Democrats aren’t the only ones in need of soul-searching after November 5. A big-box media apparatus that endlessly told Americans Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump posed a dire threat to democracy only to see him win the Electoral College vote in a rout and capture the popular vote outright is struggling to cope with its transparent irrelevance in the outcome of what it deemed “the most important election ever.”
Dark days are on the horizon at two of the most notorious cable TV news Trump bashers. CNN staffers are “very sad and deeply frustrated” as massive layoffs loom for a network that has seen its ratings crater, one employee told Fox News. The cuts will be made “by March” and will be “very meaningful,” the source told the network.
Puck’s Dylan Byers says the layoffs “will impact hundreds of employees across the organization,” with “on-air talent” “likely to be affected.”
Media Maelstrom
How bad are things at CNN? It was beaten out by leftist rival MSNBC on Election Night, the same MSNBC that has seen its ratings collapse to such an extent that parent company Comcast is looking to sell it off.
CNN averaged “just 5.1 million primetime viewers, and was bested by its liberal rival MSNBC for the first time ever with six million viewers. Fox News Channel trounced both of them with over ten million viewers,” Fox gleefully related.
This is who CNN lagged behind on November 5. “MSNBC averaged 1.1 million viewers during the month of October but plummeted to an average audience of 736,000 on [the] Wednesday, Thursday and Friday... following President-elect Donald Trump’s historic victory over Vice President Kamala Harris,” Fox reports.
Why would viewers hungry for election information tune out MSNBC? This may provide some clues. “Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign donated $500,000 to Al Sharpton’s nonprofit organization just weeks before [the MSNBC host] conducted a friendly interview with Harris,” The Washington Free Beacon reported November 12.
It’s hard to maintain the pretense that you’re a “news organization” with transactions such as that. But MSNBC isn’t alone. The blurring of news and opinion at brand-name progressive media outlets is very much on the mind of the owner of what used to be one of America’s leading newspapers.
Blurred Lines and Tunneled Vision
The Los Angeles Times has more than earned its reputation for hard-left media bias in recent years. Owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, mulling Trump’s decisive victory, believes the disconnect from the rest of the country has gone too far.
“I will work towards making our paper and media fair and balanced so that all voices are heard and we can respectfully exchange every American’s view... from left to right to the center,” Soon-Shiong wrote November 10 in an X post. “Coming soon. A new Editorial Board. Trust in media is critical for a strong democracy.”
He re-emphasized his determination to provide “balance” to The Times in an interview with CNN published November 13.
“This conflation of news and opinion of the news sometimes gets all mixed up, and I think that’s part of the problem of why there’s a reduction in trust of the press,” Soon-Shiong told the network that has exemplified that toxic blending.
Soon-Shiong caused an uproar at The Times by nixing an endorsement of Harris before the election. He sees his employees’ fury over the rejection as a teachable moment.
“I don’t think of it as a disaster at all, I think of it as [an] inflection point in which the trust in the newspapers has to be restored,” he said.
Soon-Shiong seems to grasp, at least in part, the self-marginalization dominant media organs engage in when they place their progressive ideology ahead of their job responsibilities. It’s a lesson that appears to remain lost among other outlets.
UK newspaper The Guardian has decided to stop posting on X, the wildly popular social media site owned by Trump ally Elon Musk.
“This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism,” the newspaper wrote in a November 13 article. “The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.”
The Guardian is thus voluntarily yanking itself off of one of the largest and most significant online platforms in the world today. It is not only a hamstringing of its ability to reach a conservative audience but an outright refusal to associate with that demographic in any way.
In a further display of ignorance as to what Trump’s resounding return to the presidency means, progressive satire site The Onion has purchased Alex Jones’ Infowars in a bankruptcy auction triggered by his Sandy Hook defamation litigation punishment phase.
A new Infowars parody site is in the works, mocking Jones’ so-called “conspiracy theories,” a good portion of which contain truths that deeply resonate with the very Americans who have abandoned the dominant media orbit in droves.
The move illustrates the ultimate inability of an arrogant and out of touch media elite to ever truly “self-reflect,” much less genuinely transform.
The Onion shows once again that a progressive establishment not remotely humbled by the stern rebuke it has received from the general public still yearns to mock average Americans' serious and heartfelt fears that the way this country is run today is not meant to benefit them.
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