Time to Fight Back Against the Advertising Censors

[Ptarmigan]

Time to Fight Back Against the Advertising Censors
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/01/28/time-to-fight-back-against-the-advertising-censors/

Are we in the final stages of mainstream media dominance? Over the last 15 years the market has certainly shifted – the mainstream’s sluggish adoption of nascent technology and that technology’s ever expanding reach has opened the door to new media.

It takes a long time for a whale washed up on a beach to decay to just bones. Scavengers pick over the rotting carcass for years before it finally disappears. One could argue that since 2020 the decay of mainstream media has quickened in pace. The mainstream media’s bias and lack of integrity is unravelling. Whether it was the failure of the mainstream to interrogate the Covid narrative, the one-sided and often mistaken coverage of the BLM protests after the murder of George Floyd or the lack of interest and then cover up of a certain laptop, perception of impartiality is difficult to justify.

What has stopped mainstream media asking the most pertinent and relevant questions? Recent events highlight either a lack of journalistic integrity or, more concerning, ideological capture. The New York Times is no longer the paper of record, seemingly reporting Hamas press releases verbatim. The once great BBC seems to be more interested in teaching about white privilege, while the Associated Press is now the communications arm of the climate change lobby.

Dissenting opinions, alternative and independent views and traditional values are being deconstructed to an alarming degree. This has left many people feeling unseen and de-prioritised in the cultural conversation.

The legacy media is the government media.

Traditionally the mainstream was funded by advertisers. Brands would place ads for their products and services in the pages of publications and pay for the privilege. Potential customers would see the ads and buy the products or services. With the digitalisation of the news this moved to website ads and then led to the centralisation of ad inventory. This all worked out quite nicely for everyone. But then…

Independent news media represent a double threat to the established mainstream. Firstly, the mainstream is haemorrhaging readers, viewers and listeners to them; advertisers pay per impression in the digital world, thus less impressions mean less advertising revenue. Secondly and more dangerously, alt-media sites are subverting the mainstream media’s control of the narrative.

Wiser men have written about the censorship industrial complex, a phrase coined by Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger; it is a growing, international, multi-billion dollar sector. The establishment has a number of tactics to censor and thwart independent publishers. Some are easy to spot, while others are more covert. YouTubers and podcasters can simply be taken off the platforms: Jordan Peterson has had a number of episodes taken off YouTube and Dr. Robert W. Malone has been banned completely. It is a little more difficult to impede independent news publishers. One way is for the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and other NGOs like NewsGuard and Graphika to deem alt-news websites to be ‘unsafe’ because they publish ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ – often relying on ‘fact-checkers’ funded by these websites’ mainstream rivals – thus removing their ability to sell advertising space. Media Matters monitors media outlets for “conservative misinformation” then notifies activist journalists so they can take “direct action against offending media institutions”. They sometimes do this in nefarious ways – as revealed in the recent Musk lawsuit.