OK, “ritual seppuku” is a metaphor, but, during Election 2024, legacy media hit rock bottom of a decades-old downward ethical spiral that accelerated during the Obama years.
Legacy media are effectively dead as reputable purveyors of national and world news. Their reputations were ruined by having abandoned honest, objective reporting, their collective death self-inflicted.
For years, legacy media provided little, often no balance on a range of issues that reflected negatively on their favored interest groups, causes, and, especially, Democrats.
In the past few years alone, there was scant, even zero coverage of COVID’s origins, the vaccines’ side effects, the economic/social/mental health fallout from oppressive COVID policies, contrary “global warming” evidence, identity-obsessed social and cultural issues, the 2020 BLM/Antifa riots, the border crisis, rampant crime in Democrat-run cities, President(ish) Joe Biden’s creeping dementia, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and that Biden, Kamala Harris and Democrats made America less prosperous, free, and secure.
Worse, print, on-air and social media outlets blocked dissent. People attempting to express opinions, information and evidence competing with the left’s preferred narratives were ignored, shadow-banned and/or had their social media “privileges” revoked.
Legacy media’s unwavering defense of a clearly diminished Biden further eroded public trust.
For example, in 2022, it was reported that the Washington Post’s circulation and website traffic were shrinking, and that the paper was bleeding money. Then, in 2023, the Post lost $77 million and laid off about 12 percent of its staff.
Trust in legacy media, generally, had already reached an all-time low and was still declining before, in mid-2024, traditional print, network and cable news media went all in on arguably the worst, least qualified presidential candidate in American history simply because she had a D behind her name.
Vice President Kamala Harris wasn’t always a media darling, though. Mere months before Democrats dispatched her boss and elevated her, the same media worried that Harris’ in-the-tank polling numbers were a drag on Joe “Sharp As a Tack” Biden’s reelection campaign – until he clearly wasn’t, and media could no longer convince anyone otherwise.
Suddenly, after abandoning Biden, legacy media declared Harris the second coming of (insert name of any highly-respected and/or holy figure).
It was a cynically ridiculous one-eighty, of course, and people knew it.
In June, even before Harris replaced Biden, barely a third of Americans polled had “full” or “some” trust in traditional media. Nearly two-thirds had “little” or “none.”
The independent Media Research Center tallied legacy media’s pre-Election Day coverage of Kamala Harris at 84 percent positive, and Donald Trump at 89 percent negative. Echoing Democrats, the media called Trump “racist,” “sexist,” “Hitler,” an “existential threat to democracy,” and his supporters “fascists.”
The CBS Network’s once-respected “60 Minutes” discarded its residual reputation by video-editing an embarrassing Harris interview word salad into a semi-coherent response, then refusing to release the actual transcript.
The Washington Post and LA Times lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and liberal staff (i.e., everyone there) protested, some resigned because owners would not authorize Harris’ endorsements.
Post-election, only Fox News has grown, while legacy media outlets are shedding disappointed, formerly faithful viewers and subscribers, angry at how badly they were misled. The NY Times published a number of post-election articles addressing “grief” and/or “depression,” but nothing about how their “reporting” raised reader expectations.
Dejected Democrats have tuned out MSNBC (a 54 percent decrease in viewership) in the wake of Trump’s election. Amusingly, “Morning Joe” co-hosts tried to put a brave face on their relevancy-seeking, hypocritical pilgrimage to the Berghof (a/k/a, Mar-a-Lago) for an audience with “Hitler.” The cable outlet has performed so poorly that parent company Comcast is spinning it off.
Comparing the 2024 election cycle to 2020, CNN lost half of its audience, and insiders expect hundreds of jobs to be slashed, bringing headcount roughly in line with the number of its primetime viewers.
There are (primarily local) exceptions, but the internet has replaced television and newsprint as the last genuinely open source for national and world news.
Left unreformed, legacy media will still attract intolerant liberals seeking comfort and affirmation, however, balance in national and world news and opinion will be delivered by talk radio, web-based alternative media, podcasts, and social media. For example, today, Republicans and Democrats view “X” for news in equal numbers.
Ironically, politicized legacy media may, in fact, have become a political liability for Democrats.
Contact columnist Jerry Shenk at [email protected]
