The Game Really Is Up For The Mainstream Media (Just Like Last Time)

Rogan joshing with Trump

The Mainstream Gets It Wrong – Again

I can’t believe it happened eight years ago and now it’s happened again.

“What?” you ask, “Trump’s election?”

No, the response to it from the mainstream media. More pointedly, their refusal to read the signs of the times. Their refusal to believe that no one who was going to swing this election wasn’t reading The Times, or the New York Times, or watching CNN.

Eight years ago we experienced the same handwringing fromm the same crowd.

“Where did we get it so wrong?” they cried. “Maybe we should get out of our bubble!”

You think? Yep. But that is not what they did. They bunkered down.  And they got complacent. And sloppy.

So when four years ago the MSM outlets including, shamefully, The New York Times, were insistent that the famed Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian hoax, and when that insistence was affirmed by all of their peers and MSM rivals, they assumed that things had blown over. They thought they’d gotten a hall pass.

But people don’t forget. In fact I don’t forget. Here’s what I wrote eight years ago in 2016 when Trump won the last time:

The progressives lamenting the era of “post-truth” in the light of Trump’s victory have simply been hoist on their petard.  And it’s both hypocritical to see their rage, and astounding to realise that they do not grasp the irony of what has happened. Simply put, their own weapon is now being used against them.

After a shamefully short period of self-reflection/teeth-gnashing form the progressive side of politics, the media, the academy and the cultural elites about how they had failed to listen to what many Americans were worried about, the status quo is  quickly back in force. It’s all everyone else’s fault, most notably those nasties on the conservative side who play loose and fast with the truth.

plus ça change, plus c’est la même.  You can read the rest of that post here.

The New Kingmakers

Yet here is what does not stay the same. The inexorable movement away from MSM to the platforms that eight years ago were already beginning to bite. And now they have sunk their teeth hard.  The current US election cycle has arrived at the same time as peak podcast. It landed on our shores to coincide with Youtube shorts.

Not that those in the institutional media saw it coming. But it has landed with a bellyflop right in front of them and is slithering up to their faces, all eyeballs and slimy.

Podcasters are kings. And they are kingmakers. Joe Rogan the chief of them.  200-million views of his Trump interview. Production values that are slick for sure, but they’re nimble, don’t require an overly expensive studio, and they can be made on the run.

Now it is true that some podcasters didn’t read this thing at all, the Rest is Politics being one of them. Perhaps the Rest is Politics is now history. But of course Rory Stewart who runs the podcast is a beltway insider.  Rogan is not. And beltway insiders have been copping a belting for their refusal/inability to read the political temperature of people right in front of them.

People they don’t see. Or don’t care to see.

There is a definite post-institutional, dare I say it, anti-institutional flavour to this. When your man is determined to throw the furniture around the room, then the best platforms are those who take a delight in IKEA being tossed from the windows.

Yet it’s not simply the Rogans of the world. It’s filtered down to the average Joe in his lounge room with his RODE mic and 4k camera set-up.

When I want to decompress one of my things is to watch music reaction videos (don’t judge me!). And the best videos are usually by young black men from the US who react to 60s-80s pop and rock and are blown away by it.  They love it!  It’s outside their usual rap remit and they lap it.

Many of them have around 60-400-thousand subscribers, though some have much more. And a good video reaction of something such as Pink Floyd or Dire Straits can garner 250 thousand views.

But in the past six months I’ve noticed something about a sizeable portion of this cohort. They really started racking up the numbers when they switched from reacting to music videos to reacting to political videos; sound bites, campaign conversations, progressive MSM interviews with conservative politicians.

Their numbers went through the roof.  Soon they were junking music and sticking to politics.

And here’s the thing: Everyone one of those young black blokes was reacting to videos about Trump and backing him and bagging out his opponent, whether that be his political opponent or his media opponent. Sure there are probably plenty outside my algorithm that don’t. But the casual assumption that Kamala Harris had the race thing tied up is debunked from what I have seen.

Here’s an example of a group of young black men who I react to for their music – the Cartier Family – who I usually watch applauding to artists such as Procul Harum and Spandau Ballet..

They’ve never seemed particularly conservative to me, and they’re just a bunch of four (sometimes five) young men in a room with a ropey camera and some cheap mics. They even have a fire extinguisher which they brandish when a song is particularly “fire”.

But despite all their budget material and back room hokey setting they have 1.3million followers (see that Gold Youtube plaque?), and they in turn follow Joe Rogan:

This video had 660-000 views in three days, while their video upload today in the wake of the election is 2.3 million and counting.  I was a little bemused when I first started seeing these young black men uploading videos about politics. I mean what did they know? Where were they getting their passion for it? Well it didn’t take long to find out.

No Such Thing As A Voting Bloc

I simply assumed that the black vote was all one way traffic, especially among the young. Not so. Turns out that in the end Kamala Harris had nothing to offer young black men unless they were birthing-people in need of an abortion.

Turns out when you have a platform that has vilified actual young men, and assumed the worst of them, or belittled them, you won’t just get their vote because you are the same colour. Voting blocs are in decline. Demographics can no longer be taken for granted.

Turns out their favourite person to take advice from is a white 58 year old with a potty mouth and penchant for long-winded podcasts in which he just lets people speak.

Or more to the point In which he just lets Trump speak. So many of these black young men literally yell at their computer as they watch MSM host after MSM host interrupt every conservative speaker that graces the sofa or newsroom.

Here’s where the insiders lost. When it was suggested by Kamala’s team that she go on Rogan, they thought they were still in control of things. They thought they would be doing him a favour.

So they insisted, when Rogan offered, that the interview would be a short 45 minutes. Turns out Rogan didn’t need her as much as she needed him. Nearly fifty million views of his Trump video suggests just how much of a kingmaker he is.

And it’s uncut, uncensored and unremarkable in terms of the setting. Not slick. but homespun. 2 hours and 58 minutes (my dream for a marathon time).  It’s a fireside chat, although it’s such an uninspiring waffle that I’d probably fall asleep. Yet it begins with how “the machine” set out to get Trump.

The churn of politics is there for all to see. The mainstream media is woefully out of touch. Although that’s also true of some of the social media set ups too. When Musk bought Twitter and turned it to X, progressives sniffily stopped buying Teslas, and went on to Threads, where they created the kind of echo chamber that has this for its general feed today:

And quite honestly, that’s the more considered side of what I have seen today on Threads.

Where Is It All Going?

So what does it all mean? It probably means – if history is to be believed – that in another election cycle the MSM will still not get it. Institutions take a long time to figure it out. It will take more than one or two bloodied noses for them to change this.  Yet I don’t think they will change.

They will die the death of a thousand cuts, even as the new media flexes its muscle and those in charge of social media platforms become more conservative.

And what does it mean for other institutions? It certainly has implications for the church and how information moves, and how we consume it.  It certainly means we need to be leery of misinformation. And for Christians that means heterodoxy and error.

Yet let’s face it, when the established church is full of heterodoxy and error, and orthodoxy is pooh-poohed or condescended to (take a bow Justin Welby), then why fret? The social media can be just as advantageous to biblical truth as the printing press was back in the Reformation.

There’s a lot to think about in this space. Or at least there’s a lot to think about for my generation and the Boomers.

You see, for younger generations, this just is. In the same way that it being tough to be a Christian today just is for a younger crowd. There’s never been a time that orthodox  Zoomer Christians haven’t had to navigate a hostile progressive culture. It just is.

And we need to get used to it. For as a young Christian wrote on my Facebook post this morning, in which I posited the views I have just written about here:

When that 10 years blows out to thirty years things will really have changed in the West. The podcaster interviewing the presidential nominee will be de rigueur, and then something new will have to rise and take its place as a disrupter.

Progressives seem to want progress, but only on their terms. In the meantime we’re experiencing the death throes of the old information era that has suited the establishment so well. And it’s going into history kicking and screaming.

Again.