Mainstream Media Committed Suicide
Today, I want to go back and cover a few stories that appeared over the week based on another one that appeared today about the dying of major media. Today’s story refers to it as a murder. I think I’d call it a suicide.
Today’s highlighted article claims everyone in the mainstream media all the way back to Walter Conkrite was corrupted by communism. Maybe. Certainly almost all communist thinking in the US came from liberals. I’ve never seen any conservatives move in that direction.
Whether or not we should have been fighting wars against communism everywhere, such as in Vietnam, is a much different story. My opinion is that, if other nations want to try it, let them. That’s their bad choice. If it’s as bad as many say it is (and I certainly believe it is), it’ll die of its own abject failures just like the mainstream media is dying of theirs today. So, if they want to try it, that’s all on them. We don’t need to even sanction them. Just keep preaching the truth.
Today’s article claims Donald Trump murdered the Leftist media. OK. He’s certainly beat it up good, but I think it is also largely failing on its own. Conservatives have been growing consistently sicker and sicker of its bias against conservative views and its leaning toward ever more extreme liberal views for decades. Over time, that’s a loss of, at least, a third of your audience. Many conservatives are thankful to see a champion beating the big networks up, but the liberal media had long been isolating itself to a much narrower audience. At the same time, technology made an infinite umber of smaller niche publishers and producers possible.
Still, Trump giving the big guys as many kicks in the teeth as liberal media gave to him certainly left them looking even worse. Look at how they beat up on Trump, and it’s the old, “Yeah, but you should see what the other guy looks like” for how he fought back.
They trashed Trump, sometimes fairly based on his own absurd and sensational statements, sometimes unfairly, such as with all the Russia libel they threw his way as if it were a fact when their sources were never able in the end to show that it was after years of trying their best; but he trashed them even more.
Whether by murder or suicide, the following is a true review of the news I’m talking about that has passed under the bridge this week and last:
Just a brief online search will show you the obituaries of the wicked government-media establishment. Here are just a few.
CNN is dead. More. NBC is crashing. MSLSD is having a fire sale. Oprah’s network is toast! The Las Angeles times has fired their entire editorial board.
One story that I ran this week from the liberal Atlantic said that legacy media was going to have to compete in a choose-your-own-adventure reality. That has been increasingly true for years as the public has started picking whom it will even listen to based on who matches what they already believe. If you say anything too conservative, you’ll lose all your woke liberals. If you say anything liberal, you’ll lose all your conservatives. Both sides have largely given up listening to the other; but you can blame a long-slanted media for things getting to that extreme. At least, I do, and have since long before Trump stepped up to any presidential podium.
And now the narrowing of audiences has been reduced down to very individualized flavors—no longer mainstream CNN v mainstream (of a different kind) Fox:
“You are the media now.” That’s the message that began to cohere among right-wing influencers shortly after Donald Trump won the election this week. Elon Musk first posted the phrase, and others followed. “The legacy media is dead. Hollywood is done. Truth telling is in. No more complaining about the media,” the right-wing activist James O’Keefe posted shortly after. “You are the media.”
In other words, what is replacing the media we knew isn’t any big-time conservative networks like Fox, but many smaller podcasts and other kinds of individual, private publications and productions that are gaining viewers on YouTube, Rumble, their own sites, Substack, X, etc.
A defining quality of this election cycle has been that few people seem to be able to agree on who constitutes “the media,” what their role ought to be, or even how much influence they have in 2024. Based on Trump’s and Kamala Harris’s appearances on various shows—and especially Trump’s and J. D. Vance’s late-race interviews with Joe Rogan, which culminated in the popular host’s endorsement—some have argued that this was the “podcast election.” But there’s broad confusion over what actually moves the needle. Is the press the bulwark against fascism, or is it ignored by a meaningful percentage of the country? It is certainly beleaguered by a conservative effort to undermine media institutions, with Trump as its champion and the fracturing caused by algorithmic social media. It can feel existential at times competing for attention and reckoning with the truth that many Americans don’t read, trust, or really care all that much about what papers, magazines, or cable news have to say.
With Trump’s help, that is a problem the mainstream media has largely brought on itself. For example, my own site only exits to make up for their failures (to a very small audience, but it is an example of niches nibbling away at the mainstream). I’m constantly reporting on how the government stacks statistics and how the Fed says things are a certain way, and the mainstream media just thoughtlessly parrots all of it. Eventually, it comes out that the statistics were wrong, but the mainstream is like a patient who just accepts everything any doctor tells them without questioning things and taking responsibility for his or her own health. They don’t think, or they don’t think well.
All of this contributes to a well-documented, slow-moving crisis of legacy media—a cocktail whose ingredients also include declining trust, bad economics, political pressure, vulture capitalists, the rise of the internet, and no shortage of coverage decisions from mainstream institutions that have alienated or infuriated some portion of their audiences. Each and every one of these things affected how Americans experienced this election, though it is impossible to say what the impact is in aggregate. If “you are the media,” then there is no longer a consensus reality informed by what audiences see and hear: Everyone chooses their own adventure.
Because of the many choices by the mainstream to cover the news as they want it to be, the mainstream, itself, was shocked by something no conservative was shocked by. You could see the shock all over their faces and hear it in their words when President Biden finally had to speak at length without a teleprompter in the debate. Where did this faltering old fossil come from?
They seemed to have never seen this before, and they certainly didn’t see it on any of their own news shows. However, those who carved themselves off to niche publishers, whether as tiny as The Daily Doom or as big as Joe Rogan, certainly saw it all along. None of us were even slightly surprised. As I wrote right after the debate, I was more surprised to see the mainstream media wake up and to watch their shock as they did than I was by anything I saw out of Biden.
You can see that response in one of two ways, I suppose:
The confusion felt most palpable in the days following Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June. I noticed conflicting complaints from liberals online: Some argued that until that point, the media had failed to cover Biden’s age out of fear of crossing some editorial redline, while others said the media were now recklessly engaged in a coordinated effort to oust the president, shamefully crusading against his age.
Either way, the media’s biased coverage is clearly its own demise. The two theories are just efforts to guess why the media was suddenly all talking about something it had rarely talked about all along in any manner that revealed how serious the situation was. It could easily have been both: They were afraid to cross the party line by exposing Biden, but when Biden made himself so blatantly obvious that no one could deny his shortcoming any longer, they were suddenly free to jump all over him and try to rush in a new candidate. It probably is not an either-or situation.
The media were either powerful and incompetent or naive and irrelevant … or somehow both.
I’m going with “both.” Many working in the media had not heard the news about Biden’s decline all along because, all along, they were listening to nothing but their own side on their own outlets or in their colleague publications. For them, it was a case of cognitive isolation.
The vibe felt similar around The Washington Post’s decision not to endorse Harris in the final weeks of the race after the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, intervened and shut the effort down. Readers were outraged by the notion that one of the world’s richest men was capitulating to Trump: The paper reportedly lost at least 250,000 subscribers, or 10 percent of its digital base, in just a handful of days following the decision.
Likewise with the similar story about the LA Times that broke at about the same time. I carried those stories and commented on them as they unfolded. I didn’t see either one as capitulation to Trump but as recognition by people who never intended to run a losing business that they were becoming dinosaurs if they kept bleeding off all but liberal viewers.
As many people, including Bezos himself, argued, newspaper endorsements don’t matter.
Exactly … because you’re either preaching to your own choir, so it changes nothing; or you’re preaching to an audience that hasn’t been listening to you for some time and still isn’t. That’s what I said when the stories broke. No one cared what the papers’ editors had to say anyway, except an audience long refined to consist of only people who think just like the liberal editors.
My amusement was in hearing from liberals how no longer getting the editors’ opinions was a stroke against democracy or freedom of speech when no one cared about their opinions anyway! Could liberals not figure out how to vote for the same liberal character they already knew their liberal editors would run with? Apparently, they still believed someone other than their own kind was still listening to those publications for advice.
The writer Max Read noted that Bezos’s intervention was its own indicator of the Post’s waning relevance.
The Atlantic goes on very well (and oddly unbiased in my opinion) with article about the demise of the mainstream media. Good to see liberals accounting for their own side’s abject failure.
Take it from the riche
Thus, another niche writer like myself wrote on his own small Substack site the following:
Bill Rice is one who, like myself, makes sure to read both liberal articles and conservative ones, though he’s very conservative.
Bob Dunning’s more liberal than I’m conservative. According to Substack, Mr. Dunning is also one of Substack’s rising all-stars….
As one might predict, Dunning’s views are diametrically opposed to my own and, like all liberal pundits, reek of hypocrisy, double standards and lies of omission.
After his own takedown of Dunning’s liberal hypocrisy (for criticizing Team Trump for the kind of ugly tactics Dunning, himself, used all the time against Trump) and criticizing a few other much bigger names than Dunning, such as “deplorable” Hillary, Rice concludes,
I agree with Mr. Dunning that the nation needs to “heal,”but for some reason I do not think Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and our other magnanimous Democrat leaders were ever going to lead this healing effort.
Neither was NoMoJoe, who claimed quite stridently that the unvaccinated were the reason everyone else had to struggle with Covid. He was as divisive as Trump.
It’s Dunning, Biden, Harris et al who are brazen hypocrites when it comes to espousing the view that American citizens should NOT be allowed to make their own choices about what substances get injected into their blood streams.
Again, for the record, it was supporters of Harris who said deplorable anti-vaxxers should not be treated in hospitals and should be fired and apply for welfare.
And actually, one of them, Washington Governor Jay Inslee, said they must be fired and then must not be allowed welfare.
Dunning added a reference to the “Trump-is-a-Nazi” narrative/meme when he suggested Americans might want to flee the country to avoid the coming concentration camps.
Their own disinformation has become their stock in trade.
“Also, updating your passport might not be a bad idea, “ he wrote. “Unless you are here illegally, in which case you probably don’t need a passport to be escorted out of the country by the newly sworn-in Trump Troops.”
Both ideas sound great to me! Let the lunatic Left leave on their own if they want, like Eva Longoria says she’s going to do in today’s news.
Apparently, Dunning and the legions of other anti-MAGA journalists really do think they might need to get out of the country to escape the Gestapo Trump is somehow going to activate from the ranks of government bureaucrats (the overwhelming percentage of whom also despise Trump).
To be even-handed, as I am, the madness here is not something the Left has any exclusive claim to. I remember well all the conspiracies about how Obama was preparing concentration camps so he could shut down the election—called “Operation Jade Helm.” I never bought into a word of that, and I’m glad I didn’t because it clearly never happened. No conservatives were hoarded off to concentration camps, nor did the US go under military police-state control as was claimed on a daily basis. I also never bought into the QAnon stuff, and am equally glad I stayed clear. Both sides are equally extreme in believing the other side is going to extremes. Those things simply never happened because they were never going to.
What we did see, however, was quarantine camps long after Obama and after Trump when Covid broke out and Biden and Inslee created ghettos by requiring proof of vaccination in order to get into public work places and public events. The Left was all for that social isolation. And the conspiracy people missed seeing it coming by a mile. They all caught on that it WAS happening as it happened, just like the rest of us.
Bringing it back to the big boys
So, we come to where in the past couple of weeks we’ve seen the billionaire owners of The Times and The Post making executives decisions to steer their publications back to a more influential center because that is the only position from which you can hope to influence anyone who doesn’t already believe as you do. The alternative is to stay with preaching to the choir forever and having a stunted audience compared to what they could have had if they had never limited themselves to only being of interest to liberals.
Of course, now they are facing a hot liberal backlash for daring to move their own publication more to the center, as the center has become intolerable for both staunch conservatives and liberals.
One publication this week got it without getting it. Semaphore wrote the following:
In the wake of Trump’s victory, some media critics have returned to self-flagellation or blaming their competitors for “missing” Trump’s popularity. But unlike 2016, the news media was not caught off-guard. Major outlets took him seriously as a candidate and dedicated time to covering his policy proposals. Polling analysts emphasized how his voters could (once again) be undercounted in their surveys, and those voters (once again) outperformed polling, but the forecast models still showed Trump likely to win the election.
I completely disagree. Sure they gave some honorable mention to how the stats could be wrong and Trump could win by the margin of error, but they constantly pounded the message with their headlines every single day that Kamala was screaming into the lead—almost always and almost like it was last-minute miracle. I had to read deep into the story to find that her new “lead” was smaller than the poll’s margin of error, which really meant it was meaningless. So, I didn’t carry most of those stories, just a few as a sampling.
If the mainstream media had done the good job of digging into all of that, the liberal-sphere would not have been so shocked at Trump’s landslide win. I will, however, agree with them on the part that reality forces them to admit (but just the last line of the following):
Trump’s victory isn’t a result of a failure by news outlets to sufficiently hold him accountable. The real answer is one that is a lot more uncomfortable to grapple with: The national news media is more limited in its reach and influence than ever in the modern era.
On that last bit, we can agree.
Well, and on the next bit, too, (but only with the italicized emphasis I added):
For the third presidential contest in a row, the legacy news media — represented by newspapers, television networks, magazines, and cable news networks — spent months publishing and airing neutral to overwhelmingly negative news coverage of the former president. And for the second of those three instances, a majority of American voters largely ignored the implicit and explicit warnings of that coverage — if they saw it at all — and voted Trump into office.
With individual pitches, such as Rogan has, it is hardly surprising that journalists like Chris Wallace are leaving CNN to start their own niche.