From today’s Badlands News Brief
TV Exec Tells CNN’s Brian Stelter The Inconvenient Truth: “Trump Victory Means MSM Is Dead In Current Form”
CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter shared a comment from an anonymous television executive on X, “If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form.”
The anonymous TV exec’s comment to Stelter nailed it. Trust in corporate media has been sliding for decades but has imploded to record-low levelsin the last several years.
History might show that the 2020s was the decade when the curtain was lifted on the censorship blob, a combination of MSM, government, big tech, nonprofits (fake fact-checkers), and globalist billionaires that work overtime to sow division across the nation, trick the American people into endless foreign wars, and artificially create a news flow environment favorable to far-left policies. — ZeroHedge
Our Take: Print media died in the late 1990s, but it wasn’t until 2012 that Newsweek discontinued and eulogized their printed magazine. Institutional change is a lagging indicator of public trust, in the media or otherwise.
As we frequently discuss in The Brief, trust in the “fake news” is at an all time low, and they keep breaking that record. This erosion has been gradual, going back decades. For example, I asked Grok when trust in the institutional press began to crumble, and we time traveled back to 1968:
“The 1968 convention, coupled with events like the Tet Offensive earlier that year, which was initially reported as a significant defeat for the US but later understood more as a strategic loss for the Vietnamese, contributed to a broader erosion of trust in media. The public began questioning the media’s role in shaping narratives around the war and domestic unrest.”
Gradually, and then all at once.
Media has a lower approval rating than Congress, and American trust in the institution has been falling since Vietnam. In a 2023 Gallup poll, only 16% of US adults expressed a “great deal” of trust in the mass media — and that was before the dumpster fire that is 2024.
Yet, the legacy media still claims narrative authority, and that authority leads to real world impacts. Consider Fox News and Arizona in 2020.
It’s almost like something other than market forces is at work. It’s almost like public trust in the media is no longer a part of their business model. Maybe it never was.
I remember hearing an anecdote years back about Chinese immigrants being surprised that Americans watch the news. In China, everyone knows it’s propaganda. We’re reaching that point in the US, though definitely not with the required levels of urgency for countering the communist color revolution — which is absolutely and almost exclusively being televised.
Back to this silly Stelter article, the death of legacy media has nothing to do with tomorrow’s election. Like printed Newsweek in 2012, they’re already dead. The only matter remaining is the eulogy. — Ashe in America
