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New Right-Wing Propaganda Roundup: ¡Ahora en Español, También! [1]

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Date: 2023-05-25

Do you love conservative messaging laced through your aggregated digital tabloid clickbait? Did you spend years thinking Fox News was totally fair and balanced? ¿Quieres ver la desinformación en español?

If you said "yes," or "sí" to any of those, then good news! You've got some new media outlets to choose from. If you answered some variation of "No! What's wrong with you? Why would you ask that?" then bad news! You've got some new outlets to be aware of as likely future vectors for climate disinformation.

We'll start with the simple one first: Americano, which is basically just "Fox News in Spanish," per a review by Michael Lovito at TheRighting . The still-growing "brainchild of Trump ally Ivan Garcia-Hidalgo," broadcasts over 25 radio stations and streaming services and, thanks to Trump-world connections, is aiming to raise "$30 to $50 million by the end of the spring."

By hiring a mix of serious journalists from other Spanish-language outlets and people like "up-and-comer Freddy Silva, who was singled out by Media Matters for America for his inflammatory commentary regarding immigration and LGBTQ+ issues," Americano is setting itself up for exactly the failure that's eating into Fox News: "Americano will likely struggle to prevent its legitimate news gathering efforts from getting drowned out by its bombastic opinion shows."

Alejandro Alvarado of Florida International University told Lovito that "There’s tension within these organizations. Yes, they favor right-wing politicians and governments, but I think Americano Media is trying to do serious journalism. But the talk shows are very emotional. They basically say what the audience wants to hear, and the audience is very opinionated. [The hosts] won’t correct them when they’re wrong and say that every form of government intervention is communism, because the audience is looking for that.”

Now, it's weird that the audience is the actor with agency here, and not the people whose literal job it is to program the channel.

But it's the outlets that are less transparent about their bias that you really have to worry about — and that's where things start to get trickier.

While Americano aspires to raise $50 million, The Messenger already has. But it turns out that lots of money from conservatives and a promise to do "balanced journalism" and "objective, non-partisan" news is still not enough to buy success. Launched just last week, the effort, backed by former co-owner of The Hill Jimmy Finkelstein, is already racking up headlines! Just… not the kind they probably hoped for. " The Messenger is a news startup, but it feels like a blast from the past, " reads the Columbia Journalism Review's headline. The Wrap went with a quote from one of the many, many critics: " Sounds like a bad pitch from 'Succession' ."

Nieman Lab's Joshua Benton managed to pack a pun into a devastatingly concise summary of the website's flood of day 1 stories, with the headline " No need to shoot The Messenger: Its muddled ideas are doing the job " followed by an equally damning lede about the site's exclusive interview with Donald Trump that entirely failed to ask him about the former president being found "liable for sexual abuse and defamation.” “Surely if you had a 30-minute 'EXCLUSIVE' interview with the former president, you'd ask him a question about it, right?" Benton asks.

Well, wrong, unfortunately. And why might that be?

For that, we turn to the most pernicious of propaganda: Punchbowl, which is, per David Dayen's headline at The American Prospect, " The Access Journalism-House Republican Mind Meld ."

Dayen deftly explains "the razor-thin dividing line in access journalism" at outlets like Punchbowl, "between reporting the news and creating it: the way in which the tipsheets launder the desires of powerful people and pressure their opponents to go along." Dayen's description of Punchbowl's literal friendship with Republicans does well to detail "the normalizing process at work, where Beltway pack journalism determines the boundaries of discussion."

The whole point of right-wing media outlets posing as unbiased while serving partisan disinformation is to build a false social reality . Billionaires fund "media" outlets not to try and participate in the civic debate, but instead to declare themselves the victors.

And when they fail, they have the money to start over again.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/25/2171306/-New-Right-Wing-Propaganda-Roundup-Ahora-en-Espa-ol-Tambi-n

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