Four years too late U.S. President Donald Trump has finally woken up to the fact that as a billionaire, rather than fighting the Mainstream Media in brilliant futility over Twitter, he could just buy a chunk of it to get the results he wants.
The truth is out there and it’s available for purchase if you have phenomenal amounts of wealth like Mr. Trump does, that would allow him to buy and expand Newsmax, which the President said he is seriously considering.
The current owner of Newsmax has said that the deal is not going down, but considering how much anyone even loosely related to Trump has been attacked this may be a strategic declaration.
This smaller but substantial media outlet gained a lot of prominence by sticking up for Trump’s version of reality on election night, while supposedly pro-Republican Fox News jumped at the chance to declare Biden the victor before the final vote was counted.
Perhaps if Trump would have bought or threatened his way into the Mainstream Media he would have been declared the winner long ago.
It has become a sad but undeniable fact that any powerful national leader must control at least some portion of the media or they will have no power in office at all nor much chance of getting there in the first place, having a big block of Social Media would sure help as well.
Image: Fox News could have been more of a reliable ally if Trump was at the helm and not just an “ally”.
From the standpoint of foreign eyes outside of the West, America’s 2020 election night looked awfully familiar – voting with a lot of very questionable results, strange videos of blatant electoral fraud, thugs on the streets ready to take action, and complete and total media support for one side.
In short, it looks like America has finally become the victim of its own greatest foreign policy tactic – the Color Revolution.
One could debate the previous statement but what is clear is that if the media as a whole is against you as a leader, it does not matter what your actual accomplishments (or lack thereof) are – it only really matters how the media projects you onto the population.
It is the Mainstream Media that creates the historical narrative that we in society accept as “recent history” or “current events” and if that narrative is written so as to have the national leader be declared “worse than Hitler” many will believe it, no matter how blatantly silly and proovable false the statement is.
If the narrative is woven far less cartoonishly then it can convince the general public enmasse that their leader is not worthy of his position and that he “needs to go”.
This is the way politics works and no matter how much moral outrage one may feel, the reality is that any sort of counter narrative to the Mainstream Media is going to cost big money with enough backing to be strong enough to not get banned.
As we have seen over the last few years major Conservative/Right Wing voices who committed no criminal acts have been banned from major Social Media giving the full unquestioned “creative control” of current events back to the dinosaur media.
Even the biggest of the little guys simply cannot have an impact when deplatformed.
Thus far attempts to counter the Google/Facebook juggernauts have failed leaving the only free speech alternative for American conservatives lying on the other side of the Iron Curtain. It is becoming ever so ironic that the only place where one can praise the virtues of Ronald Reagan is now on a Russian server.
Image: Trump made his image via the media, yet was unable to take grand presidential action using it.
This uphill battle that Trump or any other leader with a big populist vision has to face can only be fought with equal countermeasures. As you have seen above, leaders need massive media power to maintain their position and achieve their objectives, but this does not come cheap.
To start up a news media network similar to Fox (that would achieve a similar level of impact) could cost around a billion dollars, if not more.
Buying and hyping something like Newsmax which has more than twenty years under its belt would be cheaper but still in the hundreds of millions. As we can see, it is now clear that Abe Lincoln shall be the last President of the United States to be born in a log cabin.
Distribution is the key question with any media product and just being able to “make the news” does not mean the population is going to hear/see it.
There is nothing stopping Facebook’s empire from outright deplatforming a Trump-run Newsmax (or other entity) on the basis of “violating community standards” for whatever made up reason.
Not only should Trump blow a billion on the production of news, but hyping and building (or purchasing then hyping) an alternative to Facebook may also be necessary.
In the age of the Internet money talks and unfunded opinions walk… right into the shadows of obscurity.
Wealthy people with alternative views to the status quo must put their money where their mouth is and take control of the media (social and traditional) via purchasing power or they are sure to lose over time.
The President of the United States for one has the money and it is time to diversify Mr. Trump! If he really wants to “Make America Great Again” he has to understand that the interpreter or “greatness” is the Mainstream Media.
Thus, if he wants to project his vision of greatness then he is going to have to stop using social media and start running it. And if the POTUS were to need someone to operate this venture, well, he can find me on Facebook till I get deplatformed.
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Tim Kirby is an independent journalist, TV and radio host.
Published by SCF
Republished by The 21st Century
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.