Tech

America’s open mic moment

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1 month ago

November 18, 2024

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Above: Photo by Studioclover/DepositPhotos

BitDepth#1485 for November 18, 2024

For liberal minded individuals, the decisive election of Donald Trump to his second presidential term in the United States has been, almost universally, one of shock.

Trump’s win gives the Republican Party under his leadership a majority voice in the US Supreme Court, the Senate and the House of Representatives.

With that trifecta of government control, the president-elect and his party can do everything that Trump promised on the campaign trail, everything that’s been outlined in Project 2025 and anything else that enters their minds over the next four years.

The early signals have not been heartening.

The Republican candidate’s statements on the campaign trail, which included media threats, mass deportation of illegal immigrants and other declarations that seemed so outrageous that they were generally downplayed are now likely to be on the post-election planning table.

Project 2025 moved in mere days from “nah” and “I don’t know anything about it,” to “that was always the plan.”

Voters who supported the Trump campaign thinking that their candidate was just engaging in colourful hyperbole, those who thought that voting Republican would win them brownie points, now face disappointment on a staggering scale.

As the president-elect said, his actions on taking office will be predicated on a simple mantra, “Promises made, promises kept.”
Of the many words that Maya Angelou gifted the world, these are perhaps the most useful in these fractured times, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

TT had its own recent open microphone moment, when Energy Minister and frequent acting Prime Minister Stuart Young reintroduced the nation’s youth to the appalling slur, “zamie.”

Stuart Young and Colm Imbert at a state press conference.
Photo by Keith Matthews, the Office of the Prime Minister’s Facebook page.

It would not be unreasonable to consider that Young is familiar with the equally appalling local school-yard slur “Ching-Chong Charlie,” and so might have thought twice before diminishing a parliamentary colleague with such inelegant name-calling.

Someone close by, sounding like the Health Minister, was heard to say, “Oh God, Stuart,” but it wasn’t until the Finance Minister made it clear that a nearby microphone was live that the locker-room sneering ended.

What was the nation meant to make of that inadvertent revelation?
Certainly, it raises the question of what gets said when microphones are absent.

How it is possible to expect any kind of collaborative thinking by members of the House of Representatives on any matter of national concern when casual conversation is so easily reduced to divisive slurs?

The Republican agenda in the 2024 US election campaign wasn’t secret, but almost everyone was looking in the wrong places.

While mainstream media fulminated about Donald Trump’s fusillades of falsehoods, the real campaign was happening online, diffused across social media by Trump keyboard jockeys, articulated on podcasts and YouTube shows, particularly those that appealed to disenfranchised males.

The Republican candidate made himself widely available for extended conversations in these non-mainstream channels.

Donald Trump spoke with popular podcaster Joe Rogan for three hours on October 24, an interview that’s been viewed 50 million times.

This year’s US election made it clear that the battle for hearts and minds wasn’t taking place in traditional media, it was online, where both interviewers and candidate were both keen to attract listeners and viewers. Will the next TT election be any different?

TT doesn’t have the same kind or number of extensive, character-driven online networks of political and social influencers, but it only takes a few viral surges to spark the same circumvention of media gatekeeping here.

What made online pundits so effective in the US election?

Donald Trump interviewed on the Joe Rogan Experience, October 24, 2024.

They are identifiable individuals. Their character, belief systems and outlook in both private and public life are in alignment.

They are opinionated, with little shading in their positions on the matters they discuss and there’s no pretense about neutrality. When they drift from those moorings, dozens of rivals are ready to call them out.

They are plugged into their audiences on an intimate basis. They don’t just understand their followers; they live the lifestyles they espouse.

Their productions are definitely echo chambers, but they are bubbles of opinion that are militantly policed, corrected and sometimes moderated by their peers.

This is such a dramatic departure from the publisher > editor > writer paradigm that it’s unclear how traditional media can respond to it effectively and still uphold core systems of news and opinion gathering and presentation.

American news media consumers also seem to want their traditional media also be clearer about their alignment.

After the election results were announced, MSNBC lost 53 per cent of its prime-time viewers while Fox News gained an additional 21 per cent.

The trend of news consumers is increasingly to understand not just the what of the news, but the why of it.
For the audience it isn’t academic. These changes seem like an instinctive drift to news and opinion sources that have more touch points with their lives and away from sources that seem alien or unrelatable.

Why a reader might ask, am I writing this? It’s because I have skin in this game going back 49 years and sincerely believe that there is a role for the journalistic process that has a place alongside podcasts, blogs and YouTube.

Expecting things to return to the old status quo, in which journalists and media were implicitly trusted, is foolhardy in the extreme.

Journalists can’t just wait for politicians and businessmen to reveal themselves on an open microphone. If journalism is to move the world toward improvement, it must do with do with intentionality and an acknowledgement of a fundamentally changed media landscape.