If we have not reminded you in a while (more to the point ‘reminded’ our liberal friends) this humble portal of news and opinion has a bigger digital audience than every newspaper in the state (except the Union Leader) and we beat them now and again too.
Related: Free Speech: They use our Desire for Liberty Against Us
We also beat all the other web sites for traffic, every newspaper in Vermont, most of Maine, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, and a few other digital footprints here and about New England.
The reason for that is simple. They are increasingly the same and we are different. Attorney General William Barr, in recent remarks at the 2020 National Religious Broadcasters Convention, observed the trend. The institutional media, the mainstream press, once a “bulwarks against this slide toward despotism,” has become its enabler.
In addition to religion and the decentralization of government power, the free press was an institution that Tocqueville believed would serve as a check on the despotic tendency of democracy.
Somewhere along the way “the press’ changed sides.
In 19th-century America, the press was so fragmented that the power of any one organ was small. The multiplicity of newspapers, even in one city, cultivated a wide variety of views and localized opinion. … Today in the United States, the corporate – or “mainstream” – press is massively consolidated. And it has become remarkably monolithic in viewpoint, at the same time that an increasing number of journalists see themselves less as objective reporters of the facts, and more as agents of change.
As we have noted previously, what was once meant to act as a brake on tyranny, a challenge to the monolithic state, is now a full-throated advocate for the state and the political class. journalism exists, not to defend the public or the republic but to pillory its opposition to state power.
Gigantic media corporations coordinate messaging with the ruling class cherry-picking the issues that are important to the growth of government and its infringements on personal rights and property while ignoring the rest.
We hear all this talk about social media and Russian bots and fake news but not a peep about the monolithic media echo-chamber that works to distract us from the actual problem.
When the entire press “advances along the same track,” as Tocqueville put it, the relationship between the press and the energized majority becomes mutually reinforcing. …
This is not a positive cycle, and I think it is fair to say that it puts the press’ role as a breakwater for the tyranny of the majority in jeopardy. The key to restoring the press in that vital role is to cultivate a greater diversity of voices in the media.
You don’t have to love us, but we are nothing if not different from the rest of the media in New Hampshire and most of the Northeast. Perhaps even the nation. We are the alternative media.
We are the diversity the left insists, nay – demands and claims to defend.
You and I know that does not mean what they want people to think it means. The opposite, in fact. Diversity is a room full of different people who all think the same lefty things. Or, in the case of mass media, drink from the same Kool-Aid® filled trough.
We’re here to tip that trough over and we mean to continue doing it. And by the looks of things, the people want that too.
Reminder: we accept and publish op-eds and letters to the editor when your local “news” won’t print them, and even when they will. Email steve@granitegrok.com
