Level the Playing Field

Between the Right-wing media ecosphere and the Tech Bros, we need a rebalancing

The political Right has consistently grown its media presence for decades, from Talk Radio in the 80s, through Fox News in the 90s, to today’s digital landscape. The Left has expressed less interest in a coordinated approach, and is desperately outmanned, allowing the communications playing field to become tilted to the right.

Simultaneously, Big Tech has grown fast, and insulated itself from oversight. There are some things we could do to get the owners to moderate their social media platforms.

First is the repeal of Section 530 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. That law states: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider,” leaving them without liability for what’s said on their platforms. It was passed in the spirit of the Communications Act of 1934 that deemed telephone companies, “common carriers,” and not responsible for what people say on the phone. But this ain’t 1930s Ma Bell. The platforms can and should police themselves.

We need the social networks to seek and destroy the bots that run rampant on their platforms, and we need our intelligence community to redouble its efforts. We had a pretty good leg up under Biden, but Trump has reallocated our resources away from the onslaught of Chinese, Russian, North Korean, and Iranian efforts to get us to fight among ourselves.

A little public shaming might help, but the combination of internet anonymity and the shameless behavior that enables our worst instincts, I doubt we’ll find an answer in the “better angels” we rightfully might hope people have whispering in their ears.

The silo you choose records your interests and plays them back to you as gospel. We create our own algorithms, whether intended or not. That’s just the way the software works.

If you live in one of the right-wing silos, you may not realize what news you’re missing. For instance, if you’re not the one shopping and spending, you may not know that inflation is eating up your buying power. Coffee and beef are the fastest growing prices—coffee alone is up about 19 percent this year. Beef, utilities, and vehicles are all up between 11 and 12%. Utility costs are up 5%.

The president is busy saying he owns “the affordability.” True, he does, just not in the way he wishes. He’s daring his base with what amounts to the taunt, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

I keep coming back to the old adage that you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. The silos allow them to fool some of the people—a fair number, to be sure—all of the time.

But this fooling is contrary to what people are experiencing at the supermarket, and one would think that even though their feeds suspend reality, their wallets and stomachs do not.

Will those in the right-side silos ever know that when the Trump administration inexplicably ended 383 clinical trials, the impact was felt by over 74,000 patients? The National Institutes of Health, our—and the world’s—biggest and best medical research facility, says that of the total cancelations, 14.4% dealt with infectious disease.

If you live in the Fox News bubble that includes podcasts, radio shows, and tons of internet pages, you may be unaware that the steady march of government-funded medical research that has given us everything from aspirin to penicillin to human genome research has ended.

The Wall Street Journal says the White House is busy saying one thing and doing another. As the president goes on about “the affordability,” continuing to say things are rosy, and that this is a “Democrat hoax,” his administration is desperately trying to find ways to bring tariff-related price increases back down to earth. Hedging the bet that you’ll believe Trump over your lying eyes, they’ve started with food. This is not news you’ll hear in your right-wing silo.

Half of Michigan residents know that tariffs are crushing the state’s economy, and the American automobile industry in general—a fact that concerns Ohio, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, the “right to work” (for less), non-union states where automakers, foreign and domestic, set up manufacturing to reduce labor costs.

Chances are half the residents of flood-prone states down the Mississippi Valley, or hurricane-ravaged states from the Gulf Coast to the Carolinas don’t know of the administration’s drive to kill FEMA, the federal agency that provides disaster relief.

Between the foreign provocateurs and the silos that don’t acknowledge reality, we’re hurting ourselves.

Let’s level the playing field.

©2025 Jon Sinton