Not liking MSM ‘problem for democracy’
A Monday MSNBC segment has gone viral after claiming that independent, conservative news outlets attracting more engagement than mainstream media is a “problem for democracy.”
The remarks were made during a roundtable with MSNBC guest and former President Barack Obama Senior Advisor Dan Pfeiffer and MSNBC anchors Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.
“If you go to Facebook on a daily basis, the posts with the most engagement are from Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, and Candace Owens,” said Pfeiffer. “It is right-wing media content. It dwarfs progressive content. It dwarfs mainstream media content — which is actually, should be the part that should scare us the most, that Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire has more followers and engagement — many times more — than the New York Times or CNN. That is a problem for democracy.”
Brzezinski then interjected to clarify that Republican users are “freaks”.
“So are you saying, that like, the Republican agenda is backed up by the freaks on Facebook and so they don’t want to do anything about it?”
“Absolutely,” Pfeiffer reacted.
Incredibly, the panel insisted that mainstream media are biased towards the Right, not the Left. They made the same claim about Big Tech and social media platforms, despite Facebook and Twitter both having interfered in the 2020 election for Joe Biden and banning President Donald Trump, with Twitter recently admitting outright to silencing Right-wing viewpoints.
“We have to invest in our own megaphone to compete with Republicans,” Pfeiffer said. “That doesn’t mean we build our own Fox News. That doesn’t mean we run away from the mainstream media, but we have to invest in progressive outlets.”
Pfeiffer then called on the government to force social media companies to alter their algorithms to censor "misinformation”.
“We can’t rely on [social media] to do it on their own, and so this is where we have to rely on Congress and the regulators to step in and think about how we regulate these algorithms that are pushing this disinformation for profit.”
“Totally,” Brzezinski agreed excitedly.
“Why can’t we pass basic regulations to make these companies be transparent about the algorithms that spread the lies on everything from COVID to January the 6th?” asked Scarborough, ignoring the fact that Twitter instituted a Civic Integrity Policy to shut down accounts challenging the 2020 election results.
“We absolutely should be able to pass them,” replied Pfeiffer. “We actually have to pass them.”
