Independent Media Can Defeat the Right’s Noise Machine
The information war against the Right’s vast media machine won’t be won by building a louder Democratic Party megaphone through corporate-funded outlets. The key is stronger independent media.
A person walks past Fox News headquarters in New York City on March 9, 2023. (Timothy A. Clary / AFP via Getty Images)
When Fox News screams the quiet part, it’s worth listening and gleaning a lesson — especially when the network lets the old “fair and balanced” veneer drop and admits its real mission.
“We are waging a twenty-first-century information warfare campaign against the Left,” said Fox’s prime-time host Jesse Watters in a televised moment of candor. “It’s like grassroots guerrilla warfare. Someone says something on social media, [Elon] Musk retweets it, [Joe] Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it, and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.”
There’s a trove of worthwhile books, documentaries, and podcast series tracing the construction of that conservative media machine. For years, conservatives have rolled their eyes, pretending it’s all just a deranged liberal conspiracy theory. But here was Watters — on Fox News’ own airwaves! — proudly admitting the conspiracy is real, while also mocking critics.
“They are using tactics from the 1990s — they are holding tiny press conferences, tiny little rallies, screaming into the ether on MSNBC,” he said of the Right’s opponents. “This is what you call top-down command and control — you get talking points from a newspaper and you put it on the broadcast network and it disappears.”
Watters was right to identify this as a fundamental “asymmetry” that explains why we’ve arrived at this historical pivot point.
As illustrated in the Lever’s investigative audio series, Master Plan, the American right has for decades constructed a vast media infrastructure outside of — and pressuring — the Republican Party to embrace conservatives’ ideological agenda.
By contrast, America’s center-left has mostly funded the Democratic Party, its politicians, and its array of Washington-based nonprofits — while relying on billionaire- and corporate-owned elite media outlets as its information conduit. While there’s been election-cycle investment in Democratic Party organs that amplify whatever incoherence the party leaders happen to be spewing on a given day, the center-left’s foundations, philanthropists, and grassroots donors have made vanishingly little investment in independent media and journalism, especially the kind that scrutinizes oligarch power.
The result: as the Right wins elections, increases its vote share among working-class communities, lavishly funds its media machine, sells its agenda as populism, and implements its policies, the information ecosystem is a miasma of conservative bullshit, half-truths, and lies — all while the center-left now finds itself on the verge of irrelevance. Anti-MAGA America is portrayed — and widely perceived — as a cadre of special-interest whiners pandering to a dwindling voting base of Karens and Chads obsessed with identity politics and not much else.
In response to the caricaturing, liberal media whisperers are telling everyone to not “believe” their lying eyes about Donald Trump’s power; tone policing the Left; re-platforming an establishment press that most Americans distrust; and trying to resurrect lucrative #Resistance business models — even as reality reminds us that Pod will not Save America.
Democrats Can’t Fail, They Can Only Be Failed
Amid Trump’s unprecedented rampage, center-left donors are now bored and demoralized. The Democratic Party — mostly unburdened by independent media pressure because it’s made sure it barely exists — is loathed by most Americans, while serving as a de facto country club offering status perks to its emeritus leaders.
As for neoconservatives purged from the Republican monstrosity they helped create — rather than apologizing for igniting the political inferno that’s now raging out of control, these arsonists are busy rebranding themselves as the principled firefighters saving the day.
Meanwhile, progressives are relegated to trumpeting crowd sizes at rallies for Bernie Sanders, who is certainly delivering a much-needed message about oligarchy but whose political apparatus has never succeeded in (or shown sustained commitment to) channeling his celebrity and fundraising power into building lasting institutions beyond the Vermont senator’s personal brand. Of course, unlike other Democratic luminaries signing Hollywood deals, feigning helplessness, and preemptively retreating, Sanders is at least trying to do something to catalyze a real opposition to the broligarchy and the Trump-Musk rampage. Like a rock star playing the hits on a last reunion tour, he’s generating some of the old energy, which is mildly encouraging — and far more than anything his sedated peers are doing.
Sanders could still end up being to center-left populism what Barry Goldwater was to conservatism — a prickly senator-turned-presidential-candidate who lacked the political and organizational skills to win a national election, but who nonetheless inspired a larger movement. But in Goldwater’s case, the movement was fueled not just by ephemeral rallies, but also by conservative institution-building outside both parties.
That has not occurred on a center-left where donors, nonprofits, foundations, labor unions, and advocacy groups are still afraid — or explicitly opposed — to trying to build anything more than the Democratic Party’s message machine — a machine that promised “nothing will fundamentally change” and insists Democrats should never be pressured to do anything. In the party’s telling, Democrats can never fail, they can only be failed.
At this late hour for democracy, it should be obvious that more of such Democratic Party–aligned pink-slime media is probably not the answer to the information-war asymmetry that Watters described. Building a louder, more aggressive (and annoying) Democratic Party megaphone was tried in the early 2000s and it delivered Air America, some Beltway think tanks, a handful of new cable TV shows, and agitprop for a left-punching Obama administration whose betrayals ended up creating the backlash conditions for Trump’s ascent.
Those endeavors are a cautionary tale reminding us that the solution to an information war is not more politburo-style propaganda in service of a party’s Dear Leaders or more anesthetizing pablum from corporate media’s consent manufacturers. Nor is the answer “acting like political communication is still just buying millions of TV and digital ads every two years,” as Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) recently put it.
Daddy, What Did You Do in the Information War?
The fix is something much more difficult and nonpartisan: doing the hard work of creating information conduits that provide better, more accurate reporting about what’s really happening in America; that identify who in either party is responsible for the decisions enriching the rich and harming the rest of us; that orient coverage toward a working-class audience rather than an affluent audience; and that convey news to normies rather than only to already-converted, already-dialed-in political junkies.
That’s what we’ve been trying to do at the Lever — and you’ll notice that we do not identify our work as “left” or “progressive.” That’s a deliberate choice. Sure, I have my personal views about the world, but we are in the business of old-fashioned, fact-checked, document-based, accountability journalism — and that kind of reporting is not an ideological or partisan crusade.
We aren’t alone — we’re part of a larger movement of independent, reader-funded outlets that includes the American Prospect, Democracy Now!, the Guardian, Drop Site, ProPublica, and 404 Media (to name a few). Our outlets operate in the tradition of muckraker I. F. Stone, honor the outlook most famously articulated by Joseph Pulitzer, invest in original journalism rather than hot takes, and make real–world impact.
Our distribution doesn’t rely solely on algorithmically rigged, billionaire-owned social media platforms, and we are actual organizations rather than single-writer Substacks — meaning we are all trying to build lasting institutions larger than any one voice.
Though dwarfed by the conservative media machine, our outlets’ slow-but-steady success suggests that in the information war, there can be a much stronger counterforce than the tried-and-failed Democratic Party media schemes of the past. That is, if our outlets are able to continue finding resources for the work.
To be sure, a more vibrant, independent media focused on accountability journalism will never be the singular bulwark protecting a democratic society. The fight against corporatism, authoritarianism, and fascism requires a society-wide struggle. But those “isms” are typically more able to flourish and spread when independent media is defunded, snuffed out, or prevented from ever existing in the first place.
So, then, what is the lesson from Fox News’ admission? To paraphrase the old British recruitment poster: What should you do in the great information war?
One answer is this: if and when you can, chip in to independent media outlets — specifically, the ones that do original reporting rather than just opinion, and the ones that are building lasting organizations rather than just platforming single voices. It’s a miracle such outlets even exist — and they cannot survive and grow without reader support. At the absolute minimum, don’t complain or get offended or send an angry email when those outlets periodically ask for your help.
No, independent media is not guaranteeing you a quick fix like politicians’ spammy fundraising appeals that fill up your email box.
No, it is not offering you an overnight panacea — the work we’re doing isn’t fast and there are no short cuts. It’s a slog.
But yes, we are fighting the good fight in an information war that threatens our future — which is why this work deserve your attention and your support.