Legacy media looked like it was on the ropes during the Age of Blogging, but the transition of blogs to social media gave the legacy outlets a new niche as outrage brokers. The MSM can instantly turn huge stories into old news, or signal-boost 10 tweets into an urgent crisis.
Part of that symbiosis flows from lazy reporting and the hunger for 24/7 content. It became very noticeable over the past few years that many MSM "news" items are just reporters cobbling a story together from some tweets or Facebook posts.
Of course, the media signal-boosts "online outrage" that agrees with its political and cultural biases, and activists with the right political credentials are very good at getting their little outrage storms noticed, validated, and repeated by mainstream media.
It's easy to create a feedback loop: a few left-wing activists write outraged social media posts, the media picks it up, more social media "buzz" forms around the media story, another story gets written about the "firestorm" of controversy and "growing outrage."
Of course, you won't be getting that treatment if the media doesn't like your politics. If a real Internet grassroots firestorm of political incorrectness becomes too big to ignore, the MSM outrage brokers will try to make it look kooky, conspiratorial, radioactive, dangerous.
When media-approved outrage has been nursed into a Big Event, reporters start asking politicians (and, increasingly, corporations) how they plan to go about addressing the grievances and concerns of a "movement" that began as a busload of neurotic social media addicts.
When media-disapproved outrage grows too large to ignore, reporters begin asking politicians and CEOs to denounce it and distance themselves from it. Those leaders often know little about the previously-buried story, so they are easily bullied into snap denunciations.
Cultivated outrage allows small groups of people to completely rewrite our common culture, and they can usually get those changes codified with laws and corporate policies while the general public is still wondering what the hell just happened.
The Left has discovered corporations are easier to capture politically than the government, especially with this wonderful new tool of outrage storms nourished and promoted by legacy media. Corporate policy is increasingly the weapon of choice for coercing the general public.
Meanwhile, the outrage brokers can marginalize and disperse genuine grassroots movements, preventing them from gaining purchase with casual consumers of news and social media - and, crucially, blockading them from obtaining political support at the state and Beltway levels.
Everything that happened during the golden age of blogging was studied carefully by the Left. They laid plans to ensure nothing like the Tea Party, Rathergate, the rise of the Drudge Report, or the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth could ever happen again.
A key part of that strategy was preventing New Media from completely bypassing Old Media and making it obsolete. Instead, the Left fused Old and New Media to create today's outrage brokerage system, using legacy media to boost or muffle signals from the Internet as desired. /end
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