Creating The Media Environment That Autocrats Love, Right Here In The USA

In the wake of Donald Trump's inauguration, I wrote a piece about how his administration would see the expansion of "managed media" as the government increasingly tries to freeze out the mainstream media and instead rely on reliable propaganda outlets. The concept of managed media is really an authoritarian effort to essentially restrict information about governmental policies and decision-making processes from the media as much as possible and rely on favorable, partisan propaganda outlets to push the government's message instead. The end result is a technically still free media but one that self-censors in order to maintain access to government information as well as the proliferation of government propaganda outlets. This is the media environment that every authoritarian government wants and we see the most extreme example of the success of a managed media, where the idea was really created, in Putin's Russia.

We see the strands of this effort across all levels of Republican-controlled government. Trump still spends time bashing press coverage by the mainstream media he doesn't like. AG Sessions recently floated the idea of subpoenaing and even jailing reporters over leaks. Government agencies have removed mountains of information from their websites. Scott Pruitt decided to revoke safety rules at chemical facilities without any public input, a decision that appears to have backfired in the wake of the explosions and secrecy at the Arkema plant in Houston. The Commission on Election Integrity is apparently using private emails in order to avoid federal laws on data retention and communicate in secret.

In Congress, Republicans have spent their entire session in a desperate attempt to take health insurance from over 20 million Americans in order to pass those savings on to their rich and corporate overlords in the form of massive tax cuts. Most of this effort has been done with as much stealth as possible. The House originally voted on its first bill without a CBO score at all. The Senate relied on a group of 13 Senators to write their version of the ACA repeal in secret and then present it as a take-it-or-leave-it vote to their colleagues. The latest effort, Cassidy-Graham, is attempting to once again force a vote without a CBO score and will apparently only allow 90 seconds of debate before the vote occurs.

At the state level, the Tennessean has just documented the myriad attempts by legislatures around the country, primarily Republican but also Democratic, to restrict access to government records and information, often in the name of public safety. Many of these measures did not pass but not for lack of trying and the attempts to pass them will continue. Nebraska tried to keep the suppliers of its lethal drugs used for executions secret. Both Texas and California want to keep emergency action plans hidden, supposedly for public safety reasons. Iowa wanted to treat the audio tape of 911 calls as medical records and restrict their access accordingly. The state did decide to keep its casino's detailed financial records secret. Kansas wanted to keep the list of fired police officers secret. In Arkansas, the names of staff and teachers who are armed was made secret as a "public safety" issue. None of these are necessarily earth shattering but they are part and parcel of the continuing attempt to restrict access to government information.

On the propaganda side, the Republican party wouldn't be what it is today without the cable TV presence of Fox News. It may break with Trump every so often but it will always carry water for the GOP. On radio, Clear Channel, now calling itself IHeartMedia, dominates the market with over 850 stations, making it the largest radio station owner in the country. It, too, is reliably conservative, bringing us Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity as well as a many other conservative talking heads. But a new propaganda power is emerging in the form of Sinclair Broadcasting. Sinclair's deal to buy over 40 TV stations from Tribune Media will give the company a presence in nearly 75% of America's households. All this sets up the perfect managed media team for a conservative autocrat, with a powerful voice in cable, TV, and radio.

Sinclair is especially aggressive with pushing its conservative viewpoints and, during the last campaign, it essentially became a propaganda arm of the Trump campaign. The group had 35 interviews with Trump himself or his surrogates compared to just seven for the Clinton campaign and none with Clinton herself. Now Sinclair is requiring its stations to run what is essentially GOP propaganda with daily pieces from former Trump campaign operative Boris Epshteyn, opinion pieces from a from VP of Sinclair, and something called the Terrorism Alert Desk, that hypes the threat of terrorism on a daily basis. This obviously violates the entire idea of the journalistic independence of its local outlets and is essentially corporate directed propaganda. That corporate viewpoint nicely dovetails with the Republican party agenda.

But Republicans aren't going to rely solely on their corporate friends to manage the flow of information that best suits them. The Republican Governors Association (RGA) has just set up the Free Telegraph, an online presence that poses as a real media outlet. The Free Telegraph was launched with no indication that it was bought and paid for by the RGA with the sole purpose of getting more Republicans elected. Only when confronted by the AP did the Telegraph add a disclaimer. According to one longtime GOP communications adviser, "It’s propaganda for sure, even if they have objective standards and all the reporting is 100 percent accurate". The RGA is not alone in the idea of running government propaganda outfits. Mike Pence floated a similar idea when he was governor of Indiana but backed down when confronted with the obvious criticism.

All of these legislative and executive efforts to impose secrecy are just part of an ongoing, decades-long effort by the Republican party to destroy governmental and democratic norms. A government that is able to operate in secret is no longer a government that can truly be accountable. In addition, there are conservative media outfits that are a significant presence in the major media outlets and are willing to be propaganda arms for the Republican party. As the attacks on mainstream media continue and faith in those institutions decrease, the void is waiting to be filled by corporate and government propaganda outlets an the increasing alternative media universe.

The pieces are certainly in place to create the sort of "managed media" environment that autocrats such as Putin have already created and thrive in. All that remains is someone perhaps more authoritarian and more organized than Donald Trump to put it all together here in the US. The roadmap is already here.