtube commentator did a segment on this. It was fine, clickbait for the leftists who enjoy seeing right-wing cannibalism for a change (there’s already enough of that on “the left” — fake leftists since a true leftist would know about solidarity).

Anyway, what finally triggered me to comment on this breadtuber’s channel was his comment at the end where he says,

“… money is power under capitalism.”

The implication being a truism that billionaire funding of right-wing media is thoroughly out of control, which means a very few voices in media spaces get way out of proportion views and clicks. Advertising and marketing is a blunt weapon for getting views, but the statistics work well enough if you can throw a few million away in pocket change.

I took exception like a true MMT nerd though. Not to the point about the distortion of media spaces, which I agreed with, but to the false view of money.

The Ōhanga Pai take: “Not quite right. Money is purchasing power under any system, even anarchism (money is an IOU of the issuer). Under capitalism the ability to hoard currency by exploiting workers is the accumulation of unearned power. That’s what is out of control under capitalism, but moreso neoliberal capitalism which breaks Marx’s concept of capitalism being a revolutionary self-defeating force. (The neoliberal state bails out capitalist firms, quite regularly.).

I will not imagine any sympathetic leftists boosting my comment, but if anyone’s a true leftist (fighting for emancipation of the working class) they should give my little comment a ’like'.

Why? Because it is simply a lot harder to defeat the injustices of actual existing capitalism if you do not understand the monetary system. Governments do not need rich people to exist. A government “of and for the people” can always fund any alternative media the public has the appetite for, which means not driven by views, likes and clicks, but by constraints of accuracy, relevancy to civic discourse, non-partisanship and truth. That requires good media ombundsmen — publicly appointed, not partisan politically appointed.

Even before that this requires some serious journalism education reforms. Journalists seem today to be too prone to writing for clicks and likes, dispensing with any morality and ethics they might have once dimly perceived. The journalists should be mirrors reflecting our society back to us all accurately without bias. Not whores chasing the wars, violence, gossip and sensationalism. But we will not get such public service media without educating journalists and paying them decent public servant wages to out-bid the billionaire private media for good journalists. The bid need not bee too high, we do not need sell-out corrupt greedy journalists in the public sector, just a few more of the “good guys”. Take the worry about salary off the table, then the good journalists will turn up to work for a lot less than the billionaires are prepared to fund the sell-outs and ideologues.

We are nowhere near that even in humble egalitarian little New Zealand. Our public media is good on being seemingly reasonably non-partisan, but it is still infested with neoliberal brainworms. So NZ public media is in fact highly partisan, violating the purpose of publicly funded news media, since they present an entirely neoliberal worldview, we’ve got left-wing neoliberalism, centrist neoliberalism and right-wing neoliberalism in our public news stations. A lot like YouTube and Twitter only without the billionaire supported ultra right-wing. It’s a buffet selection of all varieties of worms.

You have to be hopeful though, as a working class grunt.

When it takes billionaires to support your rich-kid fake-populist content, you know you’re actually losing in cultural terms, it’s just hard for you to see it that way, since you’re blinded by the cash.

I will not disagree with you in-the-know MMT’ers if you think it is all a bit depressing. I just know the Crowder’s and Shapiro’s of the media landscape have the charisma of wet rags to me, so I will infer the same to many others, so we know their ideas are not the reason they’re raking in the profits, it’s their billionaire daddies.

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