Conservatives are Destroying Legacy Media
Image by Spenser Sembrat.
Now that conservatives will have full control of the triumvirate – the White House, Congress, and Senate – they appear eager to dominate the legacy media as well and ultimately destroy it.
The latest talk of the town is Elon Musk’s potential buyout of MSNBC, a move that would greatly damage the media’s ability to broadcast fair news, not to mention diminish the ability of the public to receive it.
Referring to a post that said the news network MSNBC was for sale, Donald Trump Jr. wrote on X Friday: “Hey @elonmusk I have the funniest idea ever!!!”
“How much does it cost?” Musk replied.
MSNBC’s parent company, Comcast, announced it is looking to spin the network off into a new entity that would house MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network, Oxygen, E!, Syfy, and the Golf Channel. It is unclear where MSNBC would find itself under Comcast’s new strategy.
Legacy media, including cable television, is being destroyed, taking a hit from newer digital media, from social media to podcasts to web-based networks and programs.
Popular podcaster Joe Rogan offered to take the place of Rachel Maddow, MSNBC’s leading anchor.
“If you buy MSNBC I would like Rachael Maddow’s job. I will wear the same outfit and glasses, and I will tell the same lies,” he said.
And that’s just MSNBC.
The Right is going after CNN, ABC, and print media including the New York Times, The Washington Post, and others.
This is a problem since, according to research by Pew, one-in-ten Americans cite CNN as their top source of political news.
Legacy media “is officially dead,” The Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh wrote on X. “Their ability to set the narrative has been destroyed. Trump declared war on the media in 2016. Tonight he vanquished them completely. They will never be relevant again.”
Even Brian Stetler of CNN asked, “What does this ‘red wave’ election say about the information environment in the United States?”
The answer is simple: America is changing.
People do not seem to understand the gravity of the situation in which America finds itself, especially regarding climate change, fossil fuels, pollution, and even just basic freedoms for individuals.
Donald Trump’s followers have vastly differing views from those who follow President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, as the recent election campaign demonstrated.
Nearly nine-in-ten Trump supporters (88%) favor mass deportations of immigrants living in the country illegally. In contrast, only 27% of Harris supporters are in favor of the drastic measure.
Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are more likely than Republicans and GOP-leaners to say that their main source of political news is part of the mainstream media (72% vs. 48%).
Meanwhile, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say their main source of political news is not part of the mainstream media (36% vs. 13%).
About three-quarters of Americans (73%) say they often or sometimes get local news from friends, family and neighbors.
And a small but growing share of U.S. adults are regularly getting news on TikTok.
What this means is that Americans’ relationship with local news is changing. More are getting news online or from friends and neighbors whom they trust, and fewer are turning to sources like daily newspapers, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted earlier this year.
This changing attitude toward news sources likely explains why so many Americans have differing views on some of the most important topics of today.
While most Trump supporters place the economy and immigration at the top of their concerns, the care less about issues that are much more important to Democrats including climate change, racial and ethnic inequality, and abortion.
The changing news environment means Americans are receiving information differently and this directly affects their positions on the issues.
For Democrats, this means a need to focus on how to continue getting our messaging across to voters so that we have a chance at winning in 2028.
With a dearth of information at their fingertips, Democrats will struggle to find reliable, trustworthy, and honest news sources that they can count on.
If Conservatives get their way and they eradicate much of the legacy media, millions of Americans will be left behind, desperate for dependable news.
Now is the time for networks such as NBC, ABC, and CNN, to collaborate and perhaps create a unified and strong news network that will fairly report the news and deliver insightful analyses that all Americans can depend on.
If they don’t band together, they might all disappear from existence. If that happens, America will be left with a one-sided media infrastructure parroting the White House, creating a dystopian reality for all Americans.
The Mainstream Media’s Big Lie
Eduardo Porter joined the chorus of people telling us that the inequality of the last four decades was just the result of the free market in his Washington Post column. As Porter puts it:
“A paper last year by economists from Princeton and Columbia argues that Democrats started losing the working class back in the 1970s, when they bought into the notion that the government should let market forces rip, dropping the New Deal approach of improving workers’ lot via strong unions, job guarantees, minimum wages and protectionism — and instead assisting the economy’s losers via taxes and transfers.”
He then argues that this is the source of the rise in working class support for authoritarianism.
The problem with this line is that we did not let market forces rip. Government-granted patent and copyright monopolies are not the f**king market. They are hugely important in the economy, likely shifting more than $1 trillion a year ($8,000 a family) from the rest of us to those in a position to benefit from these monopolies. Higher drug prices are the most visible transfer, but these monopolies also add hugely to the price of a wide range of other items like computers, software, smartphones.
Then we also have government support for the financial industry. This was most visible during the financial crisis when the government directly saved many of the largest financial corporations in the country from bankruptcy. There are many other supports for the financial industry, such as deposit insurance, which are less visible. This sector is the source of many of the largest fortunes in the economy.
We also have rules of corporate governance that allow CEOs and other top executives to rip off the companies they work for. This allows hugely bloated pay at the top which comes at the expense of ordinary workers. These rules are not “letting the market rip.” They are written by politicians who get campaign contributions from top executives.
Also “free trade” has never meant free trade in highly paid professions like physicians’ and dentists’ services. If these highly paid professionals were subject to the same sort of competition as autoworkers and textiles workers their pay would be considerably lower, and healthcare would be cheaper for the rest of us.
I go into these issues in more detail in my book Rigged (it’s free), but the basic point should be clear. There is a widely repeated lie that inequality was driven by the natural workings of the market. The reality is that politicians of both parties worked to structure the market to bring about more unequal outcomes.
The media and most of the academic establishment actively push this lie at every opportunity. And people are pissed. To be clear, I’m sure that almost none of them know anything about patent policy or the rules of corporate governance. They just know that the rules are structured against them, and they are absolutely right. And elite outlets like the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Atlantic won’t let anyone make this obvious point in the spaces they control.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
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