But for real... how is this not the Babylon Bee???
REPUBLICANS have control of mass media???? Where are the GOP masterminds hiding at ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, The New York Times, WaPo, local newspapers, Hollywood, Disney, Netflix, academia, and Big Tech??
Where are the conservative companies banning Democrat companies off the internet and banking? Where are the conservative training programs being mandated in every school and business across the land?
Why is it that conservatives feel they need to hide their political beliefs lest they get fired and lose all their friends?
Why did our most recent video get demonetized by YouTube for simply showing an ad made by Donald Trump's team, even though it only featured literal news clips and Biden soundbites, with no depiction or words from Trump himself?
But wait, you're thinking. Didn't the media hound Donald Trump for four straight years at least as hard as it's hounded Biden over the last week?
Well, sort of. The mainstream media certainly gave Trump harsh and even overtly hostile coverage. But the mainstream media only describes roughly half the media landscape. The other half of the media is a right-wing messaging apparatus that makes no effort to follow traditional journalistic norms.
If you split up the entire landscape by company names alone, maybe this 50/50 split is true, but that completely ignores the nationwide power that leftist media wields outside the Fox News bubble owned by a single family (and scrappy little news outfits that you should subscribe to).
And Jonathan Chait's diss that these outlets make "no effort" to follow the norms (raises hand)? Well, when you kick everyone who thinks different out of newsrooms and weaponize language and AP writing style against your enemies, of course they aren't going to follow your dumb conventions (raises hand again).
He cites Fox News' ratings as his example, instead of noting that CNN has flopped BECAUSE of its coverage of Trump, which was designed on purpose to turn public opinion against the former president from day one.
Conservative media really does command enormous audiences that frequently dwarf its mainstream-news counterparts. But this merely underscores the fact that what we think of as "the media" only accounts for a portion of the American news-media diet. The other half of the media is simply a vehicle for partisan propaganda.
Ah. Because no one at any mainstream outlet has ever been partisan despite the vast majority their staff donating to Democrats (see here, here, and here for examples).
Articles like this are trying to say that Fox (and the even better Not The Bee) are partisan hacks that are dangerous because they are deceiving people, as opposed to the stalwart media who had total control over information for a century until the internet took off.
Even the most dishonest, incompetent, and scandal-ridden Republican presidency imaginable — which more or less describes the one we just had — will still have a media environment divided almost equally between scorching criticism and obsequious fawning. On Trump's worst days, the Fox News chyrons depicted him as a triumphal leader. On Biden's best days, the conservative media was still giving him hell. In recent days, CNN and MSNBC looked a lot like Fox News, all hyping chaos in Afghanistan 24/7. That is the kind of comprehensive media hostility Trump never had to worry about.
His first sentence here isn't objective at all. "Scandal-ridden"? You mean like the time the media lied about him praising KKK members in Charlottesville? Or the time they lied about him launching tear gas at protesters so he could take a photo-op with a Bible? Or the time they lied about him dissing soldiers on a trip to Normandy? Or the time they lied about Russian collusion?
This guy probably still thinks Obama's only scandal was his tan suit, despite the fact that he released the masterminds who just took over Afghanistan this month.
Did he write this article because he's upset that Biden has zero competence and is currently overseeing the worst foreign policy disaster in American history? Tell me, even if you hate the Orange Man, when did Trump capitulate to terrorists and leave thousands of Americans behind enemy lines?
Republicans have the freedom to dismiss negative revelations as the liberal media, a luxury Democrats don't have.
I mean, in just the last year, we watched the media call $20 billion in BLM riots "mostly peaceful", tell us Antifa is just an idea, insist that the unarmed Capitol riot was the worst thing in the history of forever, inform us that Critical Race Theory isn't being taught in schools and also that it's the best thing ever, and tell us we're domestic terrorists and QAnon conspiracists and white supremacists if we disagree.
But sure, make the claim that Democrats don't have the luxury of downplaying all the problems created by their policies as the fault of conservatives and Fox News.
When you combine that near impunity from damaging news stories with the Republican ability to win control of government with a minority of the votes, you go a long way toward explaining the incentive structure that has turned the GOP into the party it is today.
Ah, those evil GOP masterminds, following the Constitution's precedent for checks and balances, federalism, and equal power among the states so that America doesn't descend into mob rule where 51% of the population subjects the other 49% to slavery!
(Democrats can also use the Electoral College to win with a minority.)
Chait's ultimate argument is that conservative media is dangerous and leftist media is more balanced because it follows the "rules."
He addresses this with a comparison of presidents, but the problem is, the divide in media isn't just political. It's societal. It's ideological. It's theological.
For examples on why his claims that mainstream media is more objective are wrong, see articles here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for some samples.
The mainstream media will end you if you dare say a man can't be a woman or that America is actually pretty great or that letting men in dresses teach kids to twerk at the library is bad or that Critical Race Theory is destructive. And you must be especially cancelled if you actually believe those things that guy Jesus taught.
This is the reason people are tuning into places like Not The Bee. They want nothing to do with ideological shills in the news these days that exist to share the gospel of wokeness.
Those people don't like that they are losing their audience though, so they write garbage like this article to make themselves feel better.
Whatever helps them sleep at night, I guess. We'll just be over here laughing at their headlines in the meantime!
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
