How Democrats can win the messaging war
"Liberals trust the mainstream media — foolishly, I think. The trust is not deserved," Ryan Cooper tells us.
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Donald Trump and his Republican Party benefit from a right-coded social media ecosystem and a mainstream press that normalizes their lies and sanewashes their extremism. Faced with those obstacles, it’s clear Democrats need to find a way to fight back.
In his recent piece headlined “Democrats Lost the Propaganda War,” American Prospect managing editor Ryan Cooper outlines a vision of how Dems can be more proactive in getting their message out.
Instead of spending predominantly on TV ads and mailers, Cooper argues that Democrats should invest in party-friendly media outlets, including local publications in “news desert” counties that are especially susceptible to rightwing propaganda, as well as websites with a national reach. (As an example of the latter, he cites my former employer, ThinkProgress, the progressive news website that was housed in the Center for American Progress before it was shut down due to internal drama in 2019. TP was a good website and is missed.)
“My idea is to put Democratic messaging in the form of either just reality-based coverage of what the Biden administration was doing — with all of these investments all over the country — or Democratic editorials, and getting that message consistently in front of voters,” Cooper told us. “That’s the other problem with the usual way of campaign spending. It only comes during election time, so there are long stretches where people aren’t hearing anything. You’re not cementing the impression of what you want to communicate.”
We recently connected with Cooper to discuss Trump’s victory in the 2024 messaging battle and the conclusions that can be drawn from it, why Democrats are “foolish” to trust the mainstream media, and the importance of Dems building online presences on non-X social media platforms like Bluesky.
“It’s the only one that’s not run by a Trump-supporting billionaire,” he said. “If you actually want to get your message out there, Bluesky is the place you ought to be doing it, rather than a platform owned by Elon Musk. He’s just implacably hostile to everything you stand for.”
A full transcript of Cooper’s conversation with Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
A note from Aaron: Happy holidays to the Public Notice community. We will not publish tomorrow in observance of Christmas, but I’ll be back with more Thursday. I hope you have a lovely holiday.
Thor Benson
Why do you think Democrats’ media problem played such a large role in Kamala Harris’s loss?
Ryan Cooper
Donald Trump has all sorts of baggage that would have been utterly disqualifying for any other candidate, or at least any previous Republican candidate. He was found legally liable for sexual assault. He was convicted of 34 felonies. He attempted to overthrow the government. He’s constantly saying all kinds of crazy stuff — almost Nazi, Nuremberg-esque things.
Yet he paid no price for it. I think that’s basically because voters didn’t hear about his campaign platform or didn’t believe it if they did hear about it.
You have, on one hand, the right-wing propaganda machine, which has been built up over 30 or 40 years now, and on the other you have a mainstream media that is just structurally hostile to the Democratic Party.
The New York Times, which now supposedly employs like 10 percent of the journalists in the country, absolutely botched their coverage this cycle. It was probably worse than they botched it in 2016. They had a scoop from John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, calling him a fascist. They basically caught and killed their own scoop. They put it on page A34 or something.
The media knows how to raise a stink about things, and they basically never did it for Trump, even though there are about 50 things they could have done. And Democrats don’t have anything like the right-wing propaganda machine. There is some progressive media, like The American Prospect, but it’s pitifully small compared to Fox News or Joe Rogan.
Thor Benson