Today's topics: Media ignores election lessons. Trump unlikely to achieve 50% mark. The Left hates the 'Trump Dance.'
By Gary Abernathy
Despite shedding readers and viewers, media keeps following the same disastrous path to irrelevancy
At last count, The Washington Post has reportedly lost about 250,000 subscribers since its decision not to make an endorsement in the 2024 presidential election. As noted here previously, the decision not to endorse only meant that Kamala Harris would have to run without the endorsement, because the Post endorsing the Democrat in the race for president was a foregone conclusion. Losing or gaining far-left readers or viewers is mostly irrelevant for media outlets, since it’s too small a pool to make a real difference for their survival.
When he caught flak for the Post refusing to endorse, owner Jeff Bezos made some pertinent comments in a column. I shared a line or two in a previous newsletter, but here are some additional excerpts:
Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility. …
Lack of credibility isn’t unique to The Post. Our brethren newspapers have the same issue. And it’s a problem not only for media, but also for the nation. Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions. The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves. (It wasn’t always this way — in the 1990s we achieved 80 percent household penetration in the D.C. metro area.) …
To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course. This is the way of the world. None of this will be easy, but it will be worth it.
At first glance, it sounds like some big changes might be afoot. And yet, a few days later, here were three opinion columns in a row lined up on the Post’s online opinion section on Nov. 15:
You got it — three predictable columns in a row ripping President-elect Trump’s cabinet choices.
The Post has been shedding conservative voices in recent months. Yours truly was informed about a year ago that after six years and nearly 200 columns, my contract would not be renewed as part of a cost-cutting event. Hey, all good things must end. But other voices from the right have also been disappearing, the latest being Hugh Hewitt, who recently got fed up and quit — one of the few columnists who consistently defended Trump. (Longtime conservative Post columnist George Will has been a Never Trumper from Day One.)
The media’s bias continues to be evident in the panels featured on the Sunday news shows such as “Meet the Press,” “Face the Nation” and “This Week.” Even if they manage to include one conservative or Republican on panels of four or five analysts, it’s often a “Never Trump” type. With Trump on the verge of his second term, would it be unreasonable to include even a couple of regular pro-Trump voices on the Sunday shows? Why shouldn’t the ratio be 50-50, rather than 75-25 or even 100-0 against Trump?
In reporting on Trump’s cabinet appointments and the future of some agencies (including Trump’s suggestions that he might eliminate the Department of Education), it’s remarkable how pro-government much of the media has become. Big Government has no bigger advocate these days than Big Media. Just read any of the alarmist stories over the commission led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to cut government spending and reduce the federal workforce.
Big Media has also become pro-illegal immigrant at the cost of the safety of U.S. citizens. When the guilty verdict arrived Wednesday for the illegal immigrant who killed Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, the Associated Press headlined its story, “Man convicted of killing Laken Riley sentenced to life in prison without parole.” “Man” convicted? Not “Illegal immigrant convicted…” or even “Venezuelan man convicted…”. Just “Man convicted,” as opposed to “Woman convicted,” apparently.
So protective of illegal immigrants are our far-left (formerly mainstream) media outlets that NBC News and others dusted off the old “undocumented migrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens” chestnut in reporting on the Laken Riley murder case.
As I detailed in a Washington Post column a few years ago, such statistics actually make the opposite point intended by the media — at whatever rate they commit crime, illegal immigrants still commit crime that wouldn’t be happening if they weren’t here in the first place. We can’t do much to anticipate and head off crime committed by legal citizens, but we sure as heck can prevent the additional crime that’s committed in our country by illegal immigrants — at whatever rate they commit it — if we do more to stop them from being here in the first place. Laken Riley would be alive today if the “man” who killed her had been kept out of the U.S. in the first place.
The 2024 election victory by Trump and Republicans in general signaled the death knell for far-left (formerly mainstream) media — not only newspapers and newspaper services like the Associated Press and Reuters, but mainstream TV too, including ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC and CNN. So humiliating was the shellacking that it led to MSNBC “Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski humbly traveling to Mar-a-Lago recently to try to make nice with Trump, whom they’ve spent the last seven years trashing day in and day out. Trump’s willingness to throw them a lifeline was an astounding display of magnanimity.
Some “journalists” wonder aloud whether Trump will seek vengeance toward the media. The most hurtful thing Trump could do to the far-left (formerly mainstream) media is completely ignore them, as he did during the final weeks of the campaign. Their partisan group-think and sustained attacks against Trump and Trump voters relegated them to the ash heap of irrelevance, as podcasts and alternative media rose to preeminence. The ratings for MSNBC and CNN have tanked since Trump’s election. Trump granting Scarborough and Brzezinksi an audience and allowing them to reopen a dialogue with him was a helping hand they were lucky to have extended.
Trump’s election sent a clear signal to the far-left (formerly mainstream) media — a message which is so far being mostly ignored even as readership and viewership plummets. Until the media overhauls their operations from the ground up and regains Americans’ trust as fair, balanced and politically detached reporters, they’ll continue to flounder.
Trump is winning the popular vote, but not a majority
You don’t hear much about it lately, but vote counting is still going on and we still don’t know the final tally of the presidential election in regard to the popular vote. Trump claiming that he won by 7 or 8 million votes might have been true on the day after the election, but it won’t be true when all the votes are counted.
As of this writing, with nearly 99 percent of votes counted, Trump was leading by about 2.5 million votes, with 49.87 percent of the total vote. So while he’s on track to win the popular vote over Kamala Harris, Trump likely won’t end up winning a majority of the vote, as defined by 50 percent or above (unless you round up). Those pesky minor party candidates (including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) will likely deprive him of that.
Keep in mind, just as a fun fact: Despite winning the presidency twice, Bill Clinton never won 50 percent of the popular vote over either George H.W. Bush in 1992 or Bob Dole in 1996, thanks at least in part to Ross Perot’s candidacy both times. Clinton won 43 percent of the total vote in 1992 and 49.2 percent in 1996.
The Left hates watching athletes do the ‘Trump Dance’
Watching various athletes break out their rendition of the “Trump Dance” has been a harmless and much-needed counterbalance to our political vitriol. But don’t tell that to the far left, which fears nothing more than Trump being “normalized.” Shock and dismay were reported time and again because an increasing number of athletes and celebrities are openly displaying their support for Trump.
Of course, if you do or say anything favorable to Trump, it must be because you are ignorant. Writing in USA Today, dependably liberal sports columnist Nancy Armour assumed that “some of these young men who voted for Trump, some of these athletes now celebrating him, likely didn’t fully understand what they were voting for.”
Condescend much?
Tough time understanding Trump’s re-election? Read ‘MAGA Republicans Are Already Normal,’ in print & eBook
My book, “MAGA Republicans Are Already Normal — And Other Shocking Notions,” might help you make sense of this week’s election results. It’s available on Amazon. Buy it here.
The book (actually much thicker than the illustrations above indicate — the hardcover and paperback are each 453 pages) is a compilation of many of the columns I wrote for The Washington Post from 2017 to 2023, and covers a variety of topics, particularly focusing on Trump’s rise to political prominence and explaining his appeal.
Here’s a link to our website dedicated to the book. Thank you!
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