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G.W. Borg (Shadow Democracy)'s avatar

The big tell about the idpol left and mainstream journalism is the widespread, outright demonization of the right. The right is guilty of this, too, but the biggest megaphones are on the left. And the reason I say this is that it is simply impossible for any human being with any combination of opinions and beliefs about anything to always and forever be 100% wrong. The inability to admit that Trump supporters, for instance, just MIGHT have a point on any substantive issue is revealing, even if we believe they're, say, 99% wrong about everything else.

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Always Adblock's avatar

But Michael - isn't this an example of where fighting the last war is working? I mean, it's obviously not working for the individual, lower-case-j journalists at crusty old legacy outfits like "Vox" and Huffington Post, whose descent into temp work and un-unionized penury I'm loving every second of.

But is it not working for the broader media environment? Five-alarm activism over Trump, BLM, and so on provokes far more *loyalty* among consumers than reanimated corpses like Broder ever did. A permanent fake revolution. I know of one older lady who literally cannot go to sleep without MSNBC on in the background, singing a lullabye of jackboots and #StopAsianHate every night. Lovely person but literally, and quite possibly physically addicted to the outrage machine. Did anyone ever do this for All Things Considered?

And the viewer is taken along for the ride! If the field reporter is out there participating in protests, well, isn't the viewer there by proxy? For the older cadres it's forever 1968; for younger viewers, White Supremacy, shaped like a giant Q, is always just one bunker away. Who *wouldn't* be tuned in every night?

And isn't all of this leading to what you cover in the last three paragraphs - that, well, the media is getting what it wants? CBS is getting a seat at the legislative table. I'm sure they're quite sincere in their support of voting rights, whatever those are - I'm equally sure they know which way the wind is blowing and that getting on the wrong side of the ascendant Democratic coalition means that the party of the left might turn on its corporatist wing. Why would they *not* be cheering on the burning of Main Street USA? Why would they *not* be screaming about quotas on Fortune 500 boards while cities pump out leaden water?

For a certain Republican - including virtually every elected one, and a good proportion of the voters as well - it is forever 2002, and the Democrats Hate Our Troops and corporate tax rates are Literally Communism. The Dixie Chicks are personae non grata, and American Christianity isn't a rotting husk. For these people, fighting the last war is at best pathetic and at worst delusional. But for the ascendent, corporatist, woke "left" - if their Orange devil didn't exist, they had to invent him. If Dean Wormer wasn't stopping them from activist reporting in the campus newspaper, they'd have to pretend he was. They act like they're rebelling against Mom and Dad, but they've been boss of the house since the Obama administration. Yes, it's a complete inversion of reality, but does that matter? It's working!

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