Many of the commenters here mention, rightly, that the Democrats have a problem getting their message out. I want to dig in on some of the challenges we face and what some of the solutions could be.
First is the death and/or degradation of current media outlets. When I mention “death,” of course CBS News comes to mind, where Bari Weiss is doing what she was hired to do, turning it into a right wing piece of shit and, when that fails, laying everyone off. Even though CBS is the most obvious dying network, I’d argue that traditional media is killing itself by alienating readers.
Let’s begin with paywalls. I struggle to find non-paywalled news. I understand that news sites need to make money, but all that the paywall is doing is keeping those sites from finding new readers. Young people do not read newspapers in part because they can’t or won’t subscribe to them. I don’t have a solution here, but I hope all Democrats realize that getting a story in the newspaper ain’t what it used to be.
Moving on from paywalls, the media sites themselves are incredibly enshittified. A guy named Shubham Bose did a deep dive into what, exactly, big media sites serve up in terms of ads and tracking, writing a piece called The 49 MB Web Page, 49 MB being the amount of crap your browser downloads in order to render one news story. I got that story via Jon Gruber at Daring Fireball, and he has a less technical gloss on it:
[…] Part of my ongoing testing of the MacBook Neo is that I’ve been using it in as default a state as possible, only changing default settings, and only adding third-party software, as necessary. So I’ve been browsing the web without content-blocking extensions on the Neo. It’s been a while since I’ve done that for an extended period of time. Most of the advertising-bearing websites I read have gotten so bad that it’s almost beyond parody.
And even with content blockers installed (of late, I’ve been using and enjoying uBlock Origin Lite in Safari), many of these news websites intersperse bullshit like requests to subscribe to their newsletters, or links to other articles on their site — often totally unrelated to the one you’re trying to read — every few paragraphs. And the fucking autoplay videos, jesus. You read two paragraphs and there’s a box that interrupts you. You read another two paragraphs and there’s another interruption. All the way until the end of the article. We’re visiting their website to read a fucking article. If we wanted to watch videos, we’d be on YouTube. It’s like going to a restaurant, ordering a cheeseburger, and they send a marching band to your table to play trumpets right in your ear and squirt you with a water pistol while trying to sell you towels.
No print publication on the planet does this. The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this. The print edition of The New Yorker could not possibly be more respectful of both the reader’s attention and the sanctity of the prose they publish. But read an article on their website and you get autoplaying videos interspersed between random paragraphs. And the videos have nothing to do with the article you’re reading. I mean, we should be so lucky if every website were as respectfully designed as The New Yorker’s, but even their website — comparatively speaking, one of the “good ones” — shows only a fraction of the respect for the reader that their print edition does.
Without an ad-blocking content blocker running, one of the most crazy-making design patterns today is repeating the exact same ad within the same article, every few paragraphs. It’s hard to find a single article on Apple News — a sort of ersatz pidgin version of the web — that does not do this. The exact same ad — 6, 7, 8 times within the same article. How many 30-something blonde white women need hearing aids? It’s insane.
People are spending less and less time on the web because websites are becoming worse and worse experiences, but the publishers of websites are almost literally trying to dig their way out of that hole by adding more and more of the reader-hostile shit that is driving people away. The Guardian screenshot Bose captured, where only 11 percent of the entire screen shows text from the article, is the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials and promotions for other shows on the same channel. Almost no one would watch such a channel. But somehow this strategy is deemed sustainable for websites.
Gruber is a Mac and design nerd, and even if you aren’t, I’m sure you recognize that the lousiness of the web pages coupled with the paywalls makes newspaper and TV sites a burden to visit.
So newspapers and TV, once the main conduit for disseminating Democratic messaging, are now secondary channels at best. Social media is king, and it’s clear that many Democrats don’t know how to use it. I’m going to pick some of Lis Smith’s thoughts from a recent NYT interview (paywalled link). Smith has thoughtfully screenshotted most of the interview on her X feed and here’s a xcancel link to it.
“Never misses an opportunity to have an opportunity” is such a great way to put it.
I don’t think I’m saying anything new here. Social media is the future and all Democrats need to use it the way that their most dynamic leaders use it now.
I have a concrete example of this, but this post is already too long and I’ll post it soon.
(Also, note the horseshit I had to go through to get links in this post. First, the link about CBS News layoffs is on the CNN site, which isn’t paywalled, but is riddled with popovers. Second, Xitter is a problem and I know people don’t like to visit it, so I used Xcancel, which shows the content without the ads and other horseshit. Finally, to show one quote from a NYT article, I had to use screenshots. Nobody wants that. Very few will go through the effort.)
