Billionaire tech entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen explained the downfall of the mainstream media during an interview at Recode this week, claiming “If you actually wanted to, last year in 2016, read the story of the election and get the truth, you read Breitbart.”
Speaking at the Code 2017 conference, an invitation-only event hosted by Recode, Marc Andreessen made his feelings about the media clear.
“If you actually wanted to, last year in 2016, read the story of the election and get the truth, you read Breitbart,” Andreessen declared. “Now, nobody wants to hear that, because we all have concluded that Breitbart is absurd right-wing propaganda and that somehow the traditional coastal press is somehow the truth, but it’s demonstrable last year that was not true.”
“So I think we all just need to take a step back from this idea that there’s absolute truth, and that we somehow have some sort of monopoly or preferential access to it and the rest of these people kind of don’t understand anything,” he continued. “By the way, it’s a surefire way to lose elections. If Democrats are ever going to win elections again in the center of the country and the south of the country, they have to show up with some message other than ‘you’re all a bunch of morons’. That’s not going to work.”
“But that’s not the point… that’s an easy shorthand way of saying no matter what they say on the left, on either coast, is untrue,” interrupted the moderator. “You can say untruths to people and get them to vote a certain way. I mean you know that.”
“If you like your healthcare plan you can keep it. Right? Obama, 2008? Obamacare, how’s that working out?” Andreessen added. “I’m gonna close Guantanamo in my first year in office?”
“Well the fact that politicians break some promises is not a very big…” the moderator continued.
“If you read the press coverage of those promises at the time they were presented as truth,” declared Andreessen. “They were presented as ‘yes, these are absolutely things that are going to happen.’ There were reams of coverage around Obamacare of how well it was going to work.”
During his interview, Andreessen also explained how the general public used to be made to think by the media that Silicon Valley was a “hotbed of crazy libertarians,” despite the opposite being true.
“Of course our friend Peter [Thiel] was always held up… as kind of representative of the valley,” he explained. “A funny thing happened last year, which was it turns out that was fake news. It turns out that was not true. In fact it turns out the opposite is true, which is the 99.999 percent of Silicon Valley is last year voted for Hillary Clinton, supported Hillary Clinton, donated to Hillary Clinton.”
“The money difference, it was like some giant multiple… Silicon Valley is extremely left-wing, extremely liberal,” Andreessen concluded. “I think it’s hard for people in Silicon Valley to even articulate the other side at this point, I think it’s hard to even articulate the case for voting for Donald Trump, it’s hard to articulate what people in the Midwest and South are thinking.”
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook.