If you relied solely upon corporate media for your information, you would most likely be shocked and terrified to the core by last week’s election result. After all, you would have been plied for many months with hoax after hoax claiming Trump is Hitler literally and Harris is Joy literally. You would have bought into the narrative that Harris leads a ‘razor close’ race. You would have ‘known’ that if somehow Trump squeaked out a win, he would handily lose the popular vote, justifying all manner of quasi-legal and illegal resistance to his administration. Like the J 6 committee persecutor Jamie Raskin’s decertification promise, Raskin Revolt. You think that punk has got the balls to try that stunt now?
So, what does a landslide popular vote mandate for Trump tell you about what the media has been telling you for the past eight years? I guarantee you this: if you have a sliver of a conscience and a hair of intellectual honesty your learning will be at PHD levels compared to the corporate media.
One of the most amazing facts of the past eight years has been corporate media’s (including its left leaning government sponsors) complete lack of self-inspection. A very well researched book by one of America’s premiere investigative journalists released in early 2017 graphically demonstrated the need for such reflection (See, Enemy of the People) Matt Taibbi, the author of Insane Ass Clown President, was known then as a left-leaning muckracker. Taibbi ably demonstrated that Trump won in 2016 primarily because he unapologetically declared corporate media as the enemy of the people because of its unswerving allegiance to preserving the American autocracy and attacking any dissent like a pack of starving wolves. Seven years have passed and Taibbi’s hoped-for media self-examination (despite much nudging by Taibbi himself) never came. Instead of examining what the losers and the media got wrong in 2016, they stepped up the demonization of their perceived enemies and idealization of their own losing political agenda.
Corporate media became so censorship/propaganda directed during the 2016-2024 election cycles that an increasing public thirst for facts and truth led to the rise of a grassroots online citizen media. By 2024 that alternative media far eclipsed corporate media’s reach. For example, former Fox host Tucker Carlson (fired for his increasingly populist oriented shows) opened shop online and soon was netting over 50 million viewers for premiere interviews – some reaching super bowl-like figures – numbers the networks are lucky to get even for a presidential debate. Joe Rogan regularly attracts tens of millions of listeners to his interviews. CNN by comparison is lucky to hit ½ a million in any given evening prime time.
Libertarian political commentator Dave Smith recently summed up the feelings of regular Americans toward corporate media on the Joe Rogan Experience.
After the election, conservative pundit Matt Walsh declared: “Legacy media is officially dead. 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.”
Is Walsh right? If the media were capable of the self-examination and correction that Matt Taibbi encouraged seven years ago, perhaps Walsh overestimates.
Scott Jennings, the one counterbalancing conservative voice at CNN, put the question to the beast directly to its face:
On the immediate heels of the election there was but one indication I could find, and I looked, that the corporate media might have learned a lesson. Here is a violently anti-Trump propagandist having a three-minute Freudian slip of sorts:
But Joe couldn’t even make it through the same show without reverting to the race-bait grift, now blaming the alleged “misogyny” of Black and Latino men for the Democrat party woes:
Think about that one for a second. America’s number one race-baiting grifter Al Sharpton calling Black and Latino men misogynist by their very nature. It doesn’t get any more patently racist than that. And, yet the cognitive dissonance factory keeps on spewing its intellectually toxic waste.
Looking inward was by far the exception and not the rule for the corporate media.
Upon declaring Trump the winner of the 2024 election the New York Times immediately regressed to chaos and terror peddling to its now confirmed minority following.
The Times gravely announced “AMERICA HIRES A STRONGMAN: This was the conquering of the nation not by force but by permission. Now, America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style or governance never before seen in its 248-year history.”
The Times then recorded its “top” opinion columnists to vent their Ivy league, grotesquely detached opinions that Trump winning = the “end of democracy.” (Note, kudos to the inimitable Walter Kirn for his witty, ironic commentary in the X post):
The Times cannot lie straight in bed. The experts in gaslighting tell you that never in America’s 250-year history have we face the coming autocratic rule; neatly omitting the very “autocrat” they rail against was President less than four years ago. The pearl-clutching character of the Times’ top talent is embarrassing.
NBC’s Insane-asylum bait Rachel Madcow was front and center for her deep-state sponsors, using the exact same coordinated term declaring that a democratic mandate of the electorate was a determination of a new form of government: “STRONGMAN AUTHORITARIAN” rule:
After the leftist honchos at New York Time and NBC pushed out the “Strongman” deep state talking points, the rest began screaming in unison for CENSORSHIP. State sponsored PROPAGANDA marched lockstep to promote CENSORSHIP.
The witches at The View were back to attempting to terrorize women, while demanding censorship:
Biden’s White House spokesperson Psaki demanded we turn full blown East Germany:
MSNBC demanded Elon Musk’s scalp:
CNN laments the Rogan and Musk efforts to restore the 1st Amendment:
Joes Scarborough loses his mind ranting about censoring “disinformation”, while spewing bucket loads himself:
It would appear that corporate media has decided it will not or perhaps cannot change. They are acting like the financial slaves of oligarchic forces much more powerful than themselves. However, those forces face a financial conundrum. A definite majority of the country voted in defiance of corporate media’s narratives and dictates. Clearly more than half the country doesn’t give a whit what corporate media broadcasts day in and day out. To the degree that that majority sustains itself and increases, so too increases the necessity for financial sponsors to redirect their financials resources to channels that reach that majority.
As long as we live in a somewhat free market economy, the oligarchs holding the most chips are going to have to be the first to have a change of heart. And it will be financial reasons that force them to, not ideological . There have been glimmerings of shifts in views of oligarchs like Bezos and Zuckerberg lately – but only after others cleared the way and helped remove potential financial disincentives. If the government cannot nationalize social media and its citizen independent media and thereby control our minds directly with censorship and propaganda the money cannot sustainably continue to flow in the direction of censorship/propaganda outlets.
The free market financial incentive above is diametrically opposed by the big government gravy train D.C. blob (that is millions of federal employees, Military-Industrial-complex, vast non-government organizations (NGO) taxpayer-funded networks). It is utterly dependent upon the Censorship/propaganda industrial complex for its continued existence. It will be a Godzilla vs. King Kong colossal knock-down, drag-out struggle between the two with Trump in office. The government-state economy vs. the free-market economy. If the former wins there will be increasing censorship/propaganda from here on out. Should the latter prevail, the Bill of Rights has a chance.
The ultimate answer to the original question “is corporate media dead?” will be determined by a single factor. It is highlighted by an exchange Scientology’s leader once had with a couple of corporate news reporters. They asked him to define power. He replied that power is determined solely on the basis of whether folks listen to whoever it is that attempts to control affairs. So it will go with corporate media. It is dead to the degree the exodus of erstwhile viewers continues to grow. So far, so good: see. Exodus from Corporate Media post election.
The purpose of this blog since March was to advocate making restoration of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution, particularly its free speech and press provisions, a central issue in the 2024 Presidential election. (see e.g. Keeping It Simple In 2024)
Hopefully, we have made a step forward. In the meantime, with corporate media’s death-throes-like desperate appeals for censorship measures, it will do us good to recall from whence we came. America’s premiere censorship/propaganda expert/whistleblower/educator Mike Benz sums it up best. In the course of doing so, he answers a question lingering for many today: how on earth were so many votes cast in 2020 for a party that did not even bother to hit the campaign trail, as compared to four years later when virtually every celebrity on the planet pimped non-stop for its candidate?
Moving On Up a Little Higher 