The average American sees and hears roughly 4000 ads each and every day. They’re everywhere – from the TV and radio to digital ads, billboards, pop-ups, and just about anything else you can think of – and there is no escaping them. And over time, no one is immune to them. I’m saying that as someone who has been vigorously trained to see and counter this influence, and to teach others to do the same. And I’m telling you straight - no one is immune. Not me, and certainly not you.
These days, given the massive changes in our viewing and reading habits and in the technology we use to engage with the world around us, the word “ad” or advertisement has expanded into a massive media monster we now call “content creation” and the rules of the game have not caught up. What I mean is, while a company running an ad has to follow certain rules and can be penalized for lying or for any number of different kinds of fraud, “content creators” are largely immune from these safeguards. For example, there is no listing under FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act) for “Influencers,” meaning that in most cases, if a foreign government pays for a lobbyist to lean on your Senator, we will know who’s paying the bills, but if they pay an “Influencer” to drive their message online, we probably won’t hear a word about it.
So let me get straight to the point. It has now become almost impossible to know whether what we are watching is real or staged, and it is also almost impossible to know who is paying for the message. Now, sometimes we can figure this out, like when Tucker Carlson did a corny pro-Putin heel turn that looked more like a pro wrestling gimmick than anything resembling journalism. It was so blatantly obvious that few if any of us were fooled by watching a career sellout do what he does best. Now Tucker can’t find even a handful of people to watch his puppet show, no matter how many rubles are spent making it.
The American right is awash with this kind of content. And the machine is efficient. For example, after Trump’s “wonderful secrets” letter published last week, a letter that Trump claimed over and over again didn’t exist, the right immediately went to work, pumping loads of billionaire cash and foreign money into a quick response that argued that the letter was fake because the signature wasn’t Trump’s. It’s a lie, but it’s a well-funded lie, so of course every lefty news outlet dropped the “is Trump a pedophile” discussion in favor of a “is the signature real” discussion because there will never be a time in which the left doesn’t take the bait and give away news cycles to the influence machine created by billionaire and foreign cash.
And on the left, the decision has been made to fight fire with fire by creating even more dark money groups to fund influencers on the left, so when this pie fight comes full circle, we will be able to say with considerable accuracy that every single message we see is bought and paid for. Nothing is organic. No arguments are genuine. Everyone, right and left, is just saying what they need to say to pay the mortgage. What gets said out loud in public space is about to become the next monopoly. The left will have one curated, focus group driven message, and the right will have one curated, focus group driven message. And anyone independent simply won’t be seen, nor heard. We will only ever see what has already been think-tank approved. First we will lose independent voices, and then we’ll lose independent thought altogether. And for those who think that could never happen, think back to 2015, when media covered the Trump campaign as an entertainment story rather than a political one because his rise was just as unthinkable.
That’s where we’re going, but you have more power to change this than you think. And for our part, let me say here and now that PVN does not take dark money, nor will we. And by saying this, know that we are abandoning a funding source so powerful that it keeps much if not most of our competition afloat, and it certainly controls what they can and can’t say out loud. Our hope is that we can help keep actual independent media strong enough to compete with the endless waterfall of corporate and foreign cash that has infected our national discourse.
So when you’re getting annoyed at the emails, or the fundraising asks, please be patient with us. We do what we do so we can keep throwing punches in a fight that is much bigger than us. The dark money wants us just like it wants everything else, but we’re not selling, and with your help and support, we plan to say no to dark money for as long as we exist. Most of the influencers and content creators we watch and listen to, even the ones we like, even the ones we trust, can’t say this.
“No Dark Money. No PAC Money. Just You.”
This is our pledge, and anyone who can’t take it with us might as well take a trip down to Mar-a-Lago and kiss the ring.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.