Never Trump, which some say puts the “con” in conservative/neo-con, is a losing proposition. Glenn Beck’s financially challenged The Blaze network, for example, forfeited a tremendous amount of traffic once it went Never Trump and has now merged with CRTV. And it looks like The Weekly Standard could be shutting down entirely.
That said, Vanity Fair just published an interesting article describing how left-wing digital outlets have also encountered difficulties in the marketplace of ideas.
“[Vice, Vox, and BuzzFeed] which once heralded the dawn of a new media age—replete with massive valuations, large fund-raising hauls, and millennial sex appeal—now appeared to exhibit some traits of the brands that they once attempted to disrupt. They were large, less nimble, and increasingly vulnerable to Facebook and Google. They seemed virtually encircled by competitors familiar and new…
“Mic canned the majority of its staff last week as part of a last-resort sale to Bustle for about $5 million—$95 million less than its previous valuation. Vice, under turnaround C.E.O. Nancy Dubuc, is in the process of trimming its 3,000-person global headcount by 15 percent, which reported Vice’s losses at more than $50 million in 2018. At Refinery29, 10 percent of the workforce received pink slips this fall. BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti recently floated in the pages of The New York Times the quixotic notion of a multi-company merger between BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox Media, Group Nine Media, and Refinery29, as a means to rival the Facebook-Google ad duopoly…”
Lost in the Liberal Echo Chamber
Breitbart‘s John Nolte adds an important element that Vanity Fair predictably overlooked:
“What do Buzzfeed, Vice, and Vox offer that you cannot get anywhere — everywhere — else?” The media world — meaning, all of it: digital, television, and print — is buried under left-wing progressives snarking at Trump, attacking the political right as backwards racists, and pursing socialism in the name of social justice. This social and ideological conformity, this cult-like adherence to the same talking points, has not only made all of these sites exactly alike, they have also become predictable and, by extension, uninteresting.”
The Low-Energy Weakly Standard?
Back to The Weekly Standard which reportedly its parent company that owns the Washington Examiner may close down, although a last-minute buyer could emerge.
Not only did the pro-Iraq War publication go full-on Never Trump, even when the current president began implementing policies that TWS traditionally or supposedly championed, but some maintain that it seemingly jettisoned its editorial ethics when it reportedly began receiving funding from a left-wing billionaire and adjusted its content accordingly.
In the current media environment as alluded to above, the reason behind the publication’s lost market share is hardly surprising, Nolte observed:
“In the age of Trump, the publication offers nothing we cannot get everywhere else in the elite media, nothing we cannot find at the far-left Washington Post, MSNBC, New York Times, CNN, etc.Smug virtue-signaling and superior Trump-bashing are the cheapest commodities in today’s news business. They are literally everywhere. And so, instead of offering a unique voice and perspective in an ocean of left-wing media, the Weekly Standard instead chose to sit in the middle of this ocean and sell saltwater…
No, the Weekly Standard as a whole only became interesting to watch as it fell into the establishment media’s classic trap, the old siren song of, Betray your base and we’ll love you…
And then your base abandons you, the music stops, and just like Megyn Kelly, you discover you’re the one without a chair.”
The Trump Effect In the Media
Like him or hate him, President Donald Trump has unmasked many sanctimonious and duplicitous political pundits who shamelessly effected an ideological 180 for a paycheck after he took office.
It’s kind of a like a babyface-to-heel turn in professional wrestling parlance. Unlike the news industry, however, no one is pretending professional wrestling is real anymore.
Slight digression: It’s also a timely reminder how so many in the media trashed the late President George H.W. Bush, the late Senator John McCain, President G.W. Bush, and Senator-elect Mitt Romney when they ran for president but suddenly regard them as great statesmen once these GOP establishment stalwarts expressed anti-Trump sentiments.
