Call it the liberal media’s Scrooge-style “bah humbug” of a year - and a few years before that.
Take a Google and find headline after headline like these from the recent past up until now:
The Columbia Journalism Review - 2018:
Most Americans say they have lost trust in the media
The CJR reports:
THE RESULTS OF A NEW Knight Foundation and Gallup poll released on Tuesday won’t come as a huge surprise to most journalists: Trust in the media is down. Again.
A majority of those who were surveyed said they had lost trust in the media in recent years, and more than 30 percent of those who identified themselves as being on the conservative end of the spectrum said they had not only lost faith in the media, but they “expect that change to be permanent.” According to a separate Gallup poll from earlier this year that tracked trust in major institutions, newspapers and television news were among the lowest, exceeded only by Congress.
News Media Credibility Rating Falls to a New Low
Poll Shows Number of Americans with No Trust in Mass Media Has Hit an All-Time High
There are headlines aplenty like these out there in Google-land. And not to be forgotten are the seemingly endless number that are media outlet specific, most frequently CNN. Headlines like these:
CNN’S RATINGS ARE AN UNFIXABLE DISASTER
CNN Drops 68% In Prime As Fox News Channel Crushes Competition In Q2 Cable News Ratings
Biggest Loser: CNN’s October Ratings Collapse To 661K Primetime Viewers
And oh yes. Don’t forget MSNBC, as here:
MSNBC IS IN MORE TROUBLE THAN CNN
The seemingly never asked question is….why? And in this quarter the answer could not be more crystal clear.
Question:
What do Trump-Russia Collusion, Covington, Kentucky high schooler Nicholas Sandmann, the BLM riots of 2020, January 6th and Kyle Rittenhouse all have in common?
Answer: All were presented to the American people by the “mainstream” media through the lens of a liberal narrative. Long gone was news presented in the fashion of that once-famous line from the old Dragnet TV show where Sergeant Joe Friday, inquiring into a crime, says to a witness: “Just the facts, m’am. Just the facts.”
In today’s media world that line has been replaced by “Just the liberal narrative, m’am. Just the liberal narrative.”
Thus it is that Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election – when it fact it was Hillary Clinton’s campaign paying for the infamous dossier. Thus it was that all those riots in 2020 that resulted in death, looting, burning and destruction were really “mostly peaceful.” Perfectly decent high schoolers Sandmann and Rittenhouse were racist brats. And the riot by a relative handful of out-of-control protestors at the Capitol on January 6th was really an “insurrection”, with the U.S. government itself hanging by a thread, with a coup attempt incited by President Trump under way.
The results of all this garbage is that the American people, in true “show me” mood, began to realize they were not being given “just the facts” journalism in any given situation but rather they were being fed liberal narratives masquerading as facts. Or, as the shorthand became, “fake news.”
And as that realization set in, liberal media credibility took one self-inflicted hit after another. The audience for just-the-facts news from Fox, Newsmax, One America News grew - and grew. As did their audience and their ratings.
At this point, the “mainstream media” has done so much self-inflicted damage to itself that one can only wonder if they will literally survive, much less thrive again.
It is no wonder that a story like this one has recently surfaced, as seen here at Newsmax:
Billionaire John Malone: CNN Needs 'Actual Journalists'
The story said:
Liberal CNN needs ‘actual journalists,’ billionaire media mogul John Malone told CNBC in an interview in which he explained there is a place for the news channel in the proposed $43 billion combination of WarnerMedia and Discovery into a new entity Warner Bros. Discovery.
‘I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,’ said Malone, who is longtime chairman of Liberty Media, which is a major shareholder in Discovery and will be the controlling partner of the new media combination.
Can this actually happen? Can CNN be saved from a “bah humbug” collapse? Can other mainstream outlets with similar problems?
Stay tuned.
And Merry Christmas!
