At first, the establishment was caught flat-footed by the internet. After being blindsided by Trump’s 2016 victory, it took analysts his entire term to recognize the seminal role that alternative media played in his victory – something that COVID and the associated increase in conservative institutional distrust served to underline.
In this light, the hypocrisy, lies and injustices of 2020 and the early Biden presidency can be seen as the ungraceful swan song of the 20th century television world. The concealing of the unmistakably violent nature of the Black Lives Matter riots, the spinning of narratives suggesting that anti-vaxers (a slur by any reasonable definition) were responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans, and, of course, the brazen censorship of those with concerns about the integrity of the 2020 presidential election; never before and never since was the manipulation more apparent – and hopefully, given television’s continued decline, it never will be again.
President Trump’s persistence through that brief but intense dark age is a testament to how impotent it all was. Had January 6th occurred twenty-five years ago, it’s unlikely that the media-manufactured narrative of a violent putsch to establish a dictatorship would have been meaningfully contested. After years of baying for reprisals, vilifying those involved as un-American terrorists, and canonizing January 6th as the newest installment in America’s long series of historical black spots to be overcome, few bit. Nobody really ended up caring, and recent attempts to condemn the President as having spared terrorists their rightful fate are entertained only by those poor souls whose eyes and ears are still in thrall to what remains of network television. America is better for having largely abandoned television, and the results speak for themselves.
It was a gradual process: as viewers increasingly abandoned television news, television executives allowed their newsmen to abandon half of their potential audience of viewers. From Dan Rather cooking the books in September of 2004 to attack President Bush, to the entire DNC-MSM railing against “cheap fakes” twenty years later in an utterly futile attempt to protect their party’s (p)resident, TV news did everything it could to hasten its own demise.
