Liberals, Provably Out of Touch with America, Must Change their Media Diet

I will begin by accepting that this is a very difficult thing to do in a world where independent media is dying and billionaires are buying up journalism left and right. The media environment has never been bleaker, and finding good information has never been more difficult since at least the invention of the television, but there are still new outlets launching all the time like Zeteo and Drop Site News that do great work, and people should search them out. I do this for a living and it’s a struggle for me to keep up with and maintain good sources of news, so I understand the difficulty inherent in this assertion.

But liberals have to try, because the current state of media diets ensures that partisan liberals are wholly unable to understand or relate to any voter who doesn’t constantly consume mainstream media. And liberals, as this chart from 2014 demonstrates, you have long predominantly been the ones who consume mainstream media.

This chart from Gallup really drives home how isolated partisan liberals are in both consuming and trusting mainstream media.

This has real-world consequences as it distorts liberal conceptions of reality. Being plugged in to the elite cable news and mainstream media environments leads to calamitous outcomes like this New Yorker report from March about Joe Biden’s campaign where narratives that exist and thrive in mainstream media are assumed to translate to the rest of the country, even in the face of data proving it does not.

Donilon’s mild demeanor can be misleading. Like Biden, he has firm beliefs—about politics, the public, the press—and a contrarian side. In 2020, he and his campaign team had to decide whether to emphasize the economy or the more abstract idea that Trump imperiled the essence of America. “We bet on the latter,” Donilon said, even though “our own pollsters told us that talking about ‘the soul of the nation’ was nutty.” That experience fortified his belief that this year’s campaign should center on what he calls “the freedom agenda.” By November, he predicted, “the focus will become overwhelming on democracy. I think the biggest images in people’s minds are going to be of January 6th.”

The 2020 election took place in an extraordinary pandemic-driven environment in the middle of a historic economic collapse and widespread civil unrest about America’s longstanding inequities under one of the least popular incumbents of all time. The only people who can look at 2020 and think that voters chose Biden entirely because of amorphous appeals to democracy are like Donilon’s pollster said, “nutty.” It’s hard to find a better example of the disconnect between the self-serving image of America portrayed to liberals through mainstream media, and the one that Biden’s pollsters and this year’s voters showed to him.

Kamala Harris spending the closing stretch shoving the John Kelly interview about Trump’s fascist impulses in everyone’s faces is more proof of how mainstream media narratives totally warp Democrats’ conception of America. Every summary you read about this election, voters are talking about their economic concerns, but if all you knew was Kamala Harris’s closing argument, well, you would think the same things that world-historic failure Tom Donilon thinks.

Speaking of world-historic failures, Phillippe Reines, former Hillary Clinton advisor, went on CNN and did the typical “lefties are costing us elections” shtick that braindead Democratic centrists pull no matter the outcome, bizarrely asserting that Medicare for All, a policy most lefties have dropped with the understanding that it is just not happening, was one of the reasons the Democrats lost because they supposedly spent “tons of time on it.” I don’t think I heard that phrase once this entire election. There is no one in America who knows less about America than cable news pundits do. My dogs understand the median U.S. voter better than Phillippe Reines does.

That’s not to say that liberals should abandon mainstream media entirely (although every single one of you will instantly get 100% smarter the moment you turn your TV off because TV news is literally brain poison). There is still terrific reporting coming from mainstream outlets like The Washington Post, and not reading those papers will narrow your knowledge of American society. But only reading them will narrow it even more, as you will only be exposed to narratives peddled by the self-serving elite Beltway interests driving this country to hell.

Liberals who have spent the days since the election putting their blue MAGA hats on and blaming minorities for shifting to Trump are proving they are the most out of touch Americans out there after cable news pundits, as their paternalistic vision of politics and their ironclad belief that Democrats are entitled to minority votes is one giant example of how the MSNBC liberal misunderstands America. Minority voters are Americans just like anyone else, and they are affected by the ebbs and flows of the economy more than the average cable news viewer who is generally whiter, older and more well-off. Biden may have governed in a way that helped poorer folks, but he failed to make a political case for his policies, and many associated Bidenomics with inflation, as the Biden and Harris teams refused to see that term the same way that voters did.

Everyone is in an echo chamber, that is just the nature of our fractured media environment. Every group, whether it be shitposting lefties like myself, MSNBC liberals who are reading this and hate my guts, or your unhinged Fox News uncle, is trapped inside a bubble where some vital information just does not make it to us. The difference with liberals is that their echo chamber doubles as this country’s largest media networks, adding a level of authority to the proceedings that their superficial analysis and lack of popularity with audiences that do not skew older and whiter do not justify.

This creates a disconnect where liberals are certain of what America looks like, because they are supposedly the most informed because they watch CNN and read the New York Times. Add the traditional liberal snobbery (that admittedly also animates the left who does not read these news sources every day), and you have a toxic combination where a bunch of people who America has repudiated multiple times in the past are dead-certain of their intelligence and righteousness because of a media that has completely missed the defining populist strain of this century. Liberals look down their noses at anyone who does not agree with their wrongheaded mainstream media-driven view of society, further exacerbating the elite backlash that has defined American politics in the 21st century.

Which leads us to situations where the entire mainstream media apparatus and the Democratic feedback loop attached to it can convince themselves that allegations made by John Kelly in a New York Times article are what everyone is talking about. Democrats paraded war criminal and election thief Dick Cheney around to further campaign on this amorphous notion of democracy, assuming that everyone was like them and believed themselves to be the protectors of it. On election day, voters who said they were concerned about democracy broke for Trump.

Sure, a lot of those Trump votes are centered around people who wrongly thought the 2020 election was stolen, but it’s probably safe to throw them into the “democracy is very threatened” bucket, which comprised a plurality, 38 percent of the electorate, according to CBS’s exit poll. However, Harris lost the “somewhat threatened” and “democracy is very secure” groups to Trump, and she only narrowly won the “democracy is somewhat secure” vote. No one bought this self-serving Democratic vision of democracy other than people who were already voting blue no matter who. Most people don’t give a shit about January 6th when they’re worried about making sure they can afford groceries this week.

How partisan liberals generally perceive democracy, as a celebration of American institutions most people hate and a once every two-year effort to “save the country” from Republicans, is not at all how most of the rest of America sees it.

The wealthy concentrating power is a threat to democracy. Not addressing voters’ economic concerns is a threat to democracy. Cable news and its Beltway and consultant-driven torrent of fake and bad information is a threat to democracy. Americans have long said this country is on the wrong track, and assuming when they express concerns over democracy that it automatically means they are only talking about Trump is peak liberal mainstream media brain. There are a lot of lessons that everyone on the left must learn from this realignment election, but one thing that is obvious in the disconnect between liberals and America is that one of the chief culprits behind it is their media diet that no one else in the country trusts.