New York Mayor Bill de Blasio believes he can rip the legacy media but President Donald Trump cannot credibly do so.
De Blasio, often criticized for his blatant opportunism, claimed on Friday that Trump is being “fake” and “doesn’t actually mean it” when he rails against legacy media outlets that Trump has dubbed the “opposition party.”
During an interview with BuzzFeed, de Blasio blistered and railed against the “corporate media.” When BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith pointed out that he sounded like Trump, de Blasio took offense.
“Donald Trump spouts fake populism all day long and gets away with it. He is part of the problem. You decide, is he a millionaire or a billionaire? I don’t care. Either way, he’s part of the problem,” de Blasio said. “He’s part of the same class that created this reality. He’s chummy with all these people. So when he rails against the media, it’s to fake appeal, if it’s just a cynical ploy to appeal to a right-wing base. They may honestly feel it. I don’t think he feels it anymore and I think he feels a lot of the things he said in the campaign.”
De Blasio added that “a lot of us felt a long time ago the media ownership trajectory was dangerous to the democratic process” and declared that “we actually need to undermine the mega-concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few” because, he claimed, “ that few invariably will be right wing, corporate people who want to create an even more unequal society.”
He slammed Rupert Murdoch as “a right-wing media baron who is consistently trying to undermine progressive governments and progressive movements all over the world.” But he also took a shot at Mort Zuckerman’s Daily News, saying that outlet “is still corporate media.”
“So the answer is to diffuse and open up the media, make it more small-D democratic, give people more and more options and more and more competition and choice, but no, of course Rupert Murdoch has spent his life trying to undermine the democratic process, we can’t let him do it,” he continued. “Look, media is based on the inequities of the capitalist system. Let’s be clear: wealthy people own the media. That’s not a good starting place. It’s not a good starting place.”
De Blasio blasted the “corporate media” for not challenging “corporate power structures.”
“If you’re going to challenge elected officials, God bless you, go challenge the corporations that are dictating the rules of so much of our lives at the same time. Go challenge Wall Street, go challenge the real powers that be.” he said. “And it doesn’t happen enough.”
He then said the “big, big story” is the proliferation of new media outlets and the ability of people to get news from non-establishment outlets on social media.
“Look, thank God that because of social media, there are countervailing voices and more and more people, he said. “Here’s what I find all the time, I can’t tell you how many people this city have abandoned the mainstream media in various ways and are getting their information on a lot of different places, or at least not taking the mainstream media’s word for it and counterbalancing, checking information, with a lot of other sources as well.”
Though de Blasio promoted more left-leaning new media options, tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen recently singled out Breitbart News for praise for its reporting on the 2016 presidential election.
“If you actually wanted to, last year in 2016, read the story of the election and get the truth, you read Breitbart,” Andreessen said this week. “Now, nobody wants to hear that, because we all have concluded that Breitbart is absurd right-wing propaganda and that somehow the traditional coastal press is somehow the truth, but it’s demonstrable last year that was not true.”
Even though Breitbart News was harsh on Andreessen for his views on immigration in 2014, it nonetheless acknowledged the instrumental role Andreessen had in allowing new media outlets to flourish.
As Breitbart News wrote, in an article that was critical of him, “Andreessen has been a pioneer in helping new media disrupt legacy outlets and make content and facts more widely available to average Americans.”
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.