Ah, friends, we live in perilous times. Adolf Hitler bestrides the political landscape like a colossus, the rule of racism and sexism is everywhere ascendant, women have no rights and the forces of democracy cower in fear. The prudent flee the country and the coming apocalypse. Dark days indeed.
Or maybe not.
Reading and listening to the MSM, it’s hard to guess where they’re going with the new political reality. One minute, it’s the same old claptrap from the past eight years; the next hints at incipient sanity. The early returns are confused and confusing, but it’s an important issue.
Has the Fourth Estate learned something from its disastrous performance since 2016? Possible lessons include (a) the mad barking at Donald Trump didn’t lessen his hold on voters (b) it did lessen the hold of the MSM on the viewing/reading public, (c) it was routinely factually wrong and (d) its opinions were nutty enough to drive away potential readers/viewers.
So, the worst anti-Trump offenders have seen their ratings plunge. From mid-October to November 18, MSNBC’s ratings dropped by over half; CNN’s caved 47%. The Washington Post loses almost $80 million a year.
And of course, the Democratic Party (and the Harris campaign) – the sources of much of the TDS channeled by their partners in the news media – lost big.
That’s a lot of quality feedback. It seems to demand major changes to what the Democratic Party and its media lapdogs have been doing. Will they change? A healthy political party that’s just been swept in a national election will engage in serious soul-searching about its failures and what it has to do to improve. News outlets hemorrhaging money and viewers/readers will do the same. It’s just an obvious thing to do.
Or, again, maybe not?
Consider: both Democrats and their allies in the news media find themselves in a kind of operational cul-de-sac. What they’ve done has failed, but, for their progressive base, cancelation is a core principle. To deviate from progressive norms (whatever they happen to be this week) is to risk losing voters and subscribers. So trying basic honesty, fairness and balance for a change, especially where Trump is concerned, could mean losing further audience share. Plus, there’s no certainty that Democrats have gotten the obvious message the election sent. No less than David Axelrod blames racism and sexism (what else?) for the Harris debacle even though he surely knows better. And if a big-time strategist like him is singing that tune, you know there’s a whole choir in the wings.
And yet, two of the most virulent anti-Trumpers, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough bent the knee and met with Trump to, as they said, try to “restart communications,” suggesting they thought some measure of honesty and balance might be warranted. Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman counsels calm while New York Mayor Eric Adams extends an olive branch toward the president-elect. The new editors of the WaPo have already read the riot act to their employees. The owner of the LA Times did the same following the election and even hired a pro-Trump editor. Major Democratic Party donors called out the Harris campaign for its incompetence. The parent company of MSNBC has announced that it will spin off the outlet perhaps silencing some of the more extreme anti-Trumpers.
But bad habits, particularly TDS, can be hard to break. Right beside the mea culpas, we’ve heard many of the same loony claims as before, as if nothing had happened. Jennifer Rubin at the WaPo informed podcast viewers that Republicans “want to kill your kids.” Elizabeth Warren took to MSNBC (where else?) to slander former Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard as a “tool of Vladimir Putin.” Needless to say, neither offered any evidence for their absurd claims and no one at the WaPo or MSNBC asked them to. Of course they didn’t.
And, over the coming years, Trump will give his opponents plenty of opportunities to relapse into their old ways. Deporting illegal immigrants won’t happen without trauma much of which will be caught on video and excitedly shown again and again on CNN. For every dime that gets cut from the federal budget there’s a constituency that feels the pain and that has a mouthpiece in the MSM to plead its case. For the corporate news media, it’ll be a four-year temptation to the same old non-stop Trump bashing.
And Trump wouldn’t want it any other way. He thrives on conflict and these people are willing to give it to him even though it mostly makes him stronger and more popular.
Another player in the drama is alternative media. To date, legacy media’s losses have been alternative media’s gains, the eyes and ears that have abandoned CNN, et al moving to the likes of Joe Rogan, The Free Press, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi and the like. Establishment media types like to whine about the power of podcasters and Substackers and this is their opportunity to take back market share from them. But they’ll have to vaccinate themselves against TDS and patiently and laboriously win back the public’s trust to do it.
So, Democrats and their stenographers in the news media find themselves in a pickle: keep doing the usual and hang onto your core adherents but watch overall ratings drop, or take a stab at honesty and principled commentary. For now, they’re leaning first one way, then the other.
In the coming years, Trump will continue being who he is – narcissist, tweeter of bizarre tweets, maker of patently false claims, reformer, potential ally of everyday Americans and bête noire of The Swamp.
So, the siren song of TDS will continue and test Big Media’s ability and desire to practice actual journalism. The future of the profession hangs in the balance.
