NOAH ROTHMAN: Where Have All the Lefties Gone?
The Washington Post lost a quarter million subscribers after the outfit, which restyled itself an anti-Trump publication in the latter half of the past decade, declined to endorse Donald Trump’s opponent in 2024. What seemed at the time like an act of protest might have been a leading indicator of consumer preferences.
In the wake of the election — one that generated far less engagement with conventional news outlets than previous elections had — left-leaning cable news ventures have seen their ratings collapse. “MSNBC and CNN have shed hundreds of thousands of viewers while Fox News viewership has skyrocketed after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election,” The Wrap reported. “That was also the case for NYTimes.com,” Digiday.com reporters wrote of the paper of record’s online presence, “which had about 29.4 million site visits on Nov. 5 and 33 million visits on Nov. 6 2024, compared to 36 million visits on Nov. 3 and 61 million visits on Nov. 4 2020.”
Some attribute the general decline in media consumption to the phenomenon of “news avoidance,” but other factors suggest that it might just as easily be ascribed to reality avoidance. What factors? Take, for example, the staggering increase in the number of users signing up for Bluesky, the consciously left-wing platform meant to compete with X.
In past presidential elections, when the DNC-MSM’s candidate lost, the left paid some lip service to either doing their job better, even if it came with a certain amount of “Gorillas in the Mist”-style condescension while they pretended try to make sense of those strange primitive creatures living in flyover country. In 2004 columnists, talk show hosts and network presidents responded with some sense of “where did we go wrong, and how can we understand all those people who didn’t vote for our guy?” Newsweek’s Howard Fineman wrote that “The ‘Media Party’ is over,” on the MSNBC Website, on January 13, 2005:
A political party is dying before our eyes — and I don’t mean the Democrats. I’m talking about the “mainstream media,” which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush’s Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox’s canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards. At the height of its power, the AMMP (the American Mainstream Media Party) helped validate the civil rights movement, end a war and oust a power-mad president. But all that is ancient history.
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The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans. The problem was that, once the AMMP declared its existence by taking sides, there was no going back. A party was born.
Back in late 2004, Rush Limbaugh had lots of fun playing an interview that Tina Brown (who now has a Substack called Fresh Hell, among other endeavors) had on her little-seen CNBC show with David Westin, then the president of ABC News, who said that the media needed to send the equivalent of foreign correspondents to the Red States, to witness firsthand how these strange people in the hinterlands live out their exotic day-to-day existences, and why they rejected the suave and debonair John Kerry for that hayseed George W. Bush:
WESTIN: I think we don’t do that enough, and I’m not just talking religious communities. I’m talking all sorts of communities across the country. I think that… You understand this, Tina, living in New York or in Los Angeles, we have busy jobs. We go into the office every day. We tend to socialize with the same people, or the same types of people, and I think it’s terribly important for journalists to get out whether it’s overseas or domestically and try to understand.
As Rush quipped, paraphrasing Westin, “We need more foreign correspondents in Alabama! We need more foreign correspondents north of Palm Beach County in Florida! We need embeds to go to church, find out what’s going on with these holy rollers! Ah, folks, you can’t know how much I love this.”
Also in November of 2004 after the election was concluded, when Brian Williams replaced Tom Brokaw, then-NBC president Jeff Zucker (who later imploded at CNN in 2022) attempted to sell Williams to the public, by proclaiming to USA Today that “No one understands this NASCAR nation more than Brian.” (Incidentally, the beginning of 2004 was when a Zucker-approved flamboyant New York real estate developer called Donald Trump debuted as the host of a business-themed reality TV show on NBC, The Apprentice.)
Four years later of course, having finally reached the end zone once again, the media loved nothing more than spiking the football hard in the faces of those red staters bitterly clinging to their guns and religion. That was the era of Newsweek declaring on its cover that “We Are All Socialists Now,” NPR promoting James Carville’s new book titled, 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation, and Sam Tanenhaus, then the New York Times book review editor, publishing a book titled The Death of Conservatism.
But today, the media are awash in disappointment: They’ve had over four years of having to first pretend that Biden wasn’t undergoing a significant cognitive decline, when it was obvious to everyone not in the bubble that he was not up for the job. Then they had to prop up one of the worst candidates for the presidency, likely knowing she faced an uphill battle being dropped in at the last moment to replace Biden. Then when her “joy” and “brat summer” messaging failed to resonate, they had to amplify her argumentum ad Hitlerum.
And their thanks for their service in November?
NEW Axios CEO melts down over @elonmusk telling 𝕏 users “You are the media now” — mounts passionate defense of dying legacy media:
"My message to Elon Musk is b*llshit. You're not the media!"
The MSNBC panel applauds:
“Social media people lying every day, every hour, every… pic.twitter.com/SBwgI9hFfC
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) November 25, 2024
But Vandehei is wrong. In his contribution to the Michael Walsh-edited recent book Against the Corporate Media, Glenn wrote that during the early days of the Blogosphere, “many people got involved because being a publisher, or a reporter, or a pundit—previously available only to those with powerful institutional resources behind them—was now within the reach of pretty much anybody. A.J. Liebling said that freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one. Once the blog revolution struck, that was everybody.” And while I think it’s better to not be within the walled garden of Twitter, even under Musk’s management, Vandehei knows it’s impossible to put the genie back in the bottle for old media.
No wonder the grandees of the legacy media would rather crawl into the silo and pretend that Bluesky is Twitter, circa 2019-2020, as Taylor Lorenz does, and they have their own private clubhouse where anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders can be shown the door.
I hope it was all worth it for them.