Former president Barack Obama was asked in an interview what keeps him up at night. He answers that it’s our divided national conversation, led by a divided media:
CBS's Nate Burleson: "Post-presidency, what…keeps you up at night?"
Barack Obama: "The thing…I'm most worried about is…a divided conversation in part b/c we have a divided media…When I was growing up, you had three TV stations…We almost occupy different realities." pic.twitter.com/KrNWHjSgap
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) May 16, 2023
Now, I think he’s being quite sincere, and I think that this has been the No. 1 issue troubling liberals. The proliferation of alternative media and the decomposition of traditional media has destroyed their near-monopoly on setting the national conversation. For a moment — roughly from the Arab Spring to Obama’s reelection — liberals believed the new media were fundamentally on their side and a force for extending their rule. Brexit and Trump destroyed all such illusions in 2016, and ever since, liberals have been trying to rebuild their control over the media by pressuring social-media companies, using the intelligence agencies to frighten these companies into compliance, and passing restrictive speech-harms laws in Europe. The internet isn’t perfect — I wish it would swing back to a far more decentralized model than the one we have today — but it truly has taken away the favored model of political management of the people by liberal technocrats.