American corporate media suffered a monumental rebuke Tuesday as Americans ignored them and elected Donald Trump as the nation’s next president. How have the outlets responded?
By calling for the government to censor their opposition, of course, and whining about how people aren’t listening to them anymore.
That’s been the theme on major network television shows as the dust settles on President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, which will send him back to the White House on Jan. 20.
Here’s PBS’ White House news correspondent, Laura Barrón-López, saying on CNN that the reason Democrats lost so badly is in part because “there is an entire right-wing media ecosystem that doesn’t exist on the left and it does not exist in the center or mainstream.”
Wait, who is mainstream? Wouldn’t that be the guy who won one of the largest landslide victories in a presidential race in 40 years, Barrón-López?
Barrón-López also complained that these new media platforms were “reaching Americans where they are, regardless of age and demographic … whether it was misinformation or disinformation or propaganda.”
Oh, how terrible: reaching people where they are, regardless of their demographic.
It was notable that the CNN analysts and hosts in the segment all nodded along with her.
It gets worse.
CNN commentator Van Jones called for “regulation” of social media platforms.
How many CNN program hosts and hosts on other networks have worked directly for Democrat presidential administrations? They don’t seem to have a problem with that.
MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle delivered a salty monologue about how awful it is that Americans now get their information on the social media platform X rather than accept whatever narrative the traditional networks force-feed viewers.
“We have now let misinformation become the accepted information,” Rhule said, angrily. “It is washed over us. Elon Musk buys Twitter and then uses it almost exclusively to be a propaganda machine. And we’ve accepted it.”
Musk renamed Twitter as X in July 2023.
Using extremely online lingo, Rhule then said: “America has just decided that we’re going to f**k around and find out.”
For the most hysterical and tyrannical take of all, we turn to ABC’s “The View” co-host Sarah Haines, who said the real lesson of the election is that Congress should have stepped in and censored information on social media.
The first thing I’d like to note here is the tone of this message.
According to the ladies of “The View” and much of the left-wing commentariat, Trump and his Republican Party are literal fascists who want to end democracy. That was the last-minute pitch by the Harris-Walz campaign, which many in the media happily echoed and promoted—as they have for basically the last decade.
Here’s media darling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., saying that we are entering an era of “authoritarianism and fascism.”
If Democrat politicians and their media allies truly believe that, one would think they’d all avoid saying right now on public platforms, “You know, the real problem is the government isn’t censoring people into silence.”
Maybe they’d even say, “Hey, it’s really important to protect the freedom of speech for all Americans, even the ones who disagree with us.”
But nope. Instead, they continue to demand that the government step in and make their opponents shut up.
What this says to me is that they don’t actually believe their nonsense about Trump being the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. Even after this election, they don’t actually think Trump or his supporters will step in and silence them, as they want to silence others.
Clearly, left-wing cultural elites have a kind of general comfort that in the end, they control government and institutions. What they apparently define as “fascism” is being prevented from using their power to control society.
Fascism is simply saying “Don’t tread on me” and meaning it.
My second big takeaway is that the Left’s postelection calls to “censor them, censor the fascists!” is a good indicator of what was at stake in this election and how much has changed since 2020. Musk’s decision to acquire Twitter has been entirely justified.
Until quite recently the Left didn’t just control the corporate, legacy media. They owned social media too. As the “Twitter Files” exposed, social media platforms coordinated with government agencies and corporate entities to censor and manipulate information.
Remember, in the weeks before the 2020 election, Twitter and Facebook literally suppressed and even blocked links to the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, which turned out to be true.
Then something incredible happened. Musk stepped in and bought Twitter, now X. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that Musk made a world-changing decision. It’s clear that many on the left knew this would begin a sea change.
By losing control of X to someone who merely wouldn’t censor the opposition, the Left lost the ability to control most of the information that reaches not just Americans but people the world over.
The remaining left-wing governments clearly see this as a threat and in many cases have tried to limit and in some cases outright shut down X or any platform that could be used to promote a message they don’t like.
Fortunately, here in America we have something called the First Amendment that protects the God-given right to free speech. But don’t think that will prevent leftist leaders from playing their hand to try to circumvent the Constitution.
With the results of Tuesday’s election, that effort—at least here in the United States—is far more likely to be derailed. It was a stunning and total rebuke to any kind of censorship regime taking hold in America.
Perhaps now media across the board will have to go to the American people “where they are,” and won’t be able to pin their hopes on having the government swoop in and regulate the competition out of existence.
Maybe now some genuine confidence can be restored in journalism, albeit in a media landscape that looks far different from the one that’s hit a historic low point in trust.
The legacy media’s time has come. A new age is set to begin, and that’s a great thing for genuine democracy.
Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.”
Reprinted with Permission from The Daily Signal – By Jarrett Stepman
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
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