… the national establishment corporate media, for they are done. Roasted to a turn, reduced to irrelevancy, as has been predicted by Insty and others for lo these many years. I had a sense that for decades, everyone kind of expected a sudden, catastrophic loss of credibility at every significant moment – a single spectacular event, abrupt like the sinking of the Titanic. But on and on the ship of national corporate media went, seemingly undisturbed by any such disastrous encounter with an iceberg. We kept waiting for that spectacular collapse, but it never happened, and so we started to route around. Still simmering, of course, over the willful and sneaky partisanship, the slanted coverage, and the constant overt or subtle name-calling, the constant reliance on the same-old-same-old experts from the same old same old press rolodex. We took heart in fact-checking their a**ses, but remained mildly disheartened that there was never an apology or a walk-back that mattered. About the best that we could hope for might be one of those sniveling “we’re sorry you stupid deplorable garbage people were offended” non-apology apologies. Alternate media, in the form of internet blogs – which rose and fell over two decades – Substack, Reddit, Twitter/X but more of a slow accumulation of small leaks … until everything fell apart at the final blow, and there we are.
The mainstream, big-money, corporate national news media was so far down into the tank for Harris and Walz that they probably needed a surface crew in a boat pumping down oxygen to them, or so I gather from the election post-mortem analyses. And this time, it didn’t do the least particle of good in moving masses of voters to vote for them. Not the last-minute OMG-Trump said bad things about service members story! OMG, he’s a convicted rapist-bully-thug-crook who hates women, Jews and people of color! It didn’t work … and Kamala’s campaign team apparently couldn’t even begin to figure out why, according to some of the post-mortem laments. Spending money like it was water gushing from a fire hydrant didn’t work, all those celebrity endorsements (Which apparently were bought and paid for) didn’t work. Reporting on poll results putting her in the lead didn’t work. All the old tried and true methods which always worked before … didn’t work.
It wasn’t just that credibility of mainstream corporate news media has sunk lower than the Titanic. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – especially Harris – came off as horribly inauthentic, fake, manufactured personalities. In none of their brief, scripted and staged appearances did they seem natural, engaging, likeable. And there was not a single thing that their campaign staffers could do to counter that plastic impression to everyone outside of committed true believers. Kamala seemed like a kind of life-sized Chatty-Kammy doll; pull the string in her back and out came a kind of scripted focus-grouped garble that almost seemed like relevant speech. Off-the-cuff, spontaneous, non-scripted? With a less-than-worshipful interviewer? Oh, heck no! In contrast, Trump and Vance came across as relatable, authentic, humorous – they could do hours of unscripted interviews with someone like Joe Rogan, Indeed, I’m halfway convinced that it was the Rogan podcast interviews with Trump and Vance that pushed undecided voters towards supporting them. They talked about what the audience truly wanted to know … not the same, tired, over-focused party line.
Discuss as you wish – what else do you think also pushed the voters towards Trump and Vance?
The “elites” are intellectually exhausted. They stand for nothing more than their own power and wealth and it became blatantly obvious to the electorate. They have no principles and certainly can’t defend their positions on anything. When pushed hard they fall back on cries of ‘racism’ and ‘misogny’ or “Disinformation/misinformation” because they have nothing else to respond with.
Think about the last four years of responses to events by the DC/Media/Silicon Valley/University blob: The Orwellian censorship revealed by the twitter files. The anger over Elon Musk and his ownership of twitter and use of ‘community notes’. The cascade of lies and censorship around covid and the vax. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson cannot define what a woman is and says “I’m not a biologist”. The response of places like Martha’s Vineyard when a busload of illegals arrived there. October 7th and the Universities are PRO genocide! The response of Ivy League presidents when asked if calling for the genocide of Jews violated campus policy on bullying and harassment?” (“it depends….”). The Democratic Party gas-lighting everyone that Joe is sharp as a tack. The same Democrats replacing Joe in a soft-coup with an appointed candidate – all while claiming that we must protect “Our Democracy”. Sunny Hostin asks Kamala what she would have done differently and the answer is “nothing comes to mind”. Kamala’s endless word-salad responses to questions.
I could go on and on… clearly the “Adults in the Room’ are in fact clueless unprincipled grifters and the average voter finally reached their breaking point.
I think people finally saw the endpoint of leftists, which seems to be defending what seems, on first blush, to be perverse.
Trans men in women’s sports is objectively unfair to women, yet leftists women defended it.
Putting illegal aliens up in luxury hotels, in schools, in veterans’ hospitals, seems perverse, yet leftists defended it.
A presidential candidate who got her start in politics via a proficiency in fellatio seems perverse, but leftists defended it.
Children sterilizing themselves and having body parts cut off to “change” “genders” seems perverse, but leftists defended it.
I could go on, but there are many more things a normal person would look upon as perverse, but the leftists said our hands are tied, we have to accept, tolerate, celebrate it.
That can only go on so long until people won’t put up with it anymore.
Fake, incompetent, weak, overly feminized, disdainful of reason and evidence, ignorant of history, and ritually supportive of every left-wing talking point is not a good profile for high elected office in the USA.
It’s rather ironic that many of the most enthusiastic supporters of the Sexual Revolution also support surgically making it impossible for minors to participate in it.
I think the final straw was Kamala’s unwillingness to answer the question about her vote as a Californian on Prop 36, which recriminalized a lot of stuff and corrected the excess of Prop 47 some years ago.
In contrast, as a Florida voter, Donald Trump came out in favor of Amendment 3 legalizing marijuana. I didn’t agree with him on that and voted no myself, but at least he didn’t duck the issue.
Unfortunately, I am old enough to have heard this “media are done” theory a few too many times. Also unfortunately, it is never true. There are lots of reasons that it should be true, but there are 66 million reasons it never is.
As always, you can fool some people all of the time. There will continue to be those who continue using the mainstream disinformation spreaders as their daily news.
I think it was the photo of Trump standing with his fist raised just minutes after getting shot, with the American flag in the background, that started the ball rolling for Trump. That photo should win a Pulitzer and appear in textbooks but we know it won’t.
“-what else do you think also pushed the voters towards Trump and Vance?”
Almighty God.
Sadly, the dearth of competence among the elites seems like the exhaustion of late-stage empire. It’s the Augean Stables in need of a Herculean washdown. Let the great realignment begin already.
From your keyboard to G*d’s monitor.
I’ve been re-reading some 2016 stuff. It’s dejá vu all over again.
It wasn’t just that credibility of mainstream corporate news media has sunk lower than the Titanic. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – especially Harris – came off as horribly inauthentic, fake, manufactured personalities.
In spite of record low credibility for the MSM, and arguably the worst presidential and vice presidential candidates evah, The Kamala Harris/Tim Walz ticket still got 48% of the vote. Like the term yellow dog Democrat says, that 48% would vote for a yellow dog– and a dead yellow dog at that –instead of for a Republican.
I find that discouraging.
back of the book section, they found someone who would cop to the nga leak, a CIA official, Asif Rehman,
I like to listen to Megyn Kelly – and she was flabbergasted that in was revealed the Harris campaign paid Al Sharpton’s “charity” $500K weeks before he interviewed her on MS-NBC and he never reveled that link.
What I loved about this election is that 77 million people so gave the legacy media the middle finger – nothing they said mattered.
The results seem to indicate the media has lost the ability to steer the narrative in the direction demanded by their political bosses. Too bad. I will not miss them when/if they disappear.
Personally I do not associate nor like people I find to be liars. I avoid them, thus it is not surprising that I find the media to be odious in that regard and ignore them with gusto.