For a long time now, there have been people on this side of the great divide arguing that the real source of power in American society is the media. The media has power because they control the moral framework and the discourse within it. If the media declares a set of facts unacceptable, then no one talks about them, unless they have a desire to be hurled into the void. The media controls what is allowed to be said, so they control how things are done and by whom.
On the surface, this was true, and it was always true to some degree. A popular political quip from the analog days was that “You should never pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel.” If the New York Times decided to declare a fatwah on you, there was a very good chance you were going to lose. This was why so-called conservatives and Republicans would crawl on their bellies to talk with the press, even though the media treated them as the official punching bag.
The model for this was Watergate. If not for media pressure, the political class would not have done anything about Nixon. The reason for that is they had no reason to hate Nixon, even if they disagreed with him. It was the media that made Nixon into a villain and then demanded the political class do something. Congress did not force Nixon out of office because they hated him or they believed he violated the rules of politics, but because they feared the media.
Ever since, the name of the game in politics has been to make sure you manage the media, which meant hiring an army of media consultants. Often, these people came out of the media. Of course, the media was an extension of the managerial class, so this new relationship created good jobs at good wages for people long on credentials and short on practical talent. This peaked under Obama when hundreds of media members got jobs in his administration.
This is why politics shifted from backrooms and onto the pages of the media, where narratives, narrative management and narrative collapse became the defining features of the public debate. The point of politics was to create a story, in which the hero defeated the villain and everyone clapped. This was to herd the managerial class into the hero side and paint the enemies of the managerial class as the villain. Politics was all about good guys and bad guys, as determined by the media.
In the end, American politics was like a Greek drama. The players on the stage were cast in their roles not by their actions, but by the commentary provided by the chorus, which was the media. It reached the point where in the Obama years, people truly thought “healthcare” was a thing that existed in unlimited quantities, but needed to be freed from the grasp of the monster called the insurance companies. Healthcare reform was a bizarre pantomime for the entertainment of Washington.
In the digital age, it went beyond the parlor games of the political class so that media power became the tip of the spear in the cultural revolution. Every activist declared herself a journalist and dedicated her life to finding heretics. Her job was to “report on the heretic” but her hope was that major media would pick up her “reporting” and have the heretic hurled into the void. Like every political terror in the ideological age, what started with the politicians was visited on the people.
This is when ideological and theological fevers break. People can suspend their disbelief and accept even the most bizarre moral framing, when it is limited to the action on the stage. They know it is just entertainment. Even when in the form of a lecture or sermon, they believe they can take from it what they will. When the directors of the moral drama begin dragging the people onto the stage, or off to the gulag, then the people can no longer suspend their disbelief.
The natural questions of all moral disputes then begin to appear. Those questions are “Who says?” and “So what?”. These questions crept up on the managerial class over the last ten years and they were never able or willing to answer them. This became obvious in the runup to the election. The media kept screaming, “Trump is evil!” and the people kept wondering, “Who says?” When they yelled about his alleged crimes and indictments, the response was, “So what?”
A great man once said that you will know that the revolution is upon us when a conservative waddles onto the stage muttering about the various “isms” and “who we are” and the audience remains silent. Then someone giggles, then another laughs and suddenly a wave of laughter sweeps the room. The great preference cascade is unleashed as everyone all at once seems to realize that everyone else thinks what they think about these ridiculous fools.
It is what we are now witnessing. Team Trump has started smashing up the managerial system in ways thought impossible. The media rushed to their pulpits to give their sermons, but the audience just laughed. The Wall Street Journal did the point and shriek at one of the DOGE kids and the audience not only laughed but turned “Big Balls” into a hero of the cause. The Vice President now goes on Twitter and mocks reporters who do the point and shriek.
There was a scene in the movie Braveheart in which William Wallace kills a group the king’s soldiers in an effort to free his wife. The last of them is the magistrate, who had killed Wallace’s wife. Wallace initially lowers his eye when he confronts him, then looks him straight in the eye and slashes the man’s throat. It is a great scene because it reflects the reality of power. The man had power over Wallace, as long as had moral authority, but he had squandered it.
That is what is happening in the United States. The media and the managerial class they represented held the moral high ground and people accepted it. This was the real power of the media. Then they squandered their moral capital on the cultural terror of the last decade. Their excesses not only damaged their credibility but also discredited their moral claims. They are now on the same level as the rest of us and we are cheering as the DOGE kids put them against the post.
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My only contact with the MSM is on Memeorandum. Are they really being laughed at? I have a hard time believing that the majority of politics enjoyers are an AJAB belittler one month into Trump’s term.
Worse than ridiculed, they largely are ignored now. Irrelevancy is worse than laughter, although there is quite a bit.
Yep. As the saying goes, the opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s indifference.
The media’s moral authority was doomed the minute the internet arrived. As the Derb once said, if there’s any hope, it’s in the comments section. As soon as people could comment on stories, they started pointing factual and logic errors in stories and opinion pieces.
Readers quickly realized how slanted or outright stupid reporters and pundits were. Twitter made it worse as we could see how these people thought and what they said about various topics, showing their bias and vapidity even more. The MSM can never regain their authority. It’s gone forever.
as are comment sections on msm sites!
The removal of the comment section from the dinosaur sites was the tell. “We decide, you agree” always had a limited shelf life.
Yep. It was capitulation. But it just made their sites even more irrelevant.
One of the early, kind of “dissident” sites I frequented was Takimag. When they ditched the comment section, that was it for me – and they had some pretty good writers.
The “Media” has always been a business, first and foremost. The Internet broke the traditional Media’s business model. From that point, the Media needed a new business model – so it adopted the Infomercial (from Ron Popeil and the Thigh-Master). This worked until the Coof vaxx, as opposed to the benign Thigh-Master, started killing folks. Had it just stuck to Lockheed Martin’s infomercials on killing foreigners, they probably could’ve made it work for another generation.
If not for the internet, we wouldn’t know who Zman is, along with commenters like Citizen or Jack Dobson, Ostei etc. My daily stop here has replaced the editorial section in the newspaper. The same newspaper that purged Joe Sobran for wrongthink in the early 00s and demanded uniformity of opinion, which I’m sure they thought at the time was “settled” opinion.
Jim Acosta getting pushed out or demoted at CNN is a portent. Now he is calling for a press boycott of Trump because of Trump’s dismissal of the Associated Press. So much to enjoy here.
An emasculated anti Trumper trying to rally his colleagues to battle that they surely won’t enjoin. Good times.
Maybe join hands with that pathetic noodle boy David Hogg for reinforcement. Speaking of Braveheart, how about the scene where the King returns and throws that homo counsel of his son out the window?
Jim Acosta is to CNN as Aaron Rogers was to the Jets – an aging avatar of failure discarded because he was expensive and ineffective. The new “Acosta” will be a cheaper draft choice and is in training camp now.
We are looking them in the eye, yes. This is an actual revolution rather than the intended Thermidorian Reaction. I expected best black employment numbers ever. What is not in question is that what we call the “Left” and their little helpers, “conservatives,” were utter media creations. Without a cordon sanitaire and deceptive packaging, what they are unfiltered is glaring and obvious and ridiculous. As examples of their ludicrous reality, look at the tiny European leaders gathering to discuss put ’em up, put ’em up, Putin, and the Democrats defending massive fraud to help themselves and their intended future voters.… Read more »
the trouble with the media’s grand plan is it blinded the movement’s cadres with lies. the end result being an inability to recognize and adapt to the herd’s change of direction
The funny part is most of the media hacks still don’t realize their time is over and the figurative (and hopefully literal) gulag awaits. That said, there are plenty of jackoffs among the hoi polloi who lap up the “media” slop. On my way home yesterday, I passed an anti Trump/Musk protest of several hundred, sporting signs like “democracy dies with doge”, “president Musk was not elected” and “fascism has no home here”. Sigh…
I have to admit that I was wrong about Trump 2.0, he’s going balls to the walls (I hope the momentum continues). As for the rest, it’s always a matter of ‘who’ rather than ‘why’ or ‘how’. Neither US nor EU have free speech. So it always boils down to ‘who’ is running the circus.
The Trump Crowd, during their 4 years in the desert and the nearly-fatal election campaign, finally discovered the Friend/Enemy Distinction. Obama jamming it up their butts for 8 years wasn’t sufficient apparently. This is the major change. The Mike Pence/Jonah Goldberg crowd is off in a $20/seat auditorium muttering about their “principuls”.
The Principles-Fest is nothing short of hilarious.
“The media and the managerial class they represented held the moral high ground and people accepted it. This was the real power of the media. Then they squandered their moral capital on the cultural terror of the last decade.”
I think the Managerial Class had the moral high ground because standards of living rose until the GFC of 2008-9. The nonstop incompetence since – stupid wars, mass immigration, government waste, corporate regulatory and legislative capture – has become too great for the public to ignore because living standards are clearly falling.
Ben Rhodes famously said that the current generation of journalists literally know nothing and journalist just lapped up whatever they said without thought.
Journalists have always been whores, but once knew how to give the pretense of objectivity and play their role more believably. Now they’re the cheap hookers on the side of the street as opposed to the expensive callgirls you could at least pretend were proper ladies.
This is the whole point of the “Gulf of America” rebrand.
Of course it’s nonsense. So we’re the Army base change names, Mt. McKinley name switch, and ridiculous statues to criminal drug addicts in public squares.
It’s a power flex. Under Uncle Joe and Barry O we were told “it’s no big deal, what’s your problem? Are you a bigot?”
Same stuff here. It’s a marker to see who is on board and who is actually stupid enough to challenge power publicly over trivialities. (Plenty, apparently)
“Point deer, say horse.”
I love it.
It’s amusing to see how, when Bernie, AOC and so many others shriek about the audits hurting poor kids in Africa, or whatever, people ask: “Why are you defending billions in waste?”
The inexplicable wealth of so many politicians always was low-hanging fruit for people who claimed to be investigative journalists. The avoidance of these juicy apples is all you need to know about “media.”
Indeed, the whole leftist argument seems to hinge on “we should do <i>X</i> because it’s nice”; to which we ask “Who says it’s nice? Who is it ‘nice’ to? Not me.”
Formerly they could appeal to authority on this (“The Regime says that it’s nice”) which while somewhat effective, also removed credibility from the Regime Bank each time it was used. Now they have <i>nothing</i>.
The media isn’t all bad. I’ve burst out in laughter at several NPR stories.