Michael Tomasky, nowadays the editor of The New Republic (a former magazine), attempts to explain why the awesome Joe Biden isn’t getting sufficient credit from the American people for all his awesome achievements, and his general all-around awesomeness. The main culprit is—right-wing domination of the news media!
I. Am. Not. Making. This. Up.
In fact, the right-wing media might finally be bigger [than mainstream media]. Mainstream media audiences and newsrooms have shrunk. Consider: In 1990, newspapers reached 63 million readers; in 2020, that number was 24 million. In 2006, newspapers employed about 75,000 people. In 2020, that figure was 31,000. The right-wing media, meanwhile, has grown and grown: Fox, One America, Newsmax, talk radio, Sinclair and all its local TV and radio news operations, and much more.
So the right-wing media today is, I’d argue, at least equal in size to the mainstream media. But here’s the more important point. The right-wing media has more power to set the news agenda than the mainstream media. . .
Yeah, r-r-r-right. But he’s only just warming up:
The mainstream media do not serve a transparent political agenda in the way the right-media do. When The New York Times or CNN or MSNBC gets a scoop about serious corruption in the Biden administration, they pursue the lead and, if verified, report it.
Yeah, r-r-r-right. At this point, his schtick has become what stand-up comics call “a runner,” that is a line of jokes based on one theme or frequent callbacks.
Most reporters know that they are personally pretty liberal, so they overcompensate for that. Most of them went to elite schools and have maybe never known a Southerner or an evangelical, so they overcompensate for that as well.
Maybe Tomasky is hoping to be a mainstream media successor to Rodney Dangerfield: “I tell ya, the mainstream media—we don’t get no respect!”
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