The End of Woke Legacy Media Has Arrived

There are plenty of heartbreaking, insightful analyses of The Situation. This is not so much about The Situation (after all this is neither a political Substack, a foreign policy wonk stack nor a war blog) as it is about the media that has been irrevocably altered in its wake. Not since Trump was elected has there been such a seismic paradigm shift. When Trump beat Clinton, legacy TV and films, in addition to major advertising campaigns and mainstream journalism, mirrored the woke tweetniks of the era. That ended on October 7th. Were it not for legacy media slavishly trying to synchronize itself with the moves of Twitter¹ teens, today’s rift between cultural progressives online and behind a news desk would have never happened.

Before the rift, when a celebrity said something that was politically not in fashion, the studio, station, whatever entity hired that celebrity, canned them at the same time as or after social justice warriors demanded they be brought to justice. Yet when Kylie Jenner shared an image of the Israeli flag with the text “Now and always we stand with the people of Israel” from the group StandWithUs, she lost a million followers and deleted the post. To be clear: she did not get thrown off of her Hulu show (although quite a few MSM outlets called her out for deleting the post). So the criteria for getting canceled has just gotten more complex. If you support Israel, you will be fine with legacy media, but you can expect to lose your social media clout, especially if you are a person who trades on being anticolonialist, etc. But if you support Palestine, expect to strictly be a social media figure who will never make the jump to legacy media outlets.