The U.S. Media War Is Also A Class Struggle

IN Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel on the pointlessness of war, the tragicomic soldier-hero, Billy Pilgrim, overhears his friend Rosewater telling a psychiatrist: 'I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living." If we equate the shrink with the establishment, Rosewater makes a lot of sense.

- CP SURENDRAN

In a democracy, our basic freedom is to determine the leader to give a voice to our favourite fiction. Lies are not entirely pejorative they could be aspirations, such as when we dress up to hide our poverty or when an elderly person goes easy on his age so he won't be counted out. A lie is a wish, a hope. Only a few leaders can offer it with conviction.

This November, it is the turn of the Americans to elect their leader. In short, they must choose what lies they will be told, and by whom.

There was a time when a guide to the electoral world in the US was the media.

But with the legacy media losing its authority and the emergence of the new social media in which every consumer is a potential authority, broadcasting his or her version of the world-the old guidelines do not hold. A billionaire like Elon Musk, with 200 million followers on X, has greater reach than most newspapers. Typically, Musk goes against the idea of all traditional wisdom. If the world is a coin, Musk is ever flipping it.

In one corner, we see the traditional American media-The Washington Post, New York Times and CNN-teaming up with the Democrats fronted by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The other; alternative media is personified by Musk, whose takeover of Twitter (now X) was intended to "destroy the woke virus".