‘Against the Corporate Media’: Michael Walsh’s New Anthology Explores

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For years, a recurring leitmotif at Instapundit, where I’ve been co-blogging for over a decade, was the phrase, “Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.” Glenn Reynolds coined it, but my co-insta-blogger Steve Green and I have used it frequently as well.

Not that we ever had much doubt, but thanks to their titanic meltdowns last week at the L.A. Times and Washington Post, it was nice of the media to entirely confirm Glenn’s hypothesis.

Both papers, each chockablock staffed with party-hack leftists, had their entirely expected presidential endorsements for Kamala Harris squelched by their zillionaire owners, Patrick Soon-Shiong at the L.A. Times, and of course, Jeff Bezos at the WaPo.

Over the weekend, cable news television channels owned by Warner Bros. Discovery and Comcast went all-in on calling a former president and his supporters the second coming of the Third Reich when Trump held a rally at Madison Square Garden, despite its use over the decades by both political parties as a popular gathering spot for large political conventions and rallies.

To understand how we got here, the backstory is told in detail in the highly-readable new anthology “Against the Corporate Media: Forty-Two Ways the Press Hates You,” assembled by Michael Walsh. Walsh is the author of 2015’s “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and a former editor at Time magazine, the late Andrew Breitbart’s early “Big Journalism” Website, and more recently, his own energy independence-themed The Pipeline site.

Walsh’s book is organized into eight chapters, each with articles written by such well-known conservative and libertarian pundits as Jon Gabriel, Andrew Klavan, David Reaboi, John O’Sullivan, Charlie Kirk, John Fund, Mark Hemingway, Monica Crowley, Steve Hayward, the aforementioned Glenn Reynolds, and others, including Walsh himself.

Ground Zero for the Weaponization of Media Hate

One of the most interesting essays is “Nixon and the Weaponization of Media Hate,” by Monica Crowley. It’s a reminder that the ongoing lawfare against former President Trump is nothing new for what Walsh has called “a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.” But the lawfare against Trump also casts Watergate in a new light. (As Zhou Enlai never actually said in 1972, “The French Revolution? Too soon to tell.”) Crowley writes:

During the four years I worked for him, until his death in 1994, I became the professional confidante of a man who had transformed American politics, changed global balances of power—and who had become the first significant modern casualty of a newly aggressive, partisan, and activist American media.

[…]

The modern American press has always been biased toward the Left. The difference in the Nixon era was its level of intensity and transformation of its bias into overt action…And in their corrupt judgment, Nixon was too odious to be allowed to succeed. Once they perceived his intellectual brilliance, political acumen, and transformational agenda as existential threats, they bit into him like a junkyard dog and never let go.

[…]

“There are standards for Democrats, standards for Republicans; then there were standards for me,” he said.

“I was in a totally different category. The press didn’t trust me after [Alger] Hiss, and they were just out there, circling and waiting…they weren’t interested in Watergate as much as they were interested in getting me on Hiss and on Vietnam. I gave them what they needed, but believe me, Watergate was just the excuse.”

For Nixon, Watergate made obvious the hidden consequence of the Hiss case: that as a force immune to the intellectual pathogens of the Left, he had to be brought down.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because once Nixon’s enemies—including the press—claimed his scalp, they grew increasingly emboldened to hunt other high-profile Republicans, including and most notably President Trump. During Nixon’s long political career, the press tested the limits of weaponized hatred and ultimately succeeded in taking him out. Armed with that kind of trophy, they kept going, ramping up their efforts to destroy whoever threatened their agenda and that of those they protected.

As Crowley concludes, “In the modern era, Nixon was truly ‘patient zero’ in the battle against a weaponized media… the advent of Richard Nixon turned journalists into hunters, and leaders with whom they disagreed into the hunted.”

The Life and Death of the Blogosphere

The era of mass media, which began with the first national radio networks in the 1920s, quickly became a virtual one-party monopoly until the arrival of Rush Limbaugh in the early 1990s and Fox News in the middle of that decade. By the end of the ‘90s, the combination of always-on broadband Internet and cheap, sometimes free, easy-to-use self-publishing platforms gave birth to an alternative conservative media, such as Matt Drudge in his site’s original incarnation, with, in its first years, Andrew Breitbart as his lieutenant. A few more self-published centrist and libertarian journalists such as Mickey Kaus, Virginia Postrel, and Andrew Sullivan appeared as well. Then in August of 2001, Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, decided to launch Instapundit, originally on the Google-owned Blogger.com platform.

In his essay for Against The Corporate Media, “The Birth of the Blogosphere,” Glenn writes:

We live today in a post-blogospheric media age. The blogosphere hasn’t disappeared by any means, but it no longer plays the central role that it played from roughly 2002 to 2008. This is partly the result of natural media evolution but also the result of very deliberate action on the part of some big players in government and tech. The blogosphere’s successors, such as Facebook and Twitter, lack its independence, its decentralization, and its free-flowing nature. On the other hand—very much against the wishes of their creators—those entities have nonetheless empowered ordinary citizens to push back against government- and media-initiated disinformation (to the extent that there’s a difference anymore) in a way that remains within the finest tradition of the classical blogosphere.

The nostalgia contained within the phrase “the classical blogosphere” is a reminder of the unforced error that so many bloggers made when they abandoned their autonomous Websites for Twitter and Facebook:

Over the next several years, the walled gardens of the likes of Facebook and Twitter drew in many people who had previously read and published blogs. The allure was seductive: less hassle and overhead, easier access to an audience, improved ability to actually connect with people you knew. And for a while, there wasn’t much of a downside. Unsurprisingly, plenty of people left the blogosphere behind.

Then, starting in the mid-2010s, these walled gardens started slamming the gates shut. From being free-speech zones, they became increasingly Orwellian patches overseen by “fact checkers” who made up facts, and “Trust and Safety Councils” whom no reasonable person could trust, and from whom no criticism of the dominant narrative was safe. I strongly suspect that this was not an accident, but a recognition by what hippies used to call The Establishment that uncontrolled media were a threat to their hegemony.

[…]

This trend accelerated after the 2016 election, and then again in the wake of the Covid narrative, when all sorts of entirely truthful information was suppressed in the name of “safety.” Likewise, the Hunter Biden laptop story was shut down, even though it was true, to the point that Twitter was blocking the sharing of URLs linking to the story even in direct messages. (I left my weekly column at USA Today, and switched to writing one at the New York Post, after my column on Hunter Biden’s laptop was spiked.)

But now there’s some pushback. Elon Musk bought Twitter, now X, and although its politicized staff has tried to fight a rear-guard action against his free-speech campaign, the platform is much different than it was. This has forced Facebook and other platforms to relax the censorship somewhat. Substack, a free-speech platform that functions almost like a blog-hosting site, but with subscription and revenue features, has attracted a large number of independent writers, including some old-time bloggers—Andrew Sullivan and Virginia Postrel have moved there, and I have a Substack site where I publish a lengthy essay every week—and people like Bari Weiss who have left Big Media platforms to escape censorship and groupthink.

The Bezos Epiphany

Speaking of “censorship and groupthink,” near the end of or immediately after every presidential election, an old media grandee invariably emerges to look back at how badly his publication reported on the election and how chummy they “accidentally” appeared to be with the (invariably Democratic) presidential nominee, and vow that they’ve learned their lesson and will never do it again. It’s rare that the actual owner of a publication issues a mea culpa, but on Monday, in a piece at the newspaper he owns headlined, “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news,” Jeff Bezos wrote (or had written for him under his byline):

In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.

Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.

Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

To understand why the media has fallen to this point over the last 50 years, “Against The Corporate Media” is indispensable. Since this review started with an “Insta-phrase,” allow me to come full circle and end with one as well: “Read the whole thing.”