The Media is Losing the Media

Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas’: HERE.

February began with massive layoffs at the Washington Post, as its owner Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, tired of the woke rebellion by his employees, cut a third of its staff, and ended with the sale of Warner Bros, along with its cable channels, including CNN, to Paramount.

This means CBS News will have the same corporate parent as CNN. And that parent is David Ellison, the investor who had already set out to reform and moderate CBS News.

While the corporate ownership wars went mostly unnoticed by the general public, the media reported them as if they were 9/11, the pandemic and Pearl Harbor combined. There were sob stories about every fired Washington Post employee, and claims that the layoffs at the Post and the consolidation of CNN and CBS under a Trump-friendly owner was the “end of democracy”.

Democracy being interpreted as perfect alignment with the ideology of the Democratic Party.

But for those who still follow the news, it was a fall of the Berlin Wall moment that opened up hope that the media might return to being more than a woke Twitter account writ large.

Everyone outside the media could have seen it coming. What had once been a liberal bias had condensed into an ideological cartel that radicalized everything it touched while alienating most of the country. The old media bosses had understood that their industry needed to reach readers, listeners and viewers. Today trust ratings in the media are at 28% and most people no longer get their news from the news. Ratings continue to drop until cable news channels have fallen so far that there’s no financial reason for the associated channels to go on except inertia.

CNN only had 807,000 total viewers during prime time in December of last year. It had only 154,000 viewers under the age of 54. If CNN had the same budget, the same viewers and was dedicated to something other than the news, it would have long since disappeared. CNN bosses twice tried to launch paid access to its programming and both times they failed. The latest effort, CNN All Access, is in the midst of a fire sale, slashing prices by 40% down to $3.50 a month.

CBS News was at the low end of media trust ratings before recent reforms. It’s at the dead end of a dead end business, network television, and was adding absolutely no value to Paramount.

Jeff Bezos had bought the Washington Post for $250 million because it was a government paper that gave him immediate access to political circles in D.C. But Trump burnout set in among liberals who ceased to believe that the paper’s motley crew of angry anti-Trumpers would pull off another Woodward and Bernstein, and at some point the fairly apolitical billionaire realized that the paper’s ‘Resistance’ program was doing his business interests more harm than good. But the ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ crowd resisted his calls for moderation, mocked and slandered him, and tried to force out his proposed choice of British conservative newspaper men to run the paper, and so Bezos brought out the big axe and asserted control the hard way.

The Washington Post was losing money and readers, and there was no reason not to fire them.

The media knew it had a trust, ratings and readers crisis going back decades. The crisis grew worse as the media radicalized. But rather than pulling back and rebuilding trust, as CBS News has set out to do, they blamed ‘disinformation’ and ushered in a censorship regime after Trump’s first win. Their ‘fact checking’ and ‘fighting disinformation’ campaign in which they compelled Big Tech companies to pay them to censor conservatives appeared to be a win.

But the media succeeded in turning Silicon Valley against wokeness. Newly post-woke industry titans Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, have joined Tesla’s Elon Musk and Oracle’s Larry Ellison, the father of David Ellison, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz (Ben is the son of David Horowitz) to stand for a new political sanity.

This is a problem for the media since its Plan A was getting bought and subsidized by Big Tech billionaires who are also the only people with the money to buy them. But now even Marc Benioff, the Salesforce billionaire who bought Time Magazine and had been a reliable Democrat backer, had supported Trump’s proposed deployment of the National Guard to San Francisco.

The Ellison deals for Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery shows that Big Tech money is still buying the media, but unlike the Time, New Republic and Washington Post deals, it’s no longer willing to subsidize dead end woke media properties out of some sense of noblesse oblige.

And the media is starting to learn the hard way that it can’t win a war with its owners.

Sometime, Benioff will tire of Time, Steve Jobs’ widow will grow weary of The Atlantic, the Conde Nast and Penske publishing empires will collapse as their subscribers die off and the transition to digital fails, as it has for most magazines, and the New Yorker, New York Magazine, Rolling Stone and the rest of the legacy brands of mainstream media publishing will go too.

Over the last decade, local papers have been disappearing and leftist activists demanded that Big Tech donors finance their nonprofit strategy for taking control of local media. Google, the only major monopoly still willing to plow endless amounts of shareholder cash into radical schemes, has been doing it. But the bleeding is now reaching the national mainstream media.

And the media is realizing that its strategy of skimming off Silicon Valley capital to finance its operations is not a long term strategy and contains major elements of political risk.

The media can accept bankrupting major legacy publishing outlets. It’s been doing that forever.

But the scarier possibility is that the crown jewels of the mainstream media might turn conservative (anything short of endorsing defunding the police, abolishing ICE, nuking Israel and having men compete against women is considered ‘far-right MAGA’ to the media.)

How can the media live in a world where Washington Post op-eds endorse scaling down the EPA, CBS News broadcasts interviews with Iranian protesters and CNN no longer spends all of its time screeching about Trump and aiming all of its programming at liberal women over forty?

The first two have already happened so it’s easy enough to imagine the third coming to pass.

The media lost America a long time ago, but now even more terrifyingly, the media is losing the media. And if the media loses the media, then what is it beyond a bunch of talking heads with their own podcasts trying to chase the craziest segments of their audience until they wake up one day and realize that they’ve become the very bloggers they once used to make fun of?

The media thought that it would go out with a bang and a civil war. Instead it’s become Don Lemon, running around with cheaply branded ‘DL’ mikes for his own imaginary news network, breaking into churches and screaming about ICE, so he can squeeze out another 15 minutes.

It’s a long way to fall. But just wait until Anderson Cooper and the rest of the media join him.