Ron DeSantis to announce Presidential bid on Twitter; Mainstream media irrelevant?

What brought us to this point when major political candidates eschew mainstream media sources to publicize their bids for office? The answer may surprise you.

The mainstream media landscape has been in turmoil as of late. High profile firings of longtime anchors like Former CNN propagandist Don Lemon and Former Fox News ratings leader Tucker Carlson — as well as the collapse of once-prominent organizations like Buzzfeed and Vice — have served to paint a bleak picture for the future of mainstream media sources.

That future is one of irrelevance and a severely curtailed market share in the best case, and total collapse in the worst.

In a twist that has served to incense the mainscheme media, Ron DeSantis has elected to forego all the traditional channels of publicizing his bid for the Presidency in 2024 by throwing in with Elon Musk’s Twitter as the preferred platform from which to announce his candidacy and plans.

It’s no secret that Ron DeSantis has famously been at odds with the media, with his description of the selective editing that 60 Minutes likes to employ to skew narratives to favor the left including the words ‘horse manure’ as a descriptor.

Would he really think so little of the media apparatus that still attempts to dominate the attention spans of millions of people by paying big money to dominate search results? The answer, as his decision to throw in with Elon Musk and Twitter demonstrates, is a resounding yes.

And just to give you an idea of how much these companies spend to be seen first, here’s a graph depicting current paid search spending and future escalations with the low end in 2021 still seeing nearly $221.4 Billion being dedicated to paid search budgets to ensure mainstream news floats to the top of any algorithm.

Source: searchengineland.com

Know what else floats? Unhealthy shit. But I digress.

There are many reasons a candidate like DeSantis would choose not to trust the mainstream media, as they often tend to cover right-wing candidates unfavorably, and resort to lying if they can’t find any dirt on said candidate.

I give you the Trump-Russia collusion story as proof of that, which I do not need to cite because if you haven’t seen it by now you probably don’t have electricity to be reading my Substack. And even then, a balled-up fake newspaper probably rolled onto your agrarian homestead due to a gust of wind that apprised you of the situation. Even the litter carried that bogus story.

But if you really need it, here are the cliff notes on the Durham report about this situation.

The primary reason for DeSantis’ decision to announce his candidacy may not be the one you’re thinking, though. And it has to do with one man - Barack Obama.

You expected me to say Trump, I’m sure.

No, Barack Obama upended the whole game when it came to campaigning in 2008. Obama’s focus took advantage of the full scope and reach of social media, which was still very much a burgeoning market at the time. Smartphones had only come onto the scene the year before with Apple releasing their very first iPhone in 2007, but they very quickly developed a symbiotic relationship with social media companies and grew exponentially in concert with the rise of companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.

This gave Barack Obama the perfect vehicle to run a modern Presidential campaign.

His Republican rival in 2008, John McCain, chose to focus his efforts through the more traditional channels and let mainstream media be the primary focus of getting the word out and attracting voters. A Luddite mistake, in hindsight.

Barack Obama may have innovated far more than he thinks by unintentionally putting mainstream media on life support with his innovation in the realm of political campaigning.

Alternative media sources have also enjoyed a rise in recent years with people becoming increasingly distrusting of mainstream news sources due to the derisive manner that media outlets are employing to cover people they don’t like.

You need only see what Vanity Fair had to say about DeSantis’ choice of platform to understand what I mean by that.

They felt so strongly about DeSantis bypassing companies like theirs that they compared Elon Musk to KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. I feel like that may be grounds for a libel suit, Elon should look into that. Can’t take too much to push Vanity Fair over the edge to collapse, I’m sure.

And remember how I mentioned the firing of Tucker Carlson earlier? Fox lost nearly a billion dollars in market value after that one.

And the best part? Tucker has also thrown in with Twitter and Elon Musk. He’ll be hosting his nightly show there going forward, though no announcement has been made as of yet to determine when those broadcasts will begin.

This has, understandably, upset the dinosaur media, some of which have begun their usual tactic of flinging accusations of white supremacy and such at Musk and Twitter for hosting DeSantis and Tucker Carlson on the platform.

The Atlantic thought so poorly of it that they’ve deemed Twitter the new home for white supremacy and the second coming of Hitler. And that assessment is only marginally more hyperbolic than their actual rhetoric on the matter.

”In just a few months, Musk has actively worked to elevate a particular right-wing, anti-woke ideology. He has reinstated legions of accounts that were previously banned for violating Twitter’s rules and has emboldened trolls, white-nationalist accounts, and January 6 defendants. Musk’s own rhetoric has moved from trolling to dog whistling to outright conspiracy peddling, and it has intensified in recent months, culminating in his recent anti-Semitic remarks about George Soros.” writes Charlie Warzel, ‘staff writer’ for The Atlantic.

Again, rather defamatory to accuse the world’s richest man of being an anti-semite. But to each their own, I guess. The Atlantic clearly doesn’t fear a lawsuit if they let that article see the light of day.

The writer’s name is remarkably close to “Weasel” for a reason, I guess. And I guess I also don’t need to say anything about what type of rag The Atlantic is to the uninitiated, based on his assessment of things over at Twitter with the company they’re presently keeping.

The death throes of an institution that has been around as long as the mainstream media apparatus will naturally be gruesome and messy, and their unwillingness to adapt to the fact that reasonable people are sick and tired of reading garbage that tells us what to think without accurately giving us the facts so we can make up our own minds about a given topic only serves to highlight the harsh truth that companies like The Atlantic are not long for this world.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, Mainscheme Media, it tolls for thee.