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Arguably, the biggest loser in the presidential race was not on the ballot.
The Pravda media put it all on the line–burning every last shred of credibility in order to defeat Donald Trump. There was no lie too big, no hoax too implausible, and no slander too outrageous for them to use if they thought it might chip away even a few votes from Donald Trump.
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The coverage of Trump in the media was less credible than the reporting you would find in a newspaper written by lunatic asylum residents. Seriously. We got to the point where The Atlantic, a once-great magazine, compared Donald Trump to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini–who combined have somewhere around 150 million corpses left in their wake.
We spoke with the top editors/heads of the New Yorker, WaPo, Axios, the Atlantic, the Information, More Perfect Union, and Crooked Media about what it says about the media that Trump won again despite almost a decade of overwhelmingly negative coverage https://t.co/dkyn8iourO
— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) November 11, 2024
Now that the election is over and the media lost–Kamala Harris, after all, was an empty shell into whom they tried to pour personality and IQ points–the inevitable postmortems have begun.
Since most media figures are midwits, you get a lot of midwit analyses. Some are closer than others to being correct, but many in the media have hallucinated a “right-wing” media complex that simply does not and cannot exist. The Pravda media is the product of over a century of effort and billions upon billions of dollars in investment, and they have a stranglehold on the distribution of most facts. More often than not, independent media have to build a more comprehensive picture of the world by delving deep into the depths of reporting that originates in various strands of the corporate media.
Joe Rogan, for all his reach, has a huge audience not because he is part of some mythical right-wing media complex but because he is honest and forthright. He isn’t even conservative.
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So what are the midwits saying?
Some left-leaning media leaders feel that the next generation of national Democrats need to take a page out of the conservative media playbook and invest in overtly partisan outlets.
Crooked Media co-founder Tommy Vietor told Semafor in a text message that Trump effectively nurtured right-wing podcasters and influencers in a way that helped him shape the narrative with his supporters.
“Trump seems to primarily view politics as a war to win attention and control the narrative, and he figured out that he can do that by constantly talking with friendly news outlets,” Tommy Vietor said. “There was lots of coverage of the Joe Rogan interview, but before that he did constant care and feeding of right wing influencers that a lot of people have never heard of, but in the process he helped them build their audiences and shape the narrative.”
Jim VanderHei of Axios at least approached an insight, although he still believes that the Pravda media isn’t really that biased.
To some media executives, it’s a sign that the quality of news offered to Americans is not satisfying them, a view that Axios founder Jim VandeHei described as “gut-check time for traditional media.”
“The verdict is not debatable: Half the country thinks traditional media is biased and often useless,” he said. “They feel reporters treat Republicans like a crime beat and Democrats like friends in need. I don’t think this is usually the case, but it happens enough to give critics pause.”
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Yes, Jim, that is exactly what we think. We don’t listen to podcasts with different points of view because we want to be told how to vote; we do so because we can’t predict exactly what they will say and usually allow others to explain themselves without having their words sliced and diced to create a false narrative.
I am looking at you NBC, CBS, and every other media outlet who do nothing but sell hoaxes and distortions of reality.
I can’t tell you how many times I have read in a Pravda outlet a quote or paraphrase from Trump that was preceded by “without evidence,” or “falsely claimed.” Kamala Harris and any Democrat could spout the most outrageous lie (“national abortion ban,” “project 2025,” “suckers and losers,” “fine people on both sides,” and the media would treat the claims as gospel.
Trump says the border is open and the economy sucks, and he is a vicious Nazi liar.
I have seen countless clips asserting that the left has to build a podcast infrastructure to rival the Right’s, as if they haven’t funded many such competitors. This is similar to the push to create Air America, to compete with conservative radio. The problem isn’t that the left doesn’t have propaganda outlets–they almost own all media channels as it is–it’s that all they have to sell is lies. Nobody wants to hear the propaganda in a different outlet. They want the truth.
Why a ‘Liberal Joe Rogan’ Will Never Exist https://t.co/abINI3koVt
— Joe Rogan Podcast (@joeroganhq) November 11, 2024
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A pretty good analysis was found in Vulture by Crispin Sartwell, whose name I admire as much as his perspicacity.
I don’t know why Kamala lost. But I do have a notion of why many of the people I know, and me, were surprised she lost. We were ensconced in the mainstream media. Our sources were The Washington Post, CNN, The New Yorker, NPR, The Atlantic, Slate podcasts. I begin each day, as I have since I was a child, reading the Post. Then I roll around the circle of familiar legacy publications and networks. One reason I do this is so I can criticize and berate: I’m liable to immediately start arguing on X with an op-ed column. Brian Stelter has blocked me. I’ll likely be outraged by the smug and self-defeating slant of all these outlets on any given day, and I’ve written about that many times. I enjoy outrage, so I tune in.
I’d have done better this year talking to people at the grocery store, as Russ Smith reminds me.
And yet, these are still my sources of information, and I do demand heavy coverage of the Washington Commanders. Even as I ragged on the extremely tendentious news coverage in the Post, I still managed to absorb what the Post was saying as some sort of standard common wisdom. On the campaign’s last weekend, the first paragraph of Post’s top story ran like this:
Donald Trump spent his last Saturday of the presidential race making a trio of meandering, profane speeches in which he spoke repeatedly about women – saying they have to be protected “at home in suburbia,” complaining that he is not allowed to call women beautiful and calling himself the “father of fertilization” – a disjointed appeal to female voters as he faces a gender gap against Vice President Harris in public polls.
And here’s the second paragraph:
Harris spoke in Charlotte, reprising her closing argument that Trump is not “someone who is thinking about making your life better,” as she cast a spotlight on his threats and inflammatory rhetoric. She called him a candidate “who is increasingly unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance,” and warned he would walk into the Oval Office “stewing over an enemies list.”
In other words, in their top news story on the weekend before the election, the Post delivered Harris’ talking points in the first paragraph. Then again in the second. In general, these outlets portrayed Trump as sexist and in terrible cognitive decline, as “wandering” or “meandering,” “disjointed,” “incoherent,” and “bizarre.” They managed to get that into purportedly neutral news accounts by quoting pet “experts,” if not by flatly inserting the insults in news stories, as they often did, as in that article.
Also, very revealingly about themselves, they interpreted his jokes as symptoms. “Father of fertilization” is pretty darn hilarious. The Post tried to fact-check it.
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Crispin hit on the point exactly: the Pravda media misinforms because it exists to do the bidding of the Establishment, and people have sussed that fact out. He trusted the media, and they let him down.
CNN has not broadcast entire Trump speeches since 2016. They believe their viewers need protection from the alleged disinformation. So they assemble the bits they think are worst, and talk about each of them for days. This procedure created a false overall picture of Trump’s campaign. There were lots of negative moments, lots of ridicule, lots of false claims. But there was also a constant invocation of unity, even racial unity. Trump wants to deport aliens, it’s true. He wants to unite Americans, and he’s relentlessly positive about the future of the country. The New Yorker didn’t even notice that, because they were trying to help Kamala’s campaign, every day in every way.
Many in the mainstream media believe that Trump won because they didn’t criticize him enough or because The Washington Post failed to do its job and tell people in the days before the election to vote for Kamala Harris.
No, folks, we know what you think. Saying it louder or more frequently won’t make the message any more effective. In fact, it makes it less effective because it is tiresomely predictable. We turn to other sources because the Pravda media sucks.
“Asscrack Alabama”. They will never get it. Rick Wilson: this will live on and on and on. pic.twitter.com/CUoBPBk3V0
— Rich Zeoli 🇺🇸 (@Richzeoli) November 9, 2024
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The fact that so many on the left were certain that Kamala would win is proof positive that the media is providing a disservice not only to the country but to its readers. It has created a world in which liberals hallucinate a reality that is not remotely plausibly true.
Democrat political analyst brags about Kamala’s huge win coming, buys champagne on Election Day and mocks Trump supporter selling it to her at liquor store. This is glorious, watch it. Trust me: pic.twitter.com/FYeXpcoFld
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) November 7, 2024
People aren’t flocking to alternative media to reinforce their prejudices. Anybody who watches the best podcasts–the ones that rise to the top–will notice that they are hardly ideological silos. In fact, they are at the top because people don’t want to exist in a silo. They could watch CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News if that is what they want.
People want to escape The Narrative™. And because enough people did, Trump will soon be president again.