“We can build a better system”
As we have stated here before, Republicans have spent decades building a media machine reaching into nearly every corner of American life. Fox “News” is only the start. Sinclair Broadcast Group owns local television stations that reach nearly four in ten American households with its conservative-biased programming. Add Newsmax, OAN, the Daily Wire, the Tucker Carlson Network, AM talk radio, newspapers such as the Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos), the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post (both controlled by News Corp. i.e. the family of Rupert Murdoch), and even CBS News now in right wing hands, and you get Uber drivers reciting right wing talking points to captive customers. Many non-conservatives therefore get exposed to this Republican ecosphere as well, as the massive reach of GOP talking points means they become the actual discussion topics for many issues.
Democrats have no comparable media structure. As a result, conservative outlets can seize upon a topic and hammer it far longer than any Democratic effort could sustain. The tactic often follows a simple pattern: Republicans take an isolated incident, strip it of context, and use their media machine to present it as proof of a nationwide crisis, often using their invented false narratives such as “Scary Brown People”.
Perhaps the best example of this is immigration. Unauthorized crossings at the U.S. southern border have been a genuine policy problem for years, but Republicans seized upon the problem as a “crisis” while simultaneously refusing to help fix it. In 2013, for example, a bipartisan immigration reform bill passed the Senate 68-32, only for House Republicans, led by Speaker John Boehner, to block a floor vote, because they did not want to give President Barack Obama a “win”. Republicans did this again in 2024, when Donald Trump directed Senate Republicans to kill a bipartisan border security bill their own party had helped negotiate, preserving the issue for the campaign trail rather than closing the deal.
At the same time, conservative outlets have repeatedly highlighted individual crimes committed by immigrants and presented them as supposed proof of a nationwide migrant crime wave. The killing of nursing student Laken Riley in 2024, allegedly by a man who had entered the country illegally, became a fixture of Republican messaging and campaign ads for months afterward. However, national data show no such crime surge, and that immigrants, both legal and undocumented, commit crimes at no higher rates than people born in the United States. But years of that Republican-manufactured alarm have worked: the share of Americans who see immigrants as a “major” crime risk has climbed sharply since 2017.
Fox “News” and other conservative media outlets are running a similar operation against socialism heading into the 2026 midterms, with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as their favorite target. On Fox, network hosts and Republican leaders routinely blur the line between Mamdani’s democratic socialism and communism, turning one mayor’s agenda into a stand-in for what they claim the entire Democratic Party has become. Donald Trump has led the charge himself, posting that Democratic-run cities are turning into dangerous “communist” strongholds.
Republicans built this communications advantage deliberately. Unless Democrats build an effective messaging machine to compete, they risk not just losing the arguments, but underperforming in the elections that follow them.
Photo by Tiffa Day, used under Creative Commons license. https://tinyurl.com/yhpkyd6k
