Politics & Power Quote by David Brock

Brock is describing the moment when reality stops being the referee and becomes just another contestant. The phrase "factual adjudication" sounds judicial on purpose: it evokes courts, evidence, due process. Then he shrugs it off. Not because facts are suddenly unknowable, but because the ecosystem has changed so dramatically that establishing the truth no longer settles the argument. That quiet pivot is the sting.

His real target is the media incentives that make an "ad" (note the dismissive specificity: not a policy, not a scandal, an ad) metastasize into a full-blown political event. "Other outlets" does a lot of work: it avoids naming names while indicting a whole tier of platforms that thrive on amplification without accountability. "Far less responsible" is moral language masquerading as a neutral observation; Brock is drawing a line between journalism as verification and media as weapon.

The subtext is less about persuasion than power. When he says some outlets have "a political reason for promoting it", he implies the coverage isn’t a byproduct of interest but a tactic: repetition as strategy, visibility as victory. The deeper cynicism is that debunking can be irrelevant or even counterproductive, because attention itself is the currency.

Contextually, this lands in the post-gatekeeper era of fragmented audiences and partisan media, where the fight is over narrative dominance, not shared facts. Brock’s intent is a warning with an edge: if you’re still litigating truth while others are optimizing reach, you’re playing the wrong game.