Dem
47
GOP
53
Christopher Armitage has an interesting blog post that tries to explain why roughly 40% of the country will not drop Donald Trump, no matter what he does.
For that segment of the country, the border is an existential crisis. Border enforcement is the only thing keeping the United States from becoming Norte de México. They do not want to call their bank and hear: "Press one for English, Presione dos para español." They have an idealistic fantasy of how 19th-century small-town America was and are scared to death that hordes of Spanish-speaking criminals are going to take over the country and destroy it. They see the country being invaded and believe Trump is the only president in their lifetime who sees this and is actually trying to stop it and even reverse it by deporting people in the U.S. illegally. He is the greatest patriot since Abraham Lincoln/Jefferson Davis (take your pick). They know Trump is not perfect, but everything they see, hear, or read, is put into this framework. Sure, ICE shouldn't have killed some innocent woman in Minnesota, but in a war like this, sometimes innocent people die. Wars are like that. Taken from this perspective, their support for Trump is part of a coherent worldview and makes sense.
What about the economy? In this framework, immigrants are taking jobs, flooding hospitals and schools, and draining resources. Naturally, times are tough and Trump is dealing with the root cause: stopping immigration and getting rid of immigrants. That makes him a hero, even if he is a little rough around the edges at times. When you are at war, the niceties of law are secondary. From a certain vantage point, if you don't dig too deeply, it all makes sense.
Where do people get the idea that the country is being invaded? Fox's cable channel gets a lot of attention, but it reaches only 2.7 million people in prime time. That is 1% of the estimated 270 million adults in the country. Where do the other 39% get their worldview from? Sinclair Broadcast Group is a much bigger news source than Fox, and at least as right-wing, if not more so. It operates 178 television stations that together reach 40% of the population. They cover local news and are part of their local communities. People trust them because their anchors cheer on the local high school football team and cover county fairs as big news. Sinclair requires all the stations to broadcast certain "must-run" segments produced at corporate headquarters. When trusted news anchors read the prepared scripts from corporate and tell people the border is in crisis, people believe them. They think they are getting the straight truth from a local, but they are actually getting a highly biased view concocted by Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley and other executives at Sinclair. This carries weight that Tucker Carlson can only dream about. Then there are smaller Fox wannabes like NewsMax and OAN that are constantly poking Fox from the right.
Of course, there is also social media. Elon Musk has 225 million followers on eX-Twitter. This is an audience that Sinclair executives can only drool over. His editorial choices are amplified by an algorithm he controls that feeds people items he approves of. Facebook is bigger still. In Jan. 2025, Mark Zuckerberg eliminated third-party fact-checking and appointed Trump allies to senior positions at the company. His algorithms shovel right-wing content at people in a way that even Musk can't match.
We actually got a message this weekend from a reader who noticed the impact of the new Facebook algorithms. This seems like a good time to share it; it's from D.G. in Lac Brome, QC, Canada:
I want to share an observation I've had recently about how Facebook's platform seems to be changing in subtle but troubling ways.
Over the past week, my feed has been inundated with suggested links and "news" stories that all seem to push a very specific narrative around the killing of Renee Good. Two examples stand out: One article explicitly tries to draw a false equivalence between her death and Ashli Babbitt's, while another emphasizes that the officer involved suffered "internal bleeding" (i.e., a bruise), framing the incident in a way that shifts sympathy and responsibility. Notably, the second story almost always links to CBS News, which raises questions about how their editorial priorities may be shifting under Bari Weiss.
This pattern wasn't isolated. Back in December, I experienced a solid week and a half where my feed was dominated by content related to the so-called Somali YouTube daycare "scandal." (This satirical takedown of it was genuinely brilliant.)
What's unsettling is that this kind of algorithmic framing seems particularly effective for the segment of the population whose opinions are still malleable. It's one thing to encounter biased media; it's another to have the platform silently nudge you toward an entire worldview.
It's deeply concerning to consider how corporations like Facebook, having previously sought favor with the Trump administration, may now be deploying their algorithms in ways that subtly shape public perception to align with power. This feels like propaganda at a scale we haven't seen before: micro-targeted, personalized, and largely invisible.
D.G. is not wrong. When they made the movie The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg was something of an anti-hero, or at least a morally ambiguous character. These days, we think that would be a much tougher sell.
And we've actually been meaning to include at least a brief discussion of CBS, and how rapidly it's going down the tubes. It used to be the network of Walter Cronkite, as good a journalist as there ever was. Now it is run by David Ellison, the son of billionaire Larry Ellison, a major Trump donor. Ellison, of course, installed Bari Weiss, who is not a journalist at all, to run CBS News. She cosplays as a fair-minded independent who is "just asking questions," but she knows full well which side her bread is buttered on, and she's delivering for her boss.
We have already written about the 60 Minutes segment on El Salvador, which was held at the last minute,
because Weiss felt it would hurt Donald Trump's fee-fees it was not fair and balanced. In the end, the program
did run the segment,
just this past weekend. Lead reporter Sharyn Alfonsi was forced to record new introductory and closing segments that
were more "fair" to the Trump administration. Also, the segment was aired during the NFL playoffs, which is the
TV equivalent of the old politician's trick of releasing bad news on Friday night. In short, Weiss buried it,
as much as was possible.
Meanwhile, new CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil has been on the job for a few weeks, and he's surely got Cronkite spinning in his grave. He's toted the water on the Venezuela operation and ICE's actions in Minneapolis, and has been openly lobbying for an attack on Iran. He did a softball interview with Trump, and made sure to air every second of the piece, at risk of being sued by the President. And on his second night on air, Dokoupil closed with a lengthy homage to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, concluding with the declaration: "Marco Rubio, we salute you. You're the ultimate Florida man."
CNN is somewhat better than CBS or Fox, but not as much as people think. Right-wing billionaire John Malone runs Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN. In 2024, Malone gave $2 million to the Republicans and $0 to the Democrats. Even if he is more interested in the more profitable parts of WBD and who buys it, everyone at CNN knows who the top dog is and better not to poke him.
But there are still newspapers, right? Well, there were. Since 2005, almost 3,500 newspapers have shut down because advertisers have gone online and the economics of local newspapers no longer works. About 55 million Americans live in news deserts, where there is no local newspaper coverage at all.
So how are those 40% "informed?" Fox sets the frame: Immigrants are the cause of all problems. Sinclair pushes it into the living room. Right-wing talk radio and/or podcasters feed it to people during their commutes. Social media platforms, like eX-Twitter and Facebook, amplify the message. It is an information infrastructure bought and owned by oligarchs who have a very large axe to grind. The impact of Lachlan Murdoch, Chris Ripley, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, John Malone, Bari Weiss, David Ellison and a handful of others on the worldviews of almost half the country can't be overestimated. Is it a wonder that nearly half the country has bought into the message and won't let go?
For balance, we are not saying all news outlets are right-wing, only maybe half of them, but they are the larger and more impactful ones. We are not trying to explain why 100% of the country has been brainwashed, only 40%. There are also outlets on the left, of course, but they just don't have the same influence. Here is an interactive chart of the media landscape from Ad Fontes Media. We didn't make the cut. Rats. Please tell your friends about our site so we can make the cut next year. (V & Z)