Sleeping with the Enemy
As the saying goes, “You are what you eat.” News people become liberal because they are constantly enmeshed in liberal ideas, associate mostly with liberal people, and generally only breathe the air inside the liberal bubble. They grow steadily more liberal, progressive, or radical, in a curious “Stockholm Syndrome” kind of way. Whatever objectivity may have once existed in the news industry was lost as the reporters, over time, became one with the reported. They morphed into roles as defenders, rather than objective observers, of the source of their financial sustenance. A liberal slant eventually permeated the entire news industry, and it became so normal that even the most fact-based generic news items about crime, disaster, or science become tainted with the liberal perspective. Even though sometimes “a cigar is just a cigar,” a left-leaning news media consistently manipulated it to sound otherwise. The bizarre became the norm, and after a lengthy period of time, something truly unusual happened – the abnormal became the normal.
The Poles Shift
The public had become so immune to the drone of the liberal mindset, the brainwashing of political correctness, and the daily dosage of forced secularism and condemnation of traditional morals, that when someone took a different public stance, that act of defiance was in itself so different and unusual that it became an item of interest. The news world was slowly flipping. It was no longer the strange and bizarre that was unusual, rather it was the mundane and normal that became hot topics of discussion. The rise of conservative news in America is the proof of a polar shift in what now became actually “newsworthy.”
The Conflict Grows
The liberal traditional media, aka the MSM (mainstream media), was rattled. Their market share began to slip, yet they continually misread the market trends. Making a fatal decision, the MSM saw the rise of conservative media as a business opportunity, rather than as the threat that it actually was. They attacked the right wingers, ostensibly hoping to generate newsworthy conflict that would win back their numbers. It worked, briefly, and then turned sharply against them. Conservative media readership, viewership, and listenership skyrocketed. Consumers began to completely tune out from MSM as they realized that the MSM had been distorting the truth and painting it with the liberal brush for so long that it was no longer a credible source for information. The more the MSM lost its audience, the more vicious it became in attacking its new right-wing enemies. The right, gaining momentum and strength, counterattacked. Talk radio pundits became even more vocal, FoxNews became the standard bearer for calling out the MSM, and the once-muted populace became ever more engaged. Republicans began to achieve wins in local and state elections across the country, and Democrats lost seats in every congress. In 2016, the unimaginable happened. Donald Trump won the presidency.
All-Out War
American liberalism, along with its champions and defenders in the MSM, finally began to see the light, and it was not a sunrise for the Democrats. But it was too late, and what they saw was the train headlamp coming at them in the tunnel. The bastions of the liberal defenses were being overrun, and the result was nothing less than panic. The MSM was handcuffed to a drowning body politic, and if it was to survive financially, it had to prevent the flailing liberalism from pulling it under. It did the only thing it knew to do – try to make news as best it could.
But the news was all bad for the left. Liberal casualties were mounting in the battles of immigration, morality, economics, environment, and defense, and they were quite simply falling far behind in the war of ideas. As leftists took to the streets in protests, clutching at every real or perceived indignity, the MSM promoted the conflicts and reported on the righteousness of the protestors. For market share. It didn’t work. The MSM came under direct attack from the White House and the congress, and millions of the people took sides with the conservatives.
The MSM finally abandoned all pretenses of objectivity, and allied itself inextricably with the leftists, correctly perceiving themselves to be in a “march or die” situation. There was no turning back. The leftists believed that it was honor that compelled the MSM to join their cause, however it wasn’t journalistic honor, but self-preservation, that drove the embattled MSM deep into their camp. If there was no good news to report, the survival choice was clear for the MSM – make something up. And that is how, and why, “fake news” became the order of the day. It was all about trying to preserve the money that comes from market share.
Surrender or Perish
The present media ideological battle will not end well for liberals. They know it, and the manufacturing of a false narrative in order to maintain market share is an act of desperation. “Fake News” is the kamikaze phase of American yellow journalism, the veritable 300 Spartans going into the last battle in the war to preserve the liberal news income stream. This struggle for economic survival will continue to be hard fought, and financially bloody, but ultimately it will prove to be futile for the hardcore liberal MSM. Many will falter, and some will be forever departed from the national media landscape.
Liberal MSM journalism in America must concede that it has lost, and that it is likely facing near total destruction as a viable business endeavor. For decades, it has prostituted its values in exchange for income, and the chickens have now come home to roost.
And it was all about the money.