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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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The problem is the right has been completely unable to actually create a right-wing alternate to the NYT because there is no audience for that among the Right - it's all DailyWire/Brietbart pushing out the sensational stuff or the day or it's money-losing magazines being propped up by rich donors. There is the WSJ, but it seems unwilling to move beyond its place focusing on business news.

The actual problem is 90% of what the NYT is reliably truthful, even to an ardent right-winger.

I suspect actually that the right has been unable to create a right-wing equivalent of the NYT because that sort of centralized top-down narrative setting is a holdover from an earlier era. The natural means of narrative formation and spread today is social media. Traditionally structured media outlets can't hope to produce narratives as memetically fit as those honed on Twitter, so largely just write sensationalist stories built on top of those. It's not just the right; this describes younger media outlets on the left as well. Even the NYT itself is not immune to this. One now regularly sees echos of Twitter discourse in is coverage.

(All of this is why establishment journalists were so eager to place themselves or their ideological allies in positions that allowed them to influence what ideas could spread on social media, via "trust & safety" councils, official labeling of "misinformation," etc. and why many seem to be practically unraveling in response to Musk getting rid of these things.)