The rise of Mega-Stupid is possible thanks to many media outlets and platforms that their primary aim is to generate revenue from clicks and views and not to propagate facts. Critical and intellectual discourse is becoming ever more overshadowed with the anti-expert contrarians – in many cases, gullible idiots or blatant opportunists. Meanwhile, the Russian state has a multiple billion-dollar budget to disseminate disinformation in the West with its propagandists and outlets such as RT.
It is no coincidence that the rise of dumb media across Europe and the US is coinciding with coordinated and systematic efforts by Russia and China to influence Western audiences. The disruption and subversion of the information space in the West by Russia and China has opened up a market for dumb media in which any grifter or fraudster can thrive with the backing of an algorithm of authoritarianism and disinformation. TikTok, an intelligence asset of the Chinese state, is the biggest platform facilitating this market. This is how Elon Musk has turned a number of individuals—many of whom were previously outcasts due to grifting or even fraud—into popular pseudo-journalists in the United States. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was a political move that used an online publishing platform to influence the political discourse in the US.
The EU is now being taken by surprise as the US government and Elon Musk are engaged in a disinformation war against it. Apart from ignoring the security aspects of Europe, the EU also failed to value and the importance of the information space enough, automatically ignoring its vulnerabilities to foreign subversion. Yet, it is the independent press in Europe that is on the frontlines against Russia’s disinformation war, and while the disinformation against the EU by the US and Russia is well funded and systematically coordinated, the independent press in Europe is reeling or barely surviving.
In Malta, the trends are also the same and the Labour government is perfectly taking advantage of the international trend. The Labour government is violating the Media Freedom Act by allocating government subsidies to its propagandists while the independent press is served with the pressure of the Courts and rising legal costs. The grifters are not lacking and individuals like Ricky Caruana and Andrew Azzopardi have dumbed down the political discourse as they ingratiated with politicians from both sides of the political divide. Politicians are now regularly adulated instead of being held accountable. The political discussions are becoming ever more riddled with fraud and disinformation and innocuous commentary. Commentary is reduced to meaningless to talking points.
The deterioration of the information space benefits the Labour Party as it tries to control the narrative and the political discourse. Controlling the information space, which is riddled with grift and dumb media, enables the government to get away with its corruption and cover-ups. Society is worse off as the rot continues to grow, rather than problems and issues being addressed transparently and with maturity. This is also a battle between idiocracy and truth, and between stagnation and development, making the role of the independent press more important than ever.
Website Editor
Historian and Publisher
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