The new age of agitprop – spiked
Are we living in a new age of agitprop? It is not unusual for journalism, culture and the arts to reflect the political bias of societies and individual writers. But in the past few decades, the business of providing information and insight has sharply deteriorated. Particularly at the elite level, the media now embrace an increasingly uniform point of view on issues as diverse as gender, race, the pandemic and climate.
To be sure, there still exists a vibrant oppositional press that offers divergent views. Nevertheless, so many mainstream media outlets increasingly resemble something closer to the kind of agitprop perfected by Russian Marxists, Lenin and their heirs. What was once a liberally minded industry, notes Michael Shellenberger, has embraced censorship as the one cure for what it defines as misinformation .
The results for consumers have been disastrous. In the new media world, all news coverage is geared towards upholding pre-established narratives. Actual reporting has become exceedingly rare. A 2019 report from think-tank Rand revealed that journalism is steadily moving away from a fact-based model and toward one dominated by opinion. The result is what Rand described as truth decay . This reflects a disappointing turn within a media industry that once proudly opposed existing power structures.
The rise of agitprop in the media is largely a result of increasing geographic, ideological and class uniformity. There has been a drastic change in the composition of the journalistic profession. Working-class reporters, many with ties to local communities, have been replaced by a more cosmopolitan and uniformly progressive breed with college degrees. At schools like Columbia, aspiring journalists focus less on the fundamentals of reporting and more on openly advancing a social justice agenda.
Joel Kotkin.