Though they may often lack intellectual honesty and sincere moral principles let it never be said that Democrats lack chutzpah, because that is essentially what it takes to make the claim that “conservative media dwarfs the progressive media in size and scope.”
Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior advisor and White House communications director for President Barack Obama and co-host of Pod Save America, has a new book coming out where he attempts to support that exact claim. In “Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media Are Destroying America,” the podcaster attempts to argue right-wing media is a “billionaire-funded disinformation machine” that nearly stole the 2020 presidential election.
To promote the release of the book, Vanity Fair published an excerpt titled, “Why Do Democrats Suck At Messaging?” where Pfeiffer evidently disregarded the reality of corporate media shilling for progressive causes across network and cable news, in addition to nearly all forms of entertainment. He mainly lamented Fox News “whose sole raison d’être is to attack Democrats and promote pro-GOP talking points.”
“The conservative media dwarfs the progressive media in size and scope,” he went on. “And even then, it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison. The bulk of the media on the right is an adjunct of the party apparatus; during the Trump presidency it was state-adjacent propaganda–Pravda, but with plausible deniability.”
Meanwhile, he touted that “Much of the media on the left is focused on holding Democrats accountable and/or moving the party’s agenda in a more progressive direction. This is, of course, an admirable and necessary task, but it doesn’t do much to help Democratic candidates and causes win the messaging battle against Republicans come election time.”
Pfeiffer appeared to embrace the narrative that the American voters are simply too dumb to understand how good they have it as the excerpt also ignored how President Joe Biden is underwater in his approval rating across the board as he claimed, “the Democratic position on immigration, taxes, reproductive freedom, minimum wage, civil rights, voting rights, and climate change is more popular than the Republican position.”
He further denied the nature of Big Tech’s complicity in silencing conservative voices and stories that would be damaging to the Democratic Party like the infamous New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story that was suppressed in the days prior to the 2020 presidential election as he claimed that Facebook is a boon to conservatives.
“Facebook, the biggest, most important media outlet in the world, aggressively promotes conservative content,” Pfeiffer claimed. “Democrats are out-gunned. We have fewer outlets with less reach. What we say is being drowned out. Sure, we need a better message, but first we need to get a bigger megaphone.”
So, in the podcaster’s assessment, former President Donald Trump and other conservatives must have gone on to start their own social media platforms because they were bored, not because they were silenced. Even then, as happened with Parler, starting an independent platform wasn’t enough to get around the suppression of Amazon Web Services which hosted the social media app.
Amazon nukes Parler! ‘Coordinated attack by tech giants’ says CEO, as it becomes #1 free app https://t.co/XEreLTmq7n pic.twitter.com/E9zz4tMDA0
— BPR (@BIZPACReview) January 10, 2021
Still, Pfeiffer insisted, “Democrats have a much smaller megaphone, and our message is getting drowned out. Republicans dictate the terms of the conversation in American politics and have done so for much of the 21st century.”
“Republicans and their billionaire supporters invest so much time and energy in building a disinformation apparatus that can overcome the opinions of the majority of Americans,” he continued before going on to blame the ineptitude of his own party for sharing Republican ideas. “They have perfected a strategy of social media trolling that tricks angry liberals into inadvertently spreading their message.”
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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