Trump Humiliates His Media Enemies
Shortly before 8 p.m. Eastern time on Election Night on CBS News (America Decides: Election ’24), anchor Lindsey Reiser cut away to Philadelphia, where polls were just about to close in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania. CBS had good news for Democrats and Kamala Harris. “The Harris campaign says tonight that they are feeling confident,” CBS News senior White House correspondent Weijia Jiang told the network’s viewers.
The self-evident unity of political purpose among “the Democrat-Media complex” … means that the defeat of Kamala Harris was also a defeat for the media.
Early in the next hour, with Norah O’Donnnell now in the anchor chair, the network again cut away to Jiang in Philadelphia, where there was still more good news for Democrats. “I just heard from a [Harris] campaign source that says that they are overperforming the internal turnout expectations here in Philly and it continues to look very strong,” Jiang reported, later adding, “The Harris campaign ground game has been like a well-oiled machine.”
As we all now know, the Harris campaign was lying about the turnout and therefore the reporting by CBS News was completely wrong about Pennsylvania. Compared to Joe Biden’s numbers in 2020, Harris got about 30,000 fewer votes in Pennsylvania, while Donald Trump increased his total by about 80,000 votes, sufficient to swing the Keystone State into the Republican column with a winning margin of more than 120,000 votes (2.7 percent of the total). Even in the deep-blue Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia, Harris underperformed Biden by approximately 37,000 votes, while Trump’s numbers were about 12,000 votes more than he got four years earlier. So much for the vaunted Harris “ground game,” eh?
Harris not only lost Pennsylvania, but every other one of the states that had been identified as the “battlegrounds” of 2024 — Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona. Furthermore, Trump won the popular vote nationwide by a margin of about 2.3 million votes. Having been hyped up as a campaign of “joy” with overwhelming momentum, Harris spent a billion-and-a-half dollars and suffered a rout of historic proportions.
If the Harris campaign has been completely discredited by its defeat, however, what about the credibility of those media organizations which promoted the Harris campaign’s message as if it were the gospel truth? CBS News certainly was not alone in hyping up hope for Harris, and the media’s barrage of partisan hype started long before Election Night. The self-evident unity of political purpose among “the Democrat-Media complex” (to employ the late Andrew Breitbart’s phrase) means that the defeat of Kamala Harris was also a defeat for the media.
“Broadcast evening news coverage of the candidates was the most wildly imbalanced in history, favoring Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris over former Republican President Donald Trump by the greatest margin ever recorded,” Rich Noyes of the Media Research Center reported. “[C]overage of Harris … on ABC, CBS, and NBC was 78 percent positive vs. 22 percent negative. For Trump, those numbers were flipped: just 15 percent positive press, vs. 85 percent negative coverage.”
That Trump won the election despite such lopsided bias in coverage by the major networks clearly demonstrates that a majority of American voters no longer trust the media when it comes to political coverage.
What is most remarkable about all this is that liberal journalists — “Democratic operatives with bylines,” as Professor Glenn Reynolds calls them — seem to have learned nothing from the thorough beating they (and their candidate of choice) suffered in November. Much of the post-election analysis and commentary in the media has focused on campaign tactics and strategy, as though Harris could have won if she had done this or that differently. A typical example was a November 7 USA Today article by Francesca Chambers that recounted the Harrris campaign’s choices at length — more than 3,500 words — and included this:
Harris suffered deep losses with Latino men all over the map. Trump won the demographic with 54 percent of the vote nationally, exit polling showed, in a stunning reversal from when Biden won 59 percent of those votes. …
The outcome in battleground states among Latinos was not surprising. It was in line with the polling about Latino voters’ high economic anxieties dating back to the beginning of Biden’s presidency, [Harris campaign adviser Stephanie Valencia] said.
Trump’s appeal to their “machismo” was viewed by Democrats as a primary factor in his increased support from Hispanic men. He went after the “bro vote” and appeared on Joe Rogan’s and Logan Paul’s podcasts as he made his closing argument.
His campaign proactively courted young Hispanic men dating back to 2021, when it was clear Trump was intending to run again, said Fernand Amandi, whose firm polled Latinos in the 2008 and 2012 general elections for former President Barack Obama.
He went to UFC championship fights and broke into the gaming community, he said, subcultures that over-index with not only young men but young Hispanic men.
Trump’s team was able to build “a cultural kinship with them,” Amandi said.
So, in this analysis, Harris lost because of “economic anxieties,” Hispanic “machismo,” and Trump’s success in going on male-oriented podcasts and appealing to “the gaming community.” This may be true, at some level, but it ignores more fundamental issues.
Why, for example, do Democrats assume themselves to be naturally entitled to the votes of Hispanic Americans, so that it requires a multiple-paragraph explanation when they fail to reach a certain threshold of support in that demographic category?
And is it not possible that the “economic anxieties” of Hispanic voters constitute a legitimate grievance with the Biden administration’s policies? Dwelling on tactical details of the campaign is a way of evading the question that no one in the mainstream media wants to examine, i.e., the possibility that Democrats lost the election because voters rejected the Democratic Party’s policy agenda — period, full stop.
This is at once the simplest explanation of Trump’s victory, and at the same time an answer that the credibility-damaged media will never offer their audience. And did I mention that their audience is shrinking drastically? Because it’s highly relevant to the problem now facing the Democratic Party that their favorite propaganda outlets are cratering in the ratings:
During the week of November 25, CNN saw its lowest-rated week among total viewers since June 2001 with an average of just 268,000 viewers. By comparison, Fox News averaged 1.4 million head-to-head.
MSNBC managed to only slightly outdraw CNN with an average of 346,000 viewers. But the real concern for MSNBC lies in primetime, where its shows used to reach more than 1 million viewers. Last week, the network averaged 465,000 viewers in primetime.
In the advertiser-coveted demographic of adults aged 25-54, CNN recorded an average of just 41,000 viewers for the week — the network’s lowest in nearly 30 years. Yet the channel still topped MSNBC, which averaged an almost unheard-of 29,000 total day viewers among the demo.
It was MSNBC’s worst week among the demo since November 1997, when Bill Clinton was still president.
The average CNN show gets a smaller audience than reruns of Paw Patrol on Nickelodeon, and overall ratings for MSNBC are just marginally higher. Yet in the election aftermath, there appears to have been no reassessment of political priorities by these failing networks, which are now endeavoring to sabotage the presidency of the man who won the election by ignoring what he has long called the “fake news” media.
Trump did not merely defeat Kamala Harris in November, he defeated the media establishment itself. Trump’s victory got an exclamation point over the weekend, when ABC News agreed to pay $15 million, plus $1 million for attorneys’ cost, to settle Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the network.
That lawsuit stemmed from George Stephanopoulos falsely claiming during the March 10 episode of This Week that a New York jury found Trump “liable for rape” in the E. Jean Carroll case. Once a judge ruled that Trump’s defamation suit could go forward — meaning that communications among Stephanopoulos and other network personnel would be subject to discovery – ABC immediately offered a settlement, rather than let evidence of their bias become public knowledge.
So now the once and future president’s worst enemies have been compelled to make a generous contribution to funding Trump’s presidential library. Could the irony be more profound?
Americans will remember 2024 not only for Trump’s historic comeback victory, but also as the year when the liberal media establishment lost its ability to control the nation’s political narrative. Some might say that this alone is sufficient fulfillment of Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again.
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