Swimming Up (Main) Stream

The Media Landscape of the Swamp

There is so much to say about American media and how it has changed in the last 50 years. Some better, some much, much worse. Today, more than half of all Americans get their news not from journalism, but from social media influencers with no journalistic training whatsoever. So starting with that information, we know that we have turned a corner in our intake, and that corner might have led us around a bend from which we cannot return.

But society at large is not my concern here, although I am happy to comment about it in my paid version of this column. The purpose here is to explicate the content of Project 2025, and what they have to say about media. That is, what they have to say about government media, more specifically.

For those unfamiliar, the United States government actually does run some media channels. The United States Agency for Global Media, or USAGM hold a mission statement as follows: “The mission of United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) is to inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy” (usagm.gov). President Gerald Ford signed the Voice of America Charter into law to ensure the integrity of VOA programming in 1976, and to protect the interests of the United States in communicating directly over the radio internationally. The intention was to gain…