from the fill-your-head-with-pudding-and-hate dept
Trump recently launched a “wireless phone service,” which as we mentioned, isn’t so much a real phone service as it is a quick licensing agreement and a lazy rebranding of other services. He’s also exploiting the presidency by launching a vast array of new, clumsily branded Trump home goods, including a new Trump-branded Instantpot. If you’re into that sort of thing.
The Trump empire also recently announced they were globally launching Truth+, the Trump regime’s video streaming propaganda service. Here too, the product is mostly just a bundling of existing right wing propaganda and fake journalism video channels pandering to far right wingers, including NewsMax, Real America’s Voice, One America News Network, RSBN and Patriot TV.
The press release for the propaganda bundle claims that this bonanza of bullshit and propaganda is essential in restoring Americans’ sagging trust in news and journalism:
“Truth+ is the singular option for non-woke TV and movies, as well as a great alternative to discredited legacy news channels that have squandered the trust of the American people.”
While we’re on the topic of U.S. journalism and trust, if you dig through the all of the U.S. reporting on this otherwise uninteresting launch of Truth+ you can’t find a single outlet that mentions this isn’t reliable, accurate journalism — much less directly calls out these channels’ history of propaganda. Zero mention, across any of them, that these outlets are filled with conspiracy theories and lies.
Outlets like The Wrap and Mediate, for example, just pretty much copy and paste the Trump regime’s press statements on the service. The same at Reuters.
Nobody, at any of the “news” outlets covering the launch of this fake news expansion, mention Trump’s blatant attacks on the First Amendment and real journalism (despite CBS paying Trump a bribe just a week earlier!). Nor do any of the outlets parroting the Truth+ press release bother to mention Trump Media’s repeated run-ins with super dodgy financial impropriety. Just not relevant, I guess.
Trump+ probably won’t be interesting or popular enough to have much of an actual impact by itself. OAN, for example, makes a lot of noise but historically sees very low viewership numbers. Viewership has been so low, major cable TV providers like Verizon and DirecTV kicked them out of their lineups, causing no shortage of whining from Trumplicans falsely claiming they were being unfairly censored.
Still, it’s part of a much broader, and far more successful right wing effort to steadily replace U.S. journalism with lazy culture war infotainment and propaganda as far as the eye can see. Peppered with overlarge, semi-functional corporate media companies too afraid to tell anybody the truth, and a handful of actual journalists increasingly operating on shoestring budgets.
Either way, supposed free thinkers can now more easily fill their heads with billionaire-approved bile, pebbles and hate, literally branded as the truth. Whose to question the wisdom of the free market?
Filed Under: disinformation, donald trump, grift, journalism, media, propaganda, streaming, truth plus, tv, video
Companies: trump media, truth social
