This is just so frustrating. For my entire life (not just adult) there has been this constant refrain the Democrats do not know how to communicate. And I am sixty years old. Over and over it is said that people don’t know the good thing Democrats do and this is a big communication problem. There is actually a diary heading the trending stories list decrying Democrats inability to communicate. You know what? I might take it more seriously if it wasn’t the same god damned story I have been reading for more than a half a century. For ten years, maybe so. The Democrats are lost in the desert (anybody remember that one). For twenty years, well… maybe. The Democrats simply do not understand how to work the systems which is “wired” for Republicans. Possibly, but unlikely that the Democratic party would fail to adapt. More than half a century? Maybe something else is going on. What makes this especially hard to swallow is that I think objectively the Democrat have some people who understand communication in the 21st century better than most. AOC is excellent in using social media. Cori Bush has an extraordinary flair for political theater (sleep in the steps of the capital). Katie Porter’s use of charts is..well...of the charts. These are only a few of the people who should be ruling the roost on communication. Are you going to tell me that the ugly and despised Mitch McConnell shuffling out and mumbling some misinformation about the “democrat” party is a better communication strategy. Or Donald Trump, who would have no social media presence if the media did not parrot everything he says — in honesty I think Trump is a social media idiot.
So what’s going on? If it was not apparent before it certainly is now, mass communication, that is mass media, is a bought and paid for phenomenon. It is controlled by oligarchs and their paid servants in the media. Let me ask you something, how can Politico, Punch Bowl news and Axios all exist and have incredible amounst of money as the same time, making their founders rich. They all do exactly the same thing, print close to exactly the same thing. At least one of them probably should have never come into existence in a normal communication landscape. How are so many people making money off of their substack newsletters? There are not that many people with that amount of extra money each month to have tens if not hundreds of substack subscriptions. How come so many “journalists” have these high paying book deals all of a sudden. I am old enough to remember when a book was the apogee of a journalist’s career, usually coming at the end. They were rare and often written by the strongest lights in journalism who had gained their reputation over a lifetime. Now I can’t turn on a news channel without somebody using it as a platform to hawk their book. It has nothing to do with Democrats being bad communicators, It has to do with communication channels being shut to Democrats. Because there is no money in that.
Until we start recognizing this and doing something about this, well…...we had a good run as a country.