by Richard Truesdell and Keith Lehmann
In our final look at the disaster of the Harris-Walz campaign, let us examine the biggest casualty of November 5: The American legacy media.
In the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, we are witnessing a real-time transition in the legacy media, from having a genuine impact on public opinion to having virtually no impact at all. Presidential and policy endorsements from legacy media outlets such as CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times now have virtually no influence on voters, who have tuned them out. Was this a long-standing trend or a sudden shift in public sentiment?
A case in point is MSNBC. Its far-left audience, having felt betrayed by the likes of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, has abandoned this propaganda arm of the DNC. The network has long since halted any pretense of journalistic integrity and has routinely launched into unhinged rants to satisfy the needs of its audience with no interest in “fair and balanced” reporting. When Joe and Mika recently visited President-elect Donald Trump, they did so in a manner that infuriated their audience and amused everyone else. They’re toast.
And, apparently, so is MSNBC. It’s so bad that corporate parent Comcast is about to unload most of its cable properties, MSNBC among them, lest it tarnish the “reputation” of its vaunted NBC News brand. This is nonsense. The NBC News brand is almost as tarnished as MSNBC’s. There are now jokes circulating on some platforms that Elon Musk is considering buying MSNBC. But can Musk buy MSNBC without purchasing the bundle of other media properties offered by Comcast, like CNBC?
Along with MSNBC, the “leadership” at CNN parent, debt-laden Warner Bros. Discovery, including CEO and President David Zaslav, is looking at ways to reduce the debt on the company’s balance sheet. At the same time, he’s looking to mitigate its sharp post-election loss of viewers. Job and pay cuts at CNN have been rumored for years. Does anyone think 77-year-old Chris Wallace voluntarily left a paying gig at CNN to move into podcasting? Wallace is just one of many who will find themselves without a slot on cable news and playing catch-up on streaming and podcast platforms. Or they’ll just evaporate into the ether?
With fewer people paying attention, what will legacy media heads do to attract a broader audience? Moderate their content? Reach out to “conservative” correspondents?
There is no introspection among those who finance and run the legacy media. There will be no epiphany to moderate content or bring forth a balanced approach to reporting or commenting on the events of the day. The Fourth Estate has morphed into a club with members that associate only with each other.
So getting back to our original question, “Which is worse? Gaslighting your audience or gaslighting yourselves?”
To be sure, there are true believers on these networks who actually believe that Trump is still a “threat to democracy,” that he will “jail his opponents,” “reduce women’s rights,” and “enrich his billionaire friends.” Just like he did in his first term, right?
Do you need concrete examples of how Democrats remain unhinged for more than three weeks? Watch these groups of Harris supporters engaging in mass primal scream therapy sessions at Lake Michigan and other locations around the nation.
But we believe that most of these correspondents know that these claims are clearly false, just as Harris’s internal polling knew she was losing almost from the day she was installed as the Democrat nominee, even though public polling (except for Rassmussen Reports and Atlas Intel) showed her in a horse race with Trump. How do we know this? Because most of them are not stupid. They remember Trump’s first term; they know the audience has access to the Internet, and they know that Trump is wildly popular among much of the country. His current approval rate is at all-time highs.
They claimed that Trump, the convicted felon, the accused rapist, the warmonger who will start World War III, is unhinged and an out-of-control authoritarian that is unfit to lead the nation.
CNN predicted Kamala Harris would win a majority of swing states and cruise to an easy victory. ABC breathlessly reported every exaggerated lawfare stunt played by various district attorneys and judges to smear Trump as a bona fide criminal. MSNBC outright promised a Trump loss to its viewers.
Those networks lied to their audience, and their audience knows it. The dramatic decline in viewership right after the election proves this. The trust, belief, and goodwill held by their audience is gone. This epic failure of the legacy media is reminiscent of Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” in which the author explains his bankruptcy unfolding “Gradually, then suddenly.”
An already skeptical audience that has been dwindling over the past twenty years has simply walked away.
The correspondents and anchors who guaranteed a different election outcome through their incessant propaganda fell into two categories: idiots who believed the nonsense or liars who knew better but lied about it anyway. Is this what the American legacy media has turned into? Their audience thinks so.
The Winners and Losers in the Mainstream Media: Steve Kornacki (MSNBC) and Harry Enten (CNN)
As far as we can see, there were only three winners. First were polling gurus Steve Kornacki at MSNBC and Harry Enten at CNN. While the so-called journalists over at sister network NBC News were constantly shilling for Kamala Harris right up to the Sunday before the election, especially Meet the Press’ Kirsten Welker, Kornacki had been sounding the alarm. After Harris’ epic defeat, he tried to explain to MSNBC’s continually misinformed audience why she was defeated across all seven swing states.
It was much the same over at CNN, where Enten tried to put the defeat in its proper context. Watch as CNN anchor John Berman looks absolutely befuddled as Enten not only explains why Harris lost the election but, in the aftermath of the election three weeks later, almost 60% of Americans were happy with the pace of Trump’s transition, Matt Gaetz notwithstanding.
Fox News
The winner on the network side was clearly Fox News. Among the broadcast and cable outlets, only Fox News had anything even closely resembling fair coverage. Anchors Brett Baier and Martha MacCallum did an acceptable job of keeping their coverage on track throughout the night.
As the dominoes of each of the swing states fell, Fox was the first of the broadcast and cable networks to call the race for Trump, even before the Associated Press. It was almost as if, throughout the evening, they knew something that the other five outlets didn’t.
The Biggest Losers
Where do we start? The clown car of election night coverage at most media outlets, especially the broadcast networks ABC, CBS, and NBC, was horrific. Thanks to the diligent efforts of many YouTubers, you can watch time-compressed edited compilation videos (linked below) that show how the tone of their coverage changed from joy to despair as the evening turned to morning and Trump declared victory.
ABC
Starting in alphabetical order among the broadcast networks, check out how ABC covered the evening’s events. It seemed that throughout the evening, the panelists, except for Reince Priebus, the token Republican on the panel, each tried to outdo their colleagues in displaying their Trump Derangement Syndrome. While David Muir was pathetic as expected (watch his facial expressions throughout the evening), Martha Raddatz showed why she should have been put out to pasture at least two election cycles ago. Her whiny anti-Trump analysis throughout the evening shed no light on the magnitude of the Harris defeat. All she did was apologize for it.
But the honor for the worst pundit on the ABC panel had to go to Democrat operative Donna Brazile. Yes, the same Donna Brazile who gave Hillary Clinton the questions before one of the 2016 debates. Her commentary was an embarrassment; it added even less to the coverage than from Chris Christie. ABC, don’t you have any shame?
CBS
It was no better at CBS, where Nora O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan put on a show for the ages carrying on their Vice Presidential Debate performance. Their evening’s reporting bias was off the charts. But what would you expect? Everyone on the panel tried to fool themselves that early on, Harris was actually winning according to their exit polling.
But by midnight on the East Coast, they couldn’t hide the magnitude of Harris’ defeat as one swing state after another, starting with North Carolina, fell into the Trump column
NBC
Over on NBC News, their election night coverage, anchored by the Nightly News’ host Lester Holt, Meet the Press’ Kirsten Welker, and the Today Show’s Savannah Guthrie, was everything you would have expected. Wall-to-wall anti-Trump coverage that misinformed its viewers throughout the evening until the swing states started falling.
The expressions on the entire team’s faces couldn’t hide the inevitable as the coverage moved past 11 PM on the East Coast. By midnight, as seen here, they knew the gig was up, that Harris had run a miserable, losing campaign. This was typified by her refusal to clear her schedule to do the Joe Rogan Show with its 60 million viewers. Instead, Harris opted for an appearance on the Call Your Daddy sex podcast, which, as of this date, hasn’t yet garnered even 1,000,000 views. Fans of the show blasted host Alex Cooper for extending the invitation to Harris, saying it sounded like propaganda, which it was.
CNN
CNN? Dreadful, biased, out-of-touch coverage anchored by the likes of Dana Bash, Anderson Cooper, and Jake Tapper was virtually unwatchable. It was a clown car of self-delusion. In the aftermath of the election, where Harris operatives like Jen O’Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter, interviewed by Obama operative Dan Pfeiffer on the Pod Save America Podcast, admitted that from the convention up until election night their internal polling never had Harris in the lead. How could Bash, Anderson, Tapper, and the rest of the CNN team be so uninformed?
With cuts reportedly coming to CNN, Berman, along with others like Wolf Blitzer, Cooper, and Tapper, are expected to follow Don Lemon and Chris Wallace out the door to the world of podcasting when CNN’s Mark Thompson cleans house in an attempt to remain relevant. (It should be noted that the broom will not be given to rising star Kaitan Collins, who will be adding White House Correspondent to her portfolio in addition to her nightly anchoring duties of her low-rated evening show, where she will be the young face of anti-Trump bias and resistance over at CNN.)
MSNBC
But the worst of the worst has to be the coverage on MSNBC.
Among the reporters on the ground, possibly the biggest shill for Democrats continues to be MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff. Time after time, all day and into the evening, he ignored the obvious, that Democrats were going down to a defeat even as late as 10 PM EST on election night. This segment, earlier in the day in Pennsylvania, when the polls were open, with the always insipid ex-George Bush neocon hack Nicole Wallace in studio reporting on his handing out water with actor Paul Rudd was especially cringe-worthy.
Beyond Wallace, all of the anchors and contributors on MSNBC come in for scorn. If you watched MSNBC’s Election Night coverage, their initial optimism from when the eastern states polls closed up until around 11 PM, you would have thought Harris was going to win all the swing states. Chris Hayes, Lawrence O’Donnell, Jen Psaki, Stephanie Ruhle, Ari Melber, Nicole Wallace, Joy Reid, and last but certainly not least, Rachel Maddow, couldn’t stop propping up Harris. They all continued to gaslight their audience until they could no longer.
No analysis of MSNBC would be complete without mentioning its so-called flagship daytime opinion show, Morning Joe (aka Morning Joke). Hosted by the reprehensible husband-and-wife team of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, with its lineup of TDS-suffering regulars like Donny Deutsch, Mike Barnacle, Claire McCaskill, John Heilmann, and Al Sharpton (whose National Action Network received $500,000 payoff prior to his softball interview with Harris two weeks earlier) along with contributors like presidential historians Jon Meachem and Micheal Beschloss, for the last nine years this posse of hyper partisans has vilified Trump, spewing lie after lie while calling out Trump for his lies. It was sad and pitiful to watch this lack of self-awareness play out, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
It got so bad that in the wake of Trump’s landslide victory, Joe and Mika made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago last week to kiss the ring of Donald Trump. Licking his shoes may have been a more apt description.
The results? An almost total collapse of their ratings, off almost 50% in the key 25 to 54 demographic advertisers covet since election night. The show that Joe Biden reportedly watches every morning to be told that he’s “the best, most cogent Biden yet” humiliated themselves to the degree that can only be described as staggering. While never big in the morning ratings (it’s traditionally beaten in the cable ratings by the weekday morning lightweights over on Fox and Friends), in the past it was seen by many inside the DC beltway as prestigious and a must-watch.
Nothing could be further from the truth. It is now an elitist circle jerk lorded over by its two ringmasters, Scarborough especially. And one of Scarborough’s favorite guests, Axios’ Jim VanderHai, in an acceptance speech getting the self-congratulatory National Press Club’s Fourth Estate Award, railed against the citizen journalists on YouTube who had a much better handle on election night than Axios, his former outlet Politico, the Huffington Post, and the traditional outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post.
So to answer the question posed at the top of this commentary, of what’s worse, gaslighting themselves or their viewers. We would have to answer, gaslighting themselves. You can’t gaslight your viewers without first gaslighting yourselves. The MSNBC team covered themselves in infamy up to midnight EST on election night when Circle Back Psaki still insisted that the Blue Wall would hold. She had to know that this was bullshit. How could she not? While not a journalist by any dictionary definition, she’s supposed to be an astute political observer. Clearly, she’s not.
Psaki and the rest of the MSNBC on-air personalities were privy to NBC News’ internal polling that had to tell them all that the Harris-Walz ticket was on its way to an electoral and popular vote shellacking. More than 90 percent of counties in the US shifted right in 2024 and voted for Trump, according to the New York Times, on his way to his 312-226 victory in the Electoral College in addition to winning the popular vote.
If you follow any of the news media biz, you already know that cuts are being made in most of the outlets, with CNN and MSNBC probably up for sale. One rumor has it that Elon Musk is a possible suitor for MSNBC (which will likely need a new name if it is divorced from the NBC News mothership whose brand it has been said it’s tarnishing). If this happens, and we think it’s a great idea, the obvious rebrand, MSDNC, will not work.
One can expect that what remains of what was MSNBC will tack to the political center, just as X/Twitter has done. And with its divorce from the reporting resources of NBC News, it’s going to need new reporters (avoid most who will be laid off from the legacy networks). Musk will need to look no further than X/Twitter for capable reporters while bringing in Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and possibly Joe Rogan to anchor the 8-11 PM weeknight block.
That would be a powerhouse prime-time lineup that could completely upend the media landscape. Could Musk (and a potential investor group) be playing 4D chess while everyone else is playing checkers?
***
Richard Truesdell is a former consumer electronics retail executive and automotive travel photojournalist. In the last 25 years, he has visited more than 35 countries on six continents. A former high school history teacher with a BA in Political Science from Waynesburg University, he is a lifelong Conservative moderate who has turned his thoughts and keyboard to political commentary and popular culture. A cross-section of his writings can be found here.
Keith Lehmann is a retired consumer electronics industry executive who has written extensively on technology, transportation, and international travel. Living in Southern California for over fifty years, he has first-hand exposure to societal and cultural happenings of the left and submits decidedly realism-based, Conservative viewpoints, much of which can be found on his Substack.
Richard Truesdell and Keith Lehmann
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/02/final-2024-election-media-post-mortem-whats-worse-gaslighting-your-audience-or-gaslighting-yourselves/
No comments:
Post a Comment