The short answer is yes. But they don't yet understand what it means. 

After years of watching trust in the news media slide down so much that POLITICIANS are now more trusted than journalists, it is dawning on executives and some journalists that people dislike them...they really really dislike them. 

But they don't yet understand why. They see the distrust of Americans as an indictment of Americans. We are irredeemable, deplorable, Nazis, and garbage. 

Anonymous TV exec: "If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they're not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form." https://t.co/zWiIqKYx1b

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) October 30, 2024

That sentiment is not directed merely at Trump supporters; it's aimed at every dissenting voice regardless of ideology. It is of course aimed at conservatives in the main because support for Trump is proof positive that you are a garbage person. But if you look more closely you can see that any deviation from the Narrative™ makes you suspect. 

This is just one more example of a phenomenon that has gained steam and spawned a burgeoning alternative media environment. Publications like The Free Press--beloved by conservatives, centrists, and free thinkers for being a breath of fresh air--have been founded by generally former liberal exiles who are tired of the ideological constraints of working in the uniformly Deep Blue media environment. 

Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger--all broadly centrists to center-left--have all moved what appears to be dramatically right in the eyes of their former colleagues. I'm not sure that you can say this is accurate, though. What they are is what they always have been--heterodox, and being heterodox is now a mainly right wing phenomenon. 

Last winter, I checked in with a friend in Democratic politics. "Life is weird sometimes," she wrote back, and told me she was staying at Alexander Soros' Hamptons house. I made a joke about coming to visit her—growing up in a midwestern working-class family, I'd always enjoyed…

— Evan Barker (@evanwch) October 29, 2024

They were pushed in a rightward direction not because they moved much or at all, but because the left went totalitarian. These people refused to move leftward with the crowd. 

One of the shocking things they found is the supposedly hateful right fell in love with them, not because they agreed with their politics (the Trump right is hardly a mirror image of the old Republican/neocon coalition, and has say good riddance to bad rubbish when the Bush/Cheney faction stomped off in a huff), but because it is such a relief to have found other free thinkers. MAGA people are nice, it turns out, and that, too has drawn reporters in.

It is striking to see how many centrists and even liberals have decided that Trump is either acceptable or even necessary as a corrective to a cultural elite gone mad with hatred and power lust. When Nellie Bowles, who I doubt supports Trump, ridicules the uniformity of thought and dishonesty of her former colleagues, it feels like a breakthrough. 

The mavens of the media elite are appalled that their authority has been stripped of them, and they have no idea that it was they who caused this. They have become the enforcers, the Pravda, the Stasi, or allies of Big Brother. Take your pick. They are the elite, and wonder why we don't bow down to them in adulation. 

The divide in America is not really over policy--this is a policy-free campaign, although there is talk about policy in vague ways by both sides. This campaign is really about who establishes the standard of normality. 

Wait, Biden called Trump supporters "garbage" during Harris's speech?

The tens of millions of voters they've been calling Nazis are also garbage now?

Garbage Nazis?

I guess it does have a ring to it.

The ring of defeat.

— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) October 30, 2024

It is ironic in the extreme that Donald Trump is the candidate of normality, as he is hardly normal. But he loves ordinary people, and obviously so, and they love him back for fighting against the true weirdos who run our country. 

The media are weirdos and aspiring tyrants. They cheer on the censors, the intelligence state, the warmongers, the tyrants who controlled our lives for years using the COVID pandemic as an excuse. The Great Reset crowd. They are the spokesmen for the transnational elite. 

They are mourning the (partial) loss of their power to persuade, and begging the tyrants in the security state to silence dissenters. Both the Washington Post and The New York Times are working on stories--based on analysis BY MEDIA MATTERS--that accuses conservative podcasters of spreading misinformation. 

The goal is to deplatform them. They are arguing that the scummiest political operative, David Brock, should have veto power over others' speech. 

[2] As you'll notice, this is PRECISELY the same line of attack @nytimes tried to launch earlier this week. The New York Times targeted YouTube, attempting to cudgel them to shut down conservatives for "misinformation" using Media Matters research. The @washingtonpost is now…

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) October 30, 2024

[4] This reporter makes no reference to the actual "misinformation" I have purveyed. Democrats are professionals at ballot harvesting! Indeed, they have dedicated massive budgets to pursuing just that! Here, for example, is NBC News on the topic: pic.twitter.com/uqCCo9kyO8

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) October 30, 2024

[6] But that's the true Big Lie: that media like The Washington Post or New York Times are pursuing journalism rather than Left-wing activism. They've made that perfectly clear for years, which is why the American people don't trust them -- as the OWNER OF THE WASHINGTON POST… pic.twitter.com/CotUHliIsG

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) October 30, 2024

The media is engaged in a desperate power grab as they lose their influence. And before you see the pushback from the alternative media as proof that we are winning, the fact is that the results of the battle are far from certain. All of Europe is aligned against us and asserting state power to control the media, and if Kamala Harris somehow wins shutting down speech is top of the agenda. 

We haven't won this battle yet. And if we think we have, we have lost it instead. The Democrats are pulling out all the stops, using billions of dollars and the coordinated efforts of the corporate media, to at least rig the election, and perhaps steal it. 

If you haven't voted, do so. If your friends and family haven't voted, grab them now and bring them to the polls. We can't wake up on November 6th (or the 18th) and be stunned that Kamala pulled it off. We have been warned.

Heed that warning. Fight like the fate of America and the free world is at stake, because it is. 

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