But as always it must come true faster:

MSNBC and CNN suffered staggering losses in viewership over the past year — while Donald Trump’s ascendancy supercharged Fox News in the cable news ratings war. The left-leaning networks — which will both be spun off by their respective parent companies — suffered year-over-year declines in all major metrics for the second quarter compared to the same period last year, according to the latest Nielsen data, which was reported by AdWeek.

This while Fox News climbs to nightly numbers that now beat the three old broadcast networks of NBC, CBS and ABC.

So it’s not just the MSM getting smashed by new Internet-based sources but people turning away from these garbage sources of news – including even their most dedicated Lefty fans, who have slowly woken up to the concept that they’ve been lied to about the things they most wanted to believe were true (Biden is sharp, Harris is not a living word salad). But even in the face of death the MSM won’t change.

Focusing on one type of MSM, let’s take this moment to not Mourn the death of TV, despite the love for the 80’s and 90’s TV by the Online Right:

There is one tendency among these that I find particularly troubling – lamenting the death of American network television… Eulogies are given for a world wherein thousands would crowd into Times Square to watch the conclusion of Seinfeld.

Spectator writer Anthony Thomas has no time for this RW nostalgia and goes on to explain that the political rise of TV personality Trump was precisely because of the collapse in influence of the very medium that gave him fame beyond what would have been possible via the New York City glossies of the 1980’s:

For all the sentimentality, it’s impossible to ignore the myriad ways in which television was used to lie to the then less-skeptical American public….This pining for the age of television betrays a misunderstanding of Trump, his rise, and the movement he represents. The GOP’s reorientation around the electorate’s wishes from 2016-24 is impossible to conceive of without the death of television and its usurpation by the internet.

Thomas picks one of the key events of that era, the protest at the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, as an example of this collapse in MSM power:

Had January 6th occurred twenty-five years ago, it’s unlikely that the media-manufactured narrative of a violent putsch to establish a dictatorship would have been meaningfully contested.

Even here in NZ, and on this little blog, we saw that shit in action, with Centre-Right-Liberal-National-Party wankers like Wayne Mapp, pounding away on that narrative with the expectation that it would destroy Trump.

I’ll grant that, with my upbringing in the MSM age, I thought they would succeed, as I wrote off Trump after that debacle and the Democrat-MSM effort to tie him to that day.

But at the end of the day, few cared, and that bubble mentality continues even in the wake of Trump’s win in 2024:

Oh Noes. Despite Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Droughts, Floods – and experts, lots and lots of experts, the percentage of Americans shitting themselves about Climate Change hasn’t shifted in thirty years, hanging around 39%.

Wah! The “MSM Expert” thing has gradually turned from a strength to a weakness, as the recent screaming about the Medicaid “cuts” by journalist, Nathaniel Weixel, in The Hill, showed for analysis of the Big Ugly Bill:

  • Only Leftist “Experts” Consulted – speaks for itself.
  • Politicians versus “Experts – didn’t quote conservative analysts but a comment from Trump with rebuttal that “experts … say….”.
  • “Advocacy” Bias: – A term never used to describe someone conservative, who “advocates” for less spending and a smaller government. “Advocates” are always someone who cares – by demanding that taxpayers pay more for a larger, more powerful, controlling government.

Of course there’s always the ideological bias:

After spending years reading these kinds of articles, it didn’t surprise me much to learn that National Public Radio had 87 Democrats, and not a single Republican, in editorial positions in its Washington headquarters. Places like The Hill, Politico, and The New York Times likely aren’t far behind.

Of course.

As a result the message about such things has not yet penetrated the Democrat bubble because it has not penetrated the MSM bubble that surrounds them, like on the Trans issues:

Atlantic Writer Tells Her Fellow Liberals: You’re Living in an Anti-Scientific Media Bubble Impervious to Fact, Everything You “Know” About “Trans Affirming Medical Care” is a Lie

The Atlantic? Holy shit, things must be getting serious:

Allow children to transition, or they will kill themselves. For more than a decade, this has been the strongest argument in favor of youth gender medicine–a scenario so awful that it stifled any doubts or questions about puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
…
But there is a huge problem with this emotive formulation: It isn’t true. When Justice Samuel Alito challenged the ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio on such claims during oral arguments, Strangio made a startling admission. He conceded that there is no evidence to support the idea that medical transition reduces adolescent suicide rates.

Understand again that this is The Atlantic, a once superb magazine that has, in recent years, become a purveyor of every piece of Leftist bullshit on any topic you care to think of, including “The Horror, The Horror“, as they showed in September 2024.

Still awesome

Along with these influence failures is the MSM’s increasingly public blood-letting:

Then this weekend, we saw the polar opposite effect of a paper needing to explain itself. At the New York Times, they had exposed the detail in the past of Zohran Mamdani where he had identified as a black male on a college application. The report had been thoroughly researched by reporter Benjamin Ryan, and he even spoke with Mamdani, who attested that he had filled out the documents in that fashion.

There was blowback to this accurate report to such an extent that not just social media erupted, but also internal outrage at The Times emerged, with Ryan personally attacked by others at the paper. As a result Assistant Managing Editor Patrick Healy saw fit to release a thread addressing what transpired – basically he needed to explain to the offended people how they committed journalism.

The readers of the New York Times, The Atlantic and half-a-hundred of other MSM sources don’t want news, let alone investigative journalism. In an inversion of the Soviet Union, it is the people – well, Leftists at least – who want Pravda and Izvestia:

In Pravda there is no truth, and in Izvestia there is no news.

It is a mark of the low level that the Left have reached, especially in America, that most of them don’t know about this joke.

Meantime, non-Leftists are not so ignorant, which is why they’re increasingly asking, What Is the Point of the Legacy Media Today?:

  • The panelists spent 83 minutes opining on Republicans, focusing on Trump and his administration, in 93% negative fashion (77 minutes negative, six minutes positive).
  • Show “intros” by moderator Jeffrey Goldberg often set a mocking anti-Trump tone, not the “civil discourse” promised.
  • Of the 14 different media outlets that were represented on Washington Week during the study period, all but one hailed from the left end of the political spectrum – and that single one (The Dispatch) sounded as liberal as the rest.

You’d think that failure in the form of collapsing TV ratings, press reader numbers and subscriptions, as well as public trust, would cause them to change.

You would be wrong – and don’t even talk about capitalist profits as a driver of balanced reporting.