Trump Broke the Media, Chapter 63,528

Damin Toell @damintoell

Right-wingers are fully aware of what non-right-wing media outlets say. Libs often have absolutely no idea what goes on in right-wing media, they have no understanding of what right-wingers actually think. This is part of why it's so shocking to them now that anyone would question Biden's competence. They haven't seen a million videos of Biden mumbling and trailing off and lumbering around and looking lost, they didn't know that he gets fed questions in advance. Two weeks ago, libs would've called it all fake news and cheapfakes, but right-wingers have known this stuff for years. Despite positioning themselves as the educated ones in the room, libs so often have absolutely horrendous media literacy.

This is also why every two months, you get "we're canceling our New York Times subscriptions" freakouts - and we're seeing this happen to journos and news outlets on a nuclear scale right now - because anything uncomfortable is seen as traitorous and must be immediately rejected. They're not used to bad news (the type of bad news that makes them feel bad about themselves instead of the other guy being bad) and they have no idea how to navigate that.

Matt Taibbi has been talking about this recently.

He points out that the media has changed its "commercial business model." Previously, he says (a bit naively) that the corporate media attempted to inform a broad audience.

Under Trump, the media became more overtly biased, of course. He says that's because Trump was a huge draw commercially, even for -- especially for -- leftwing news outlets. They knew that when they ran segments about Trump, their ratings went up. When they posted about Trump, their clicks went up.

So under no circumstances would they stop making their channels and papers Trump News 24/7. This would benefit Trump, of course -- if they reported on him neutrally.

So the new business model they chose would be to continue filling their airwaves and newspapers with almost nothing but Trump, but they would appease their audiences, and their own consciences, by making it unrelentingly negative and biased coverage.

Further, they noticed that whenever they surprised their almost-entirely leftwing audiences with a story that did not support the preferred leftwing narratives, they would lose "market share." The leftwing audience they cultivated would simply turn them off if they ever ran a story noting that crime was rising, or inflation was rising, or that there might be some problems with open borders.

So they simply excised such stories from their channels and newspapers, almost completely. Instead of broadcasting to a, well, broad audience, they instead used market research principles: Their actual market was uniformly leftwing and preferred the hardcore Democrat bubble.

So they adapted their business model to stop chasing or serving any other audience except their current hard-left partisan audience, and reported only stories that flattered the prejudices of that audience. Republicans were always bad, Trump was always a Nazi-in-waiting, crime has never been lower, and there is no illegal alien crisis, and if there is a crisis, it's only because Republicans won't pass amnesty plans.

I mean, that is true, mostly. But it's not like this just began in 2015. It certainly intensified in 2015, but the corporate Marxist media has always done this, just less brazenly, just less overtly.

As we often say: 2015 was merely they year that they pulled off the fig leaf of impartiality and hung the full dong of crazed partisan advocacy "journalism."

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 02:20 PM

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