On May 11th 2009 the New York Times reported that the newspapers (big and small) have lost 16% of their readers since 2000, but the major broadcast networks had lost 28% of their viewers in the same time. In short, the MSM looks to be in terminal decline.
The Main Stream Media is now directed at leftist Baby-Boomers, the elderly and the working class. It survives only because these groups lack the technical facility to contribute to the Blogosphere. Leftists, the elderly and the working class are a useless audience because they are timid, dying or stupid. A cursory glance at any British newsstand shows the same story; publications aimed at out-of-touch pensioners (Daily Express, the Daily Mail, the provincial press in general), neo-Christian liberal eccentrics (the Guardian) or uneducated no-marks glued to their TV sets (Sun, Mirror, Daily Star). None of these publications has any appeal to a genuinely intelligent, self-aware person of any social background. The same can be said of TV. Aside from a few decent wildlife shows, the programmes are banal prolefeed (X Factor, American Idol) aimed at the human LCD. Political programmes are utterly juvenile, still trapped within post-War paternalism, refusing to accept that Britain now dances to the tunes of America’s Power Elite (without understanding this, no genuine understanding of Anglosphere politics can begin).
In the modern Anglosphere, MRAs are heavily outnumbered. In itself, this is not insurmountable: as Stonewall Jackson opined, a small nation can hold its own against a larger nation by concentrating its forces, destroying the enemy in detail, compensating for small numbers with greater activity. Indeed, during the early days of Anglo feminism in the late Sixties, they did exactly this. Feminists were active everywhere across the Anglosphere and were able to drive patriarchy before them, destroyed in detail or trapped in intellectual redoubts. Today, the liberal feminists hold the ground that matters: the mainstream media, the law, politics and academia. We hold nothing. However, the fall of the MSM removes a vital part of their fortress, giving us the initiative for the first time in decades.
To understand this situation better, we must return to Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony. Gramsci thought deeply about why revolutions happened in some countries, not others. Why did Russians rebel during World War One, and not the English? After all, on the morning of the battle of the Somme, some 60, 000 British troops died; whole villages lost all their men in a few hours. The same could be said of the American Southerners during the Civil War. Why did they keep fighting, even after Gettysburg, when all hope of victory was gone? According to Gramsci, hegemony explains this difference. Russia had no elaborate mass media comprising radio stations or newspapers, which weakened the masses' social conviction and made revolt more likely. By contrast, the English fought on because they were enmeshed in a complex hegemony comprising schools, newspapers, radio broadcasts, street names and customs, binding them to the existing social order and making them more pliant to state manipulation. We are all trapped in hegemony, to a greater or lesser extent. And it is fair to say that we are now trapped in a matriarchal hegemony, which has normalized the denigration and marginalization of men across the Anglosphere.
However, since the MSM is the major tool for transmitting the NAMWO agenda, its decline represents a golden opportunity to create a counter-hegemonic movement. The Internet is supplanting the MSM and we must colonize it NOW to realize our aims and ambitions. If we look at the media world, the most potent initiatives inhering to men's issues are occurring online. However, removal of the MSM's ability to control popular discourse is beginning to have far reaching effects in the real world, too. We are witnessing what Gramsci called a 'crisis of hegemony' where many of the old pan-Anglosphere sureties are no longer viable. All the old assumptions are disintegrating, where they remain in place at all.
The hegemonic breakdown is much more precipitous in Britain than elsewhere, simply because British hegemony is more developed than that of the younger Anglosphere countries. It is implied that, being more socially integrated, the British quickly lapse into anarchy when sundered from hegemonic tradition. Hence Britain’s hegemonic collapse is having political effects transcending mere lifestyle issues. A case in point: declining support for the ‘mainstream’ parties is matched by rising support for the BNP. Of course, Nick Griffin’s nationalists have fully exploited the Internet to get their message across - as we might expect from a counter-hegemonic perspective.
Canadian criminologist Elliott Leyton discusses British hegemonic exceptionalism in Men of Blood, his study of crime in Britain. He argues that Britain has traditionally enjoyed low crime rates because of high hegemonic integration. For example, British murderers have much higher suicide rates than incarcerated murderers elsewhere in the world – obviously, the ‘shame’ of such a crime is greater for highly integrated individuals. Interestingly, the excellence of the British armed forces may also relate to this hegemonic factor – during World War Two, 120 British troops were worth 150 Americans in western theatres. Even today, the excellence of Britain’s forces give it a disproportionate influence on world affairs. And British football hooliganism mimics traditional imperialist themes of international expansion. But I digress...
In short, the MSM can no longer regulate public opinion as they did in the post-war era. Men’s rights, populist politics and other anti-Boomer agendas are just a few of the online results. In the longer term, the MSM looks doomed to extinction. It cannot compete with the Internet for a number of reasons:
Expenses and overheads. To get any publication to the newsstands, costs are astronomical. It costs little or nothing to post opinion or information on a website. Ultimately, costs alone will force the MSM onto the Internet, where their advantages are nullified.
Speed. The Internet is quicker. Newspapers chew over old stories because they are followers, now. Today, hot news breaks online, not via the MSM.
Technical proliferation. As more and more people get online access, the old media channels wither. As handheld devices like iphones and Blackberries become ubiquitous, those old channels will run completely dry.
Death/marginalisation of current MSM audiences. The old die off. The working class has no spending power. Boomer leftists are dying off, too. The MSM presently survives on these audiences. This is why their offerings are so weird, low-brow and out of touch. Newspapers seem to think we are still living in 1958: party politics, organized religion, feminism and post-war collectivism all express this archaic fixation. Smart younger people have decamped online, disgusted with these offerings. The MSM have adapted skilfully to lower class/Boomer/pensioner tastes - but dealt themselves out of the game.
Given that the MSM are doomed, what does the future hold? Many things, not all of them good.
Firstly, the blogs of today will become tomorrow’s online institutions. Roissy in DC or Whisky (or whoever runs their blogs, then) will become household names. Baby Boomer left-feminism will be forced back, as its spokespeople die off. Already, Greer and MacKinnon convey an archaic ethos bizarre even to most women. We can expect Internet-based, pan-Anglosphere post-modern communities of interest to burgeon. Such communities will widen into pressure groups, maybe even new political blocs. Emboldened and renewed by these new communal links, Britain will sever links with Continental Europe and look more towards the States and the commonwealth as its natural cultural allies. As pan-Anglosphere hegemony erodes, supplanted by these new online communities of interest, the constituent nations will start to politically disentegrate. Britain in particular may lapse into civil war, torn between a paternalist MSM ‘Court’ and a populist Internet ‘Country’.
Truly, we live in interesting times.
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