In our modern democracies, we are highly dependent on our information economies to build consensus.

Those economies have essentially ceased functioning as competitive markets for ideas, globally.

In general, newsrooms don’t make enough money to independently cover local news, and are consolidated under political/private parties. Journalism isn’t dead, but it is definitely on life support.

America though, has a further metastasized issue, in that there exists market capture. Republicans and their media apparatus have effective agenda setting power over a large enough section of the populace.

The short version of it is that in the right leaning media sphere, the rules of journalism have changed. A common through line for headline stories begins with a fringe theory on the internet. This fringe theory shows up on some podcast, which then gets repeated by a guest on a channel like Fox. This in turn gets alluded to by the White House, and then it can be reported on as a position that the Executive is considering, making it fact.

The GOP didn’t need to throw out votes, provided it could muddy the waters effectively enough.

The research by Roberts, Faris and Benkler, is what this is based on.

Reality always wins in the end, so now with the increase in oil prices, the limits of information dominance are visible, and they will need to leverage their strength in other domains to gain advantage for the upcoming elections.