It started with something that didn’t happen.
In the 2024 presidential election, the Washington Post didn’t endorse a candidate. It looked at the two top contenders and decided Kamala Harris wasn’t ready and Donald Trump was, well, we are talking about the Washington Post here.
That decision cost the Post 250,000 subscribers. But it was followed relatively soon by an editorial that said the high costs of Obamacare were coming home to roost. Then another that urged fiscal restraint. Before long, Mark Thiessen, a columnist on the op-ed page, was happily declaring the Post was a “conservative newspaper.”
Now we read that Bari Weiss is “embattled.” Like heck she is. Larry Ellison, an outspoken Trump donor and the world’s second-richest man, is in her corner. And he owns the place – his family recently took over CBS and its parent company, Paramount Skydance.
Ellison is trying to turn around CBS, which now trails the other big broadcast networks in nearly every category, and he is trusting her skepticism of the way news has been delivered in the US in the last 50 years to turn the tide.
That means a 60 Minutes story on a prison in El Salvador was held until the information government agencies provided in response to the story’s allegations were included. It means Tony Dokoupil, not a Lester Holt leftist, has been installed into the anchor chair on CBS Evening News.
This tilt away from the left – we’re not at the stage where it could be called “rightward” – could bring some truly delicious moments for those of us who have reported on biased media over the years were Ellison to succeed in his quest to get control of CNN and change the direction of reporting there.
It could happen too. Paramount wants to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, which would give Ellison control of CNN as well as HBO, the HBO Max streaming service and other entities. The board has chosen another (smaller!) offer, from Netflix, but shareholders have not formally voted yet and President Trump has suggested he may block the deal if they choose Netflix.
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It also could be argued that someone already inside the building at CNN sees the need to balance things, or they wouldn’t keep letting Scott Jennings run circles around their leftist panel guests.
On the web, hard-core leftism is not selling that well. BuzzFeed shut down its news division. Vice Media filed for bankruptcy. Every major network in America has sustained double-digit losses in audience except one – Fox News.
The war is far from over. Americans are turning like never before to AI chatbots to answer routine and even not-so-routine questions. And the information loaded into Grok, Chat GPT, Meta AI and their competitors comes overwhelmingly from sources such as the New York Times, so the responses themselves carry a strong ideological taint.
Americans also increasingly rely on the news apps loaded onto their phones – Apple News, Google News, MSN and Yahoo News – and the news on their front pages is almost exclusively leftist news from proudly leftist outlets. The New York Times is prominently displayed and its website gets 440 million views per month – the most of any US website. CNN is next at 330 million – an extremely valuable property.
The coverage of the Trump administration in particular, but the right in general, remains overwhelmingly negative. Trump’s approval ratings have been steady throughout his return to office, and his approval among Republicans is at an all-time high. But coverage of his first year back was 92% negative on the major news networks.
And X continues to be filled with video of Trump and his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, jousting with the hostile press corps
But there’s no question that a tide is turning, that the people who run these networks realized they have lost America’s trust and that this probably occurred because they had allowed intellectual rot and lazy bias to infect their operations.
It’s about more than ratings, circulation and money though. Something else has happened. There’s so much information out there now that what we’re looking for is accurate, basic news about which we can form our own opinions, which also are readily available.
As a result, it’s almost as if they’re returning to the days of trying to inform us rather than convince us. And that’s refreshing – and informative.
Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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