The Death of the Liberal Media

1968-2024

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There was a moment in August when the center-left establishment media was hotter than it ever was. This was around the time Tim Walz was allowed to call Republicans “weird.” Mainstream media led the liberal Internet by the tail into Kamala Country. So why did the liberal media die Tuesday night?

Follow the sweat.

They had control of legacy media of course, but they wanted to have just as much control over Internet platforms. Later that month, Pavel Durov was arrested in France. TikTok was on trial. In Brazil, X was banned. All over the world, empire managers were trying to mimic China and Russia’s stranglehold on online media. The US was no different.

So, after Trump won, when the liberal talking heads asked “where is our Joe Rogan,” they really asked two questions:

1: Why can’t we silence Rogan?

2: Why are we irrelevant?

Was a time in the early 2010s when the center-left was in a symbiotic relationship with the Internet. Beyond the cozy relationship with social media, liberal legacy media also had Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, and the other LA alt-comedy podcasts in that universe, in its pocket. In a post-Trump world, though, legacy media outlets like the New York Times decided to go the NPR route and have their own podcasts. Less humor, more sensitivity. Rogan and his gang of Rogan rogues saw daylight and took over. From a previous post:

To the chagrin of liberal critics, Joe Rogan still has the #1 podcast, which he has built not only off his own touring, but promoting comedians that have had staggering ticket sales thanks to the Rogan bump. Shane Gillis’s ticket sales and Patreon sales have been so high, he hosted “Saturday Night Live,” which fired him before he even got on the air in the ‘10s. In contrast, female and LGBTQ comedy has not had one or two great ticket draws to hang their hat on, but several niche acts that are more likely to perform on group shows than make money headlining themselves.

But what about podcasts like Chapo Trap House and Cum Town? They, along with Joe Rogan later, were smeared by the press as “Bernie Bros.” The media is not left or Communist, it is a mouthpiece of the Democratic Party. This led to a left podcast world that now has TrueAnon as well as Twitch personality Hasan Piker, all enraged by the centrist liberal media.

This is one reason the liberal media died earlier this week: too many enemies. It was understandable that Republicans would seethe, but what about the pro-Gaza movement? Embittered Bernie supporters? Regular people who were told they were hallucinating a bad economy? The liberal media had too much faith in the quality of its celebrity supporters, like Beyonce and Taylor Swift, instead of the quantity of voters needed to win elections and help keep them relevant in the first place.

But that is not the only point of impact here. The liberal media was at odds with the tech platforms they blamed for Trump’s first victory in 2016. This, after years of Silicon Valley being a town that is socially liberal and fiscally conservative, just like the Democratic Party. By 2020, the war on disinformation heated up during COVID. It was around this time that Rogan officially began his rightward shift. While some platforms like Facebook and Twitter removed Trump from their platforms after January 6, Elon Musk saw an opportunity: to become the new Rupert Murdoch by buying Twitter and renaming it X. Musk wasn’t the only one making the rightward shift. Many VCs were furious at Biden’s antitrust regulations, getting in the way of mergers and acquisitions. The liberal media was of course rooting Biden on, especially since there was no effort to reinstall the Paramount Decrees that were struck down in 2020, giving studios more power to consolidate. ¹

One more point of impact: the liberal media’s bitter separation from the youth. Was a time when the liberal media was the media of the youth. When Cronkite did not support the Vietnam War, the antiwar youth were emboldened. This moment birthed the liberal media. And what a birth it was: a centrist’s centrist admitting that the American war machine was breaking down. This was when the liberal media spoke truth to power as opposed to speaking power to truth. The liberal media was in trouble when it tried covering up two unpopular wars that American soldiers are supposedly not fighting in. Though the media establishments and the Democratic party were never going to support Gaza, it does help explain why the youth vote was stronger on the right, with Gen Z males, than the disillusioned left, which has no gender bias but was not inspired enough to vote.

It is not just MSNBC anchors and “View” hosts that are crestfallen with no fire in their bellies either. Looks like Hollywood does not have another resistance in it. Though the liberal media is dead, this does not mean right wing media won. Truth is, the balkanization of politics online will simply spread to film and TV. Some movie studios will show alt-left documentaries, others will show politically incorrect cartoons. Speaking of Hollywood, Tinseltown might end up being to this decade what Las Vegas was to the ‘60s: the epitome of everything the counterculture hated. As Austin becomes more relevant and New York maintains its cool, Hollywood has become the symbol of bloated, unctuous, alienating entertainment that is not woke enough for the Tumblr crowd but still too liberal for the rest of America.

As I have said too many times before to link here, this is 1968 in reverse, but in one more way I didn’t enumerate: while 1968 marked the beginning of the end of the counterculture, this moment is perhaps the first victory of the counterculture. In 1968, it (seemingly) made sense to criticize the irresponsible hippies for passing dope instead of casting votes. But now, the only audience agreeing with the shrill cries this time is the increasingly small Blue MAGA faction. While the liberal media is dead, the alt-left is just getting started.

1. Another death blow to liberal media was the death of Twitter. The entire fulcrum of cancel culture, the church of liberal judgement, was based on Twitter. Twitter came into prominence because of the Obama campaign’s savvy use of it. Twitter was liberal media’s umbilical cord to the Internet (along with Buzzfeed of course lol). Facebook was where the Republicans posted but Twitter was for the libs. Where have the liberals gone after Twitter? TikTok? The app they want to ban? Threads and Bluesky? HA! Instagram has turned into a marketplace for OnlyFans models. They could have played nice with Substack, but instead they arrogantly stuck with their Nazi demonization. Good on Hamish for sticking to his guns during that witch hunt btw. Now that they are in their death throes, the liberal media would do better than to shit on Substack.