According to a Pew Research Center study out this week, entitled “News Platform Fact Sheet,” Americans are paying less attention to the news nowadays and that can be attributed to three factors: “changes in news consumption habits, declining trust in the media, and high levels of news fatigue.” The first relates to the increasing impact of the Internet as a supplier of news. The second and third are, of course, the most troubling and have to do with the way the so-called “MAGA Movement” led by Donald Trump has toyed with the minds of the public to turn citizens off from even wanting to know what’s going on. Reports in recent weeks of the U.S. Intelligence community’s assessment that the Russians and other anti-democratic forces are actively working globally to disrupt the public’s confidence in fair elections worldwide comes as no surprise to many, and underscores our assessment here that the “MAGA Movement” in the U.S. is one big Russian operation based on the Kremlin’s stated decision to use Trump as its tool of influence and misinformation going back as far as the 1980s.

Such influence, more than just disinformation but a fully-blown “psychological warfare” operation against an unwitting U.S. population, is aimed at eroding the underpinnings of democracy, which is centered on the public’s right and capacity to learn, observe and act in the national interest. To the extent this has not been taken seriously by the most influential leaders of our society, then it is succeeding in the erosion of our democratic values and institutions. Distrust or worse, active measures that strike at the heart of our democracy are being accelerated in this period to the point that Americans are being urged to believe even those things which they see with their own eyes aren’t really true. The most classic example was in January 2017 when Trump’s first White House press secretary Sean Spicer brazenly insisted to the White House press corps that attendance at Trump’s inauguration parade was attended by millions when all the senses of everyone suggested otherwise. Again, that was not just misinformation, that war “psywar” of the most extreme and dangerous type.

The demise of reliable news in our culture is another and maybe even the most significant example of this “psywar,” fueled by operations, among others, like Fox News and the ongoing Trump claim that the 2020 election was “stolen.”

Financial strains on media organizations, big and small, have been accelerating, wiping out thousands of local and regional newspapers, often substituted for by bland corporated-backed entities, such as Patch.com that peddles pablum instead of real, hard and critical news. Patch is owned by New York-based Hale Global, described as “a buyer and partner of choice for leading global enterprises.” It is akin to a corporate raider operation that either picks apart what’s left of independent news entities or is used to push them closer to insolvency by situating themselves as substitutes for them.