The left thinks the media has it in for them and their candidates and going easy on Trump.
It’s laughably untrue. More than 90% of the coverage of Trump by the major broadcast networks is negative. The news apps on your phone basically never show a story from a non-leftist outlet on their front pages.
That’s how CNN with its tumbling ratings and the New York Times with its falling circulation remain viable, by the way. These news apps are sending their web properties hundreds of millions of views per week.
Elsewhere around the cultural landscape, we have not heard much from Dylan Mulvaney lately. The ad campaign that featured Mulvaney and destroyed the market for America’s largest-selling beer at the time has been replaced by one that features Peyton Manning and attendees at a heterosexual wedding chasing a keg down a mountainside.
The Cracker Barrel CEO, who tried to remake the popular chain family restaurants into a bland, spare Chipotle knockoff for “efficiency” reasons, said she felt like she was “fired by America” after the avalanche of bad publicity forced her to keep the pro-family, all-American decor on which the chain had built its fortune.
Then there was the speech by Jelly Roll at the Grammys. It’s hard to say what was more remarkable – that a winner would use his acceptance speech to so fulsomely thank his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, or that the audience would applaud in the numbers it did.
After decades of victories by the left in its effort to batter us into accepting its views on God, morality, American values and the role of the media and the state in setting the tone on these matters, the right is starting to win a few of its own.
The importance of Elon Musk purchasing X cannot be overstated. We were dangerously close to entering an era where free speech no longer was reliable in this country. When you have government bureaucrats working with Big Tech executives to censor the views of the other side, it’s not that information can’t get out; it’s just that it doesn’t all that often. Now X and all of social media is the wild, wild west – as it should be.
Jeff Bezos’ decision not to let the Washington Post endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election is another milestone. The Post couldn’t very well endorse Trump after trashing him every day since he came down the escalator in 2015, but it couldn’t in good conscience endorse the callow and clearly unfit Kamala Harris. Only this time, instead of taking one for the team, Bezos decided not to.
More recently, Netflix has backed out of its deal to buy Warner Bros Discovery. That means Warner Bros Discovery likely will end up in the hands of Larry Ellison, one of the richest men on the planet, and his son, David Ellison.
Larry Ellison, a personal friend of President Trump and a member of the Tesla Board of Directors, controls Paramount, and his son runs Skydance Media, which has been merged into Paramount. So a major media property moves out of the hands of smut peddlers and into the hands of a company headed by people committed to traditional American values.
If the merger goes through, Larry Ellison would control not just CBS but CNN as well – a prospect that has the left worried. The left already has decried the “loss” of CBS as a reliable leftist mouthpiece after Bari Weiss delayed broadcast of a “60 Minutes” story because the reporters had said the government refused to comment when in fact the government had offered meaningful responses from three different agencies. That kind of dishonesty was run of the mill before Weiss; now it is called out.
If that’s the way things are going at CBS, what will happen to CNN, where ratings have plummeted and a conservative – eternal panelist Scott Jennings – is the biggest star?
You have to give President Trump a lot of credit for this. His attacks on the veracity of the press have been proven correct enough times now that trust in the media has reached an all-time low. His advocacy for American values – just last week, he held a prayer meeting with ministers in the Oval Office – was not something we ever saw during the Biden administration.
But a lot must go to Americans, too. We’ve voted with our feet and our pocketbooks for years for less filth, more family values, more love of God and country, and less sexual deviancy and societal dysfunction. Through the immediate feedback of social media, we have a way to make our voices heard in real time. And finally, the people who matter are listening.
Michael Pappas is a former member of Congress from New Jersey.
