STEPHEN MILLER: The election was a referendum on the American media.
In the final month of the 2024 election, the national media existed in another solar system from the country for whom is tasked at reporting accurate, unbiased and truthful information. The final month started with Jeffrey Goldberg and the Atlantic attempting to regurgitate their anonymously sourced “suckers and losers” hit against Trump from 2020. With the help of CNN and others, they resurfaced General John Kelly. Then they went and got their full Reich on by comparing Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally to a 1939 Nazi rally there. At said rally a comedian known for celebrity roasts made a crass joke about Puerto Rico, which blanketed the whole of national media outlets for four days.
When the October jobs report was released on the final Friday of October, showing an anemic growth of only 12,000 jobs, the national media focused all of their attention on comments Trump made about former representative Liz Cheney, who had become a Kamala Harris campaign surrogate, regarding sending her off to fight the wars her family and in particular her father had endorsed.
The Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and NBC created an echo chamber of thought bubbles that only they were listening to. The country had completely tuned them out. None of these stories actually mattered to voting audiences and the election result, with almost every major voting demographic moving toward Donald Trump in an electoral blowout.
And now the MSM are currently attempting to play the “right wing media bias” canard on Barry Bonds-levels of steroids. At Power Line, in a post headlined, “The Left’s Parallel Universe,” Steve Hayward quotes “Michael Tomasky, a former thinker and current editor of The New Republic (a former magazine)” on “the real reason Democrats lost the election:”
Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often. . . This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. [Emphasis added.]
Tomasky includes Elon Musk and Joe Rogan as part of “the right-wing media,” but Rogan was a former Bernie Bro, and Musk has been quoted as saying, “They try to paint me as a far-right guy which is absurd because I like to make electric vehicles … I supported Obama. I stood in line for six hours to shake Obama’s hand.”
As Glenn noted in the very early days of Instapundit, “As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they’re looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don’t. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.”