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I know, I know, it was not an actual door Rose reclined on in the icy Atlantic after the Titanic split in two. It was a hunk of wood. Regardless, there was no reason she couldn’t scoot over a little bit and let Jack out of the frigid water. The improvised flotation device was clearly two-person sized. 

As Elon Musk trolls regime media this week, teasing his interest in collecting up MSNBC for his portfolio after Comcast is willing to fire sale the cable channel, the freakout is becoming pronounced now that Donald Trump’s incoming government is taking shape. 

Jim VandeHei, as Beltway as it gets in journalism, began his career covering national politics for the Washington Post before leaving to co-found Politico. He subsequently left that platform to co-found Axios with Mike Allen. He was at the National Press Club earlier this week, and gave a speech on regime media versus new media, and especially Elon Musk’s claim that X is now part of the media. VandeHei is not amused.

Spare me the angst that reporting is hard. It’s tedious. It’s not hard. Pouring concrete is hard. Street repair is hard. Fighting in war is hard. Spending a decade in school and specializing in neurosurgery is hard. Contacting people and collecting information in order to report on something is a craft. The late, great Atlantic essayist Michael Kelly knew that. 

According to VandeHei, the hard work is trying to get to the truth without fear or favoritism. I’ll bet you didn’t know that before becoming a hard-working reporter without fear or favoritism, he actually worked for a United States Senator. If you had to place a Shohei Ohtani-financed wager, which is very large, I’m told, what would you guess the political affiliation of that Senator to be? I’m waiting for your shocked face when you learn that Jim worked for Wisconsin Democrat Herb Kohl back in the day before trying his hand at hard work of reporting. I’m sure, however, the fact he worked as a staffer for a Democrat was just luck of the draw, not a poker tell he has a tad bit of favoritism in how he covers both parties. 

And just a quick aside, when Jim VandeHei is citing al Jazeera in the Middle East as being an honest broker just doing the hard work trying to get to the truth without fear or favoritism, it seems to me that Israel might rise to object. This is just a rant offered to VandeHei’s fellow regime media members, trying to be a pep talk while the influence and impact of regime media continues to crumble. 

An example of that hard work is Elle Reeve on CNN, providing the field work for what became an attempted CNN hit job on Scott Presler, the one-man GOP voter registration drive and turnout engine all over rural Pennsylvania. She talked to Presler, and questioned why he kept using the word peacefully in this interview, as if the use of that word indicates some nefarious purpose. 

I would have to believe that Andrew Breitbart, if he were still with us, would be beaming with pride after seeing this. He would have gotten an enormous kick out of seeing the slow-motion collapse of partisan media, beating them at their own game by using their own tactics, and encouraging and fostering a new generation of communicators. 

Molly Jong-Fast was on MSNBC immediately after Judge Tanya Chutkan dismissed the J6 federal case against Donald Trump, lamenting why she believed the case didn’t have the legs or impact in the election cycle Democrats so desperately wished it had. 

Wait a minute. Jong-Fast is admitting that media is different because of podcasting and social media. But Jim VandeHei just gave a profane-laced, passionate defense that X, a social media platform, wasn’t media. Regime media is not even able to agree on what regime media is now. 

VandeHei is a regular contributor to all sorts of programming on MSNBC. I wonder if he thinks his colleague, Joy Reid, is media? 

DOGE is going to usher in the era of raw milk, she says. Intuitively, you would have to think that even regime media types would cringe at this, believing Reid inadvertently makes Elon Musk’s case that actual media is found all sorts of places now, and the traditional networks, even through their cable news extensions, do not have a monopoly on truth, fact, common-sense, or sanity anymore. 

Scott Jennings and Jim Geraghty of National Review were both part of the panel of CNN’s 10pm show normally hosted by Abby Phillip. She was off, and the guest host and her panel wailed and gnashed their teeth when Jennings proclaimed X was more ideologically balanced than any other platform. 

Notice that when Bill Gates, another billionaire, went into partnership with NBC to start the cable channel, nobody in regime media had a problem with that, because Gates is a progressive liberal Democrat. It was a great point by Geraghty. But the panel immediately moved to shout down and silence Jennings for bringing up what they believed is a heretical statement about X being ideologically balanced, more so than other platforms. Regime media cannot allow that narrative to take root. It would cause Jim VandeHei to swear more in speeches. Except here’s the thing. When challenged on his sourcing for such an outlandish and obviously false claim, Jennings replied that it was ‘our own network’ – CNN. 

It’s all lies, you have no source, no proof, shut up, the panel said. Also, earlier in the day, Harry Enten, not exactly a Republican polling analyst, had this to say about X as a platform. 

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The good thing is regime media as we know it will continue to circle the drain, because too many of their entrenched member refuse to admit they have a problem. They believe the only solution to the hemorrhaging of viewers and readers is government regulating alternative media out of existence. For the next four years, that’s just not going to happen. And while I think it’s not only healthy, but imperative that a republic like ours has a free, independent, and skeptical press to keep government honest, it is precisely because of new media – podcasts, substack reporters/journalists, talk radio, social media platforms, that the barriers to entry into the regime media club have fallen and are no longer needed. People can do the hard work all on their own, and have readily available opportunities to broadcast and present their material to the public without it having to be cleared by the Manhattan-Beltway media bubble. 

Chief Justice John Roberts back in 2007 penned a plurality opinion that said this. 

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

It’s absolutely true. And the same principle can and should be applied to media. If you want a healthy, robust media, the way to achieve that is not to limit people from practicing the craft because they don’t subscribe to the approved left-wing narrative. The more platforms, the more opportunity for people to write, speak, go on camera, and interview, the better. 

Donald Trump and his entire prospective cabinet are poised to be the disruptive force necessary to get the economy, foreign policy, and Constitutional governance back on track. If he has a coattail effect as being a disruptive force on traditional regime media, that’s icing on the cake. 

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