All day today I have been having the vertiginously weird experience of trying to convince Democrats that the fact that the RW has a giant, coordinated messaging machine & they don't *matters*. To no effect! I can't even get people to acknowledge & discuss it.

And yet every single Dem, from center to left, is eager AF to discuss "messaging" & "framing." They'll all spend hours lingering over various word combinations, poring over focus group results, convince that just the right phrase is the key to the kingdom. Argh.

Politics is about money & power. Messaging is part of politics & therefore ALSO about money & power. The cleverness or stickiness or virality or whatever TF of individual phrases is not what wins messaging battles. Money & power win them.

You win messaging battles by developing the capacity to ensure that your message is repeated again & again, in multiple media, in such a way that it *reaches your target audience*. How do you develop that capacity? Money & power.

You can run all the focus groups you want, come up with the cleverest, catchiest, most perfectest phrase that was ever phrased ... if all you do is say it at a press conference & hope the media transmits it, intact, to your target audience ... you will lose. Repeatedly.

The right has a giant propaganda machine that utterly dominates the worldview of millions & heavily distorts even "mainstream" media. The left doesn't. That simple fact fundamentally shapes all of US politics. I'm gonna beat this damn drum until I die.

It occurs to me I've written stuff on this subject over the years. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/12/28/14074214/climate-denialism-social

And so forth. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/11/10/16627256/conservatives-climate-change-persuasion

What's this, 2014? https://grist.org/climate-energy/no-you-actually-havent-found-a-way-to-reach-conservatives-on-climate-change/

One last point on this alreadytoolong thread: IMO, there's not much hope of a LW media to match RW media. The only real longterm hope for progressives, in media as in politics, is to restore a base level of social trust & solidarity in the US. Without it nothing else is possible.

Metastasized & growing. https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1326020882112786432

Final entry in this thread I promise. This is the map of media consumption produced by a seminal 2016 study at Harvard. Left-leaners distribute their consumption b/t mainstream & left sources. Right-leaners cluster around a few hyper-partisan RW sources. https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2017/08/mediacloud