This post is going to be a little bit of stream of consciousness so bear with me. I've been doing this blog for twenty-two (22) years now (!) but this past year feels to me like the accumulation of all my predictions come true. Sure, I thought Romney could win in 2012 but I also thought Trump would lose in 2016 so it all balances out.
Above all, one theme I've come back to is that the mainstream media is irredeemably biased and incapable of objectivity. And, brother, this year not only proved that theory but showed that the mainstream news is dead.
Dead. Pining for the fjords dead. It's an ex-media.
Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis had a blunt message for his staff during a tense meeting following the sudden ouster of executive editor Sally Buzbee, according to the paper's own reporting.
"We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it. It needs turning around," Lewis told the paper. "We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore."
Man, I still love reading that line: "
I can't sugarcoat it anymore." The
great halving of audience has occurred all across the news media landscape.
It's my
opinion that this all started with Obama: 2008 is the year where the mainstream media either let the mask drop or threw aside fairness (take your pick). But then Trump came along and the media turned that bias up to eleven. Greg Gutfeld has it exactly right: anti-Trumpism drove every narrative and buried every story remotely critical of the other side. It all came crashing down on June 27th when it was exposed that the media had conspired - yes, conspired - to cover up Joe Biden's obvious infirmity.
The same media that conspired to bury Hunter's laptop and pushed the Russia Russia Russia hoax. The same "news" sources that told us that inflation wasn't serious and acksually we're doing so much better than, um, England right now. Also, that southern invasion is all in your mind. I could go on and on.
Do you know why there was no blowback at Trump's false insistence that "they're eating the pets" in Springfield, Ohio? Because
trust in the media is so low that a wide majority of Americans just dismissed the media's reporting. There they go again.
Too late, the media is trying to reverse course. The LA Times and Washington Post both declined to endorse Kamala for President. CNN brought in
Scott Jennings to inject some sanity to the network. Joe "
Best Biden Evah!" Scarborough made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump's ring.
As Carole King would say: it's too late baby, now it's too late.
Americans have moved on to alternative news sources and podcasts. One Joe Rogan interview pulls more eyeballs than a month of MSNBC now because nobody is buying what they're selling.
Side note: after the disgraceful ABC News Presidential debate I believe we've seen the last Presidential debate run by a "news" network.
A new Trump presidency has started and we'll see if the media has learned anything but I reckon they will fall back into their echo chamber quickly. The mainstream media is like Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense now: they're dead and they don't know it.
Wonderful, delicious vindication.