Legacy media don’t get it

Six and a half weeks after the 2024 General Election, the legacy media still don’t get it. They expect people to trust them as they did fifty or sixty years ago, before social media even existed. Now they’re showing themselves to be obtuse, or else telling more of the lies that are now causing people to seek their news elsewhere. Furthermore, some legacy media organs are reinventing themselves – and some aren’t. That choice is falling out along ideological and geographical lines, so it can only contribute further to the Great Sortation.

Legacy media obtuseness – an example

Any organization, or industry, derives its collective qualities from individuals. The legacy media derives its collective qualities from publishers, editors, and reporters – and CNAV uses that last term loosely. Most of these people went to the Columbia University School of Journalism, the Academy of the Legacy Media. That academy has produced leftist graduates almost since its inception, and certainly since the current First Families of Newspaper Publishing took over. Those families are uniformly leftist in their outlook.

Lately, a new class of online medium has arisen, pretending to be “nonprofit and nonpartisan.” These organs, however, are hiring old-line legacy media reporters and editors as columnists – so their blind spots remain the same.

One such old-line columnist is Bob Lewis, who writes for The Virginia Mercury (Richmond, Virginia), a member of States Newsroom. States Newsroom also lists The Texas Tribune as an affiliate, which should tell readers all they need to know. They pretend to be nonpartisan, which would imply being non-ideological as well. But their ideology is still leftist, though perhaps with this twist. When fellow leftists go crazy, they take alarm – because such craziness will only drive people to the right.

Bob Lewis’ biography gives the most salient details:

Bob Lewis covered Virginia government and politics for 20 years for The Associated Press. Now retired from a public relations career at McGuireWoods, he is a columnist for the Virginia Mercury.

How objective can Mr. Lewis be, if he has been an old lion at The Associated Press for twenty years? Mr. Lewis also lists an email address – and an address on Mastodon, one of the earliest havens of leftist refuge after Elon Musk bought, renamed, and repurposed Twitter.

The area of concern

Two days ago Mr. Lewis expressed alarm that his State, and the country, were

losing [their] ability to talk, to understand, to reason.

He took alarm when, after the murder of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, several influencers on X and YouTube called that a heroic act. That is indeed a disheartening spectacle, which others will corroborate. But he failed to mention that Taylor Lorenz, the first and arguably the worst offender, was a legacy media retiree. He also spoke of “one political party … refer[ring] to its opposition … as “the enemies of the people.” Again he failed to name the Party involved: the Democratic Party.

Virginia is an interesting microcosm of a nation fast cleaving itself into hostile tribes, ideologically, culturally and — perhaps most troubling — geographically.

So he’s noticed the Great Sortation. Or maybe he’s noticed the county-by-county results. The Austin-American Statesman has the best interactive map of 2024 results by county. In fact, most counties in America voted Republican. Many House districts went Democratic only because they contained one or more large cities.

Neither side in our widening cultural schism is willing to consider the other’s point of view. We are hardened by the echo chamber of social media and ideologically driven cable channels and podcasts to the point that losers resort to violence to keep or gain power.

Again, he didn’t name the side. Such violence as did break out, did so on the left, not the right. But here’s what concerns him the most:

News media are diminished to the point where professional, vetted reporting is no longer how most voters get their information. It’s a complicated dynamic in which the financial and concomitant editorial atrophy of legacy print and broadcast journalism gets swamped by the unchecked proliferation of social media platforms, podcasts and cable stations where lies commonly go unrebutted even as verifiable fact struggles to be heard.

The link is to a Pew Research result showing 35 percent of respondents getting their news from “television.” This could include cable stations – most of which are leftist (CNN, MSNBC, etc.) – and old-line broadcast network stations. Does he seriously mean to say that “broadcast journalism” is a place of “professional, vetted reporting”? Then how can he explain the decision by Disney/ABC’s Bob Iger to settle a defamation suit with Donald Trump, paying him $15 million?

If you don’t want to be suspected of conspiracy, don’t conspire!

Now consider these gems:

Not that major newspapers and the once-unchallenged networks were sacrosanct. Far from it; they were quite human. We made mistakes. (I certainly did.) We got things wrong, but the process was sufficiently transparent that errors were promptly and publicly corrected and the reporters and editors responsible were held accountable for it.

Transparent? He is pleased to joke. Where was the accountability when The New York Times willfully attempted to deceive its readers with a lurid tale that Donald Trump was some sort of “Manchurian Candidate”? Why is that newspaper still in print?

Now, conspiracy fabulists run wild, misinforming and disinforming with impunity.

Oh, like the narrative that, without the coronavirus vaccine, we would see “meat wagons” driving down Main Street, bullhorns blaring “Bring out your dead!”? Or that no one died from such a vaccine?

They blast a firehose of disinformation that would rightly be dismissed as really bad science fiction in a more rational past, yet it finds an audience among the willfully gullible. For instance, enough people believe there are machines that control the weather that legislation is pending in Florida to ban such a device.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton were awfully selective in the regions they “visited.” That, plus the documented refusal of FEMA supervisors to help Trump supporters, is the sort of thing that gives rise to conspiracy theories. One starts with motive, then observes the total unwillingness of appropriate authorities even to discuss the possibility.

Anyone suspecting an illusionist’s trick knows this maxim: assume it’s a trick, then figure out how the illusionist did it. Now CNAV offers another maxim: if you don’t like people accusing you of conspiracy, don’t conspire!

And don’t call people names, either, as President Biden did (“Garbage,” he said), if you expect them to trust you. Nor stretch misinterpretation into outright lying, as Keith Olbermann did when he accused Trump of calling for Liz Cheney’s execution.

Legacy media and the Great Sortation

In the last part of his essay, Lewis talks specifically about a geographical divide in Virginia:

In Virginia, the geography of the schism is easy to follow. It shows up in crimson and blue maps after every election.

A crescent of suburban wealth — that loops loosely from Loudoun County and the Washington, D.C., bedroom communities south along Interstate 95 through commuter country to the affluent clusters around Richmond and then southeast down the Peninsula to Hampton Roads — is largely center-left and leans toward Democrats. They’re largely college-educated, two-income households whose kids attend well-funded schools and tend to be more socially liberal.

West and south of there are vast, often sparse populations in rural areas whose fortunes took a beating since the 1990s. Global trade agreements moved furniture and textile jobs offshore. Litigation against cigarette makers crippled tobacco farming and processing. Clean-air mandates, driven by climate science, undermined the coal industry that once brought decent wages to the corner of Virginia the farthest from the suburban crescent.

When people with their conservative beliefs feel — and not without justification — that their communities and values are being ridiculed by comfortable elites in cozy subdivisions … well, you can see how it wouldn’t take much for those hard feelings to grow and ossify.

These are differences that the long passage of time may or may not assuage. But the lack of communication we have here is untenable. It will eventually corrode our very ability to govern ourselves.

Correct, as far as it goes. But why won’t he acknowledge his role, and that of his colleagues, in the state of affairs he now laments? Didn’t he agitate for the litigation against the tobacco industry? Didn’t he fully agree with what now turns out to be actual bad science fiction – the climate change narrative?

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to the data series for the last twenty years, i.e., from 1981 onwards, and to 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Phil Jones, Director, Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, UK

Where was he when your editor broke that story and that quote from the Climategate Archive? He was nowhere to be found. And why won’t he acknowledge that the climate change alarmists are using the same playbook they or their fellow travelers used against the tobacco industry?

In short, he’s right about “comfortable elites in cozy subdivisions” ridiculing conservative values, and the communities in which they prevail. (Though he won’t acknowledge that many of those two-income households are DINKs – Dual Income, No Kids.) But neither will he acknowledge his own role in shaping that divide.

His most recent track record is worse. Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-Va.) put in place a program to remove from the voter roles certain registrants who admitted on their voter registration applications that they are not United States citizens. Furthermore, his order gave people ample opportunity to address themselves to their unit registrars. But what does he say? That the governor is “purging” the voter rolls willy-nilly and removing citizen voters without warning. (For the straight dope, see here.)

A broader problem

The problem is, of course, far broader than that. CNAV noted a year ago that people were moving out of Democratic-controlled or “blue” States into Republican-controlled or “red” States. Donald Trump’s victory is the chief reason the country will not break up along geographical lines. Another reason might be that Trump “flipped” three traditionally blue States, and managed to isolate Illinois, Colorado, New Mexico, and Minnesota from other “blue regions.”

But pressure for interstate secession remains. The western half of Virginia, about which Mr. Lewis worries so much, would love to join West Virginia. For that matter, western Maryland would also like to join an enlarged West Virginia. Eastern Oregon has wanted to join Idaho for some time, and eastern Washington State might consider it, too. And of course, California is divisible along a roughly north-to-south line into leftist coastal and conservative inland regions.

The lack of introspection from leftist politicians is, of course, the primary driver of secessionist, or at least “sortationist,” sentiment. But if one can’t expect politicians to look in the mirror, one should expect journalists to do so. Until they do, they will continue to lose readership, viewership, and audience. And if they contribute to a “geographical division” of the country, the blame lies with them, for failure even to recognize their own role in this affair, much less the role they could play in “keeping it peaceable.”