By contrast to Harris’s Lefty Zoomers it was apparently 19 year old Barron Trump who told his father he should go on these podcasts! Of course! His Dad’s been part of the professional wrestling world for decades and enjoys the rally-type crowds, but Barron, like other young men, is more into Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) and when he wants to hear and see more he doesn’t listen to Sports radio or watch ESPN. He watches these podcasts.

Sounds frightening! I assume that NoMinister is a part of this ecosystem, albeit a very obscure part. Do we even have such an ecosystem in New Zealand? It doesn’t seem so to me as I watch National and ACT politicians continue to appear on MSM places like TV1 and RNZ, while often stiffing the likes of The Platform.

A pity because apparently it’s just such a system that is responsible for Trumps 2024 election win, at least according to a PBS reporter, Barron-Lopez adding gravitas to CNN:

Maybe it’s not so much Democrats’ policies or messaging or the words they used specifically, but there is an entire right-wing media ecosystem that doesn’t exist on the left and it does not exist in the center or mainstream and people are getting their information in very different ways now….And Donald Trump and Republicans and Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, know exactly how to reach Americans where they are regardless of age and demographic, and that played a big role in this because of the fact that, like, whether it was disinformation, misinformation or different propaganda, that they were feeding to the American public, that made them feel the way they did, and the American public felt as though—that they were being heard by Donald Trump.

As J D Vance said to one of these journalists a few weeks ago: “Do you even hear yourself?”. This is another entry in the book of What Journalists Don’t Know, where they reveal how disconnected they are from the society they report on.

For all that FoxNews continues to crush its cable news rivals like CNN and MSNBC the fact is that the evening news shows of the three big broadcasting networks, NBC, ABC and CBS, continue to pull upwards of 20 million viewers every night compared to FoxNews’s 2 million (sometimes). Then there’s the rest of the MSM “ecosystem” of the NYT, Washington Post, LA Times and multiple magazines like The Atlantic that overwhelmingly support the Democrat party and their policies. In the whole US MSM world it’s really only FoxNews that supports the Right Wing, giving the Left perhaps a 90% advantage or more – and yet still we get whinging like this on MSNBC:

There’s no doubt that something has gone wrong with the MSM when 90% of them, vomiting forth hate for eight solid years to tens of millions of Americans didn’t seal the deal against its Great Orange Enemy, as a few of them are recognising:

Trump’s victory isn’t a result of a failure by news outlets to sufficiently hold him accountable. The real answer is one that is a lot more uncomfortable to grapple with: The national news media is more limited in its reach and influence than ever in the modern era – Semafor

Hell, it doesn’t get more of a spectacular fail than the MSM’s four year long “Muh Democracy” psyop seeing a majority of those animated to “Save Democracy” voting for Trump:

The really funny thing about that last comment is that just a couple of weeks later the same Jim VandeHei would have an onstage meltdown in front of the National Press Club after Elon Musk told his millions of X-followers: “You are the media now.” – meaning that ordinary citizens are photographing, videoing, investigating, commenting on and – worst of all – fact-checking the MSM:

Everything we do is under fire. Elon Musk sits on Twitter everyday — or X today — saying, “We are the media! You are the media!” My message to Elon Musk is: “Bullshit! You’re not the media!” You having a blue checkmark, a Twitter handle and three-hundred words of cleverness doesn’t make you a reporter. You don’t do that by popping off on Twitter. You don’t do that by having an opinion. You do it by doing the hard work.

What hard work? All I’ve seen from most of the MSM in the last twenty years are opinions, based on lightweight research with Lefty-approved “experts”. As none other than Obama’s Deputy National Security, Ben Rhodes said years ago:

The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.

I’d already covered VandeHei’s earlier, calmer and more sensible take in Schadenfreudeliciousness VII: The MSM Are Dying!, ending with the question raised by the role that may have been played by Joe Rogan’s podcast in this election, with his two three-hour “interviews” of Trump and Vance respectively. But it wasn’t just his podcast that Trump and company hit:

After congratulating Trump and his family, [Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana] White gave a shout-out to a motley crew of men: Twitch streamer Adin Ross, the YouTube collective called Nelk Boys, plus podcasters Theo Von and Joe Rogan—all media that either Trump or J.D. Vance appeared on this election season. With the exception of Rogan, these names might be unfamiliar to many Americans, but not young American men.

Which leads back to the MSM desperately trying to figure out what has gone wrong…

I seem to recall much snark in 2020 and after as right-wing voices were booted off Facebook, Twitter and others, that the Right “could go and build their own platforms”, with much laughter about Parler as it was buried by Apple and Google.

Which in turn leads to one of their predictable answers to this terrible problem….

It’s at this point that part of a recent speech on censorship by journalist Matt Taibbi cuts home:

America has the most useless aristocrats in history. Even the French dandies marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Haydens, John Brennans, James Clappers, Mike McFauls, and Rick Stengels who make up America’s self-appointed behavior police. In prerevolutionary France, even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword duel to the death. Our aristocrats pee themselves at the sight of mean tweets. 

The MSM are part of that aristocracy, which is why they’re being equally idiotic in their analysis, conclusions and solutions! Let’s go back to that link on the podcast offensive by Trump:

None of these podcasts or streams are inherently political, and neither is the UFC. They are not right-wing media, in any traditional sense of the word. They are, though, the young male mainstream, representing a large but silent minority—one ignored by politicians at best and demonized at worst. 

Exactly. The Right Wing Conservative movement didn’t build this ecosystem! In fact, up until now not even Trump and company really embraced it, let alone obsolete stiffs like Mitt Romney and the rest of the GOPe (establishment). Neither did Kamala Harris and company:

Later, the Harris campaign tried to break into the Twitch ecosystem, forcing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Tim Walz to play video games together on the streaming platform. In a cringe mimicry of what an actual Twitch stream looks like, the two politicians woodenly recited Democratic talking points about Project 2025 while playing Madden NFL, a football video game. Less than 300,000 people tuned in.

That’s really the secret, embracing them means respecting the mediums and fully participating in them. Harris and company could not do that, making silly demands for Rogan to fly to her for a one-hour interview, a refusal that, in the eyes of tens of millions of Rogan podcast viewers and more who don’t watch the show but are well aware of its format, amounted to an admission that she was too much of a fake to just sit and casually talk for three hours. By contrast both Trump and Vance seemed entirely at ease as the conversation waxed and waned across many subjects. It was the same with the other podcasts as well.

Harris would have bombed in that situation. She couldn’t even do the traditional town hall format without making people jump behind their couches with hands over their eyes, watching between gaps in their fingers. Cringe doesn’t even begin to describe it. I could only cope with a minute or so and felt embarrassed for her.

In any case it was also never going to happen because her staff exploded with fury at the suggestion in another example of ideological purity producing cluelessness – generational in this case – as National Review laughs:

Emhoff adviser Jennifer Palmieri put herself out there this week to explain to the Financial Times that Harris ditched the Rogan appearance because she feared the reaction of her own young staffers. “There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it, and how there would be a backlash [if she did it].”

I weep tears of utter joy to read this. Watching Harris’s campaign crippled from within by unruly, upjumped, spoiled brat Zoomers who think they have a right to dictate the candidate’s political decision-making is like watching the glorious climax to a black political comedy. All I can say, after having written my piece about The Nation’s interns going to war with The Nation (over their endorsement of Zionist pig sellout Harris), is that I believe staffers on a presidential campaign have as much right to pilot the ship as the galley slaves of Ben-Hur.

By contrast to Harris’s Lefty Zoomers it was apparently 19 year old Barron Trump who told his father he should go on these podcasts! Of course! His Dad’s been part of the professional wrestling world for decades and enjoys the rally-type crowds, but Barron, like other young men, is more into Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) and when he wants to hear and see more he doesn’t listen to Sports radio or watch ESPN. He watches these podcasts, like tens of millions of other young men.

As to the ongoing stupidity of almost all the Left on this issue, here’s yet another article that demonstrates it: Why Democrats won’t build their own Joe Rogan. It follows up on all those CNN-MSNBC pieces about the Vast Right Wing Media Ecosystem, describing in detail the money poured into it, and how the Left have nothing like it and so on and so forth (“It is the result of massive structural disadvantages in funding, promotion, and institutional support”). It’s by the nasty moron known as Taylor Lorenz (doxxer fired by the Washington Post and recently seen cheering on the murder of a health insurance CEO), America’s oldest teenager, and someone who actually thinks that the NYT only allows Right-Wing opinions, so I’m not going to quote anything from it except the following, buried in the heart of it, as a mark of the overall hysterical cluelessness:

People saying Harris should have done Joe Rogan are missing the point. That wouldn’t have helped her. Liberals need to BUILD THEIR OWN JOE ROGAN. Somebody who can speak to the people he speaks to, without being a guy who wants to kiss ass to billionaires like Elon Musk.

Except that they already had a Joe Rogan – he was called Joe Rogan:

Rogan is a supporter of abortion rights, socialised healthcare, gay and lesbian rights, and drug legalisation, a critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, and endorsed Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democrat primaries.

But the Left forced him away anyway because he’s also a believer in free speech, leading him to interview Lefty hate objects (Trump was merely the latest), a disbeliever in gender identity ideology, who discouraged young people from taking the Covid shot while talking up his self-prescribed use of the anti-parasitic drug Ivermectin. All that led the Left to actually try and destroy him, by demanding that Spotify boot him off their platform. It’s amazing that he was still offering to talk to Harris.

Aside from that, The Spectator points out that ultimately it’s less about specific issues than the medium and its audience, in a repeat of what happened in the 1980s-90’s with talk radio and its giant, Rush Limbaugh, who, just like Rogan, was dismissed as nothing until an election – in Rush’s case, the 1994 GOP landslide that won them the House and Senate – suddenly revealed an awesome and terrible power:

They tried to mimic it and many a Democrat was hailed in newspaper puff pieces as the next ‘Limbaugh of the left’, among them Al Franken, Jim Hightower, Mario Cuomo and Bill Press. But none could compete with Limbaugh, and even liberal talk’s breakout star, Rachel Maddow, only did so by switching to television….They had misunderstood Limbaugh’s talent, which was not for converting his overwhelmingly white, male audience into conservatives but for drawing out the innate conservatism of this audience.

Today’s progressives misunderstand Rogan in much the same way: he’s not making young men anti-woke, sceptical of experts and fixated on physical fitness – young men are, broadly speaking, anti-woke, sceptical of experts and fixated on physical fitness.

I thus had to laugh in reading about how a legendary journalist has read the signs and walked away from the MSM:

Chris Wallace was reportedly offered a hefty contract extension at CNN, where he’s served as one of the faces of the network for three years, but he declined the offer, the Daily Beast reported. At 77 years old, you might think he turned it down so he could retire and enjoy the rest of his life in private, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Wallace told the Daily Beast that he is going to attempt to get into streaming or podcasting because that is “where the action seems to be.”  

Oh dear. That’s going to work about as well as the “Limbaughs of the Left” did thirty years ago.