Has a corporate media recalibration begun?

I saw a handful of stories from corporate media stalwarts this weekend that I must confess took me completely by surprise.

Let me begin by citing realclearpolitics.com as the aggregator that brought these stories to my attention.  If you’re not familiar with them, you need to be.  They do an exceptional job of highlighting stories from both liberal and conservative perspectives.  Often, you’ll see stories on the same topic from left and right, one after the other.  How much more balanced can an outlet be?

Here are the stories that caught my attention, the first three are from The Atlantic, a reliably very left of center, progressive, neocon outlet.  These are my headlines not theirs, so I’ve provided links for you to get their full story:

1. The economy really does suck despite the gaslighting of Paul Krugman (NYT) and many other liberal economists.

2. New gender dysphoria study from the UK torpedoes leftist groupthink.

3. A profile of right wing firebrand Matt Gaetz.

And perhaps, most shockingly, from the New York Times: some voters look back on Trump’s presidency more positively.

Another interesting development from the past week is the dog bites man story from long-time NPR editor Uri Berliner outing his employer NPR as a cauldron of totally biased left wing groupthink.  Who could have known?

Was the latter case the cause that affected the others?  Who can say, but coming on the heels of the recent hiring, and subsequent firing, by NBC News of former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel it could be that a tipping point has been reached.

That The Atlantic would do two stories in direct conflict with the narrative is extremely out of character, to say the least.  The third, the profile on Gaetz, certainly dredges up some dirt on him, but true or not, it’s out there.  Were a conservative outlet to do a profile on him without addressing it, it would be considered a puff piece, so I don’t find it out of line for the Atlantic author to bring it up in her story.  The rest of it struck me as pretty fair minded and balanced.  I didn’t get the sense that she was going to rush out to vote for him, but overall, she gave him a much fairer shake than I expected.

And that the New York Times would run a piece about Trump that didn’t cast him as some kind of composite of Hitler/Stalin/Satan is the cherry on top!

A new poll by The New York Times and Siena College finds that voters think highly of the former president’s record on the economy, but memories of his divisiveness largely remain intact.

Could it be that nine years after the ascent of Trump, and everything that they have done to demonize not only him but those who support him as well, that they’re waking up to the irreparable harm they’ve done? Not so much to the country (you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs), but more importantly to themselves and their own credibility, resulting in a complete loss of trust by average Americans?

Trust in media is near record low and the U.S. media lags far behind many third world banana republic autocracies in gauges of press freedom.  Take a bow NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and the rest of the corporate media ecosystem!

The bottom line is that these outlets find themselves preaching to choirs that are growing smaller and smaller with each passing news cycle.  Maybe some of this can be attributed to the new media business model in the digital age that has become far more dependent on paid subscriptions.  The logical end here is simply serving up more red meat for their bases.  Telling their paid subscribers what they want to hear.  And it’s not just the left, Fox News does it too, but they have a large enough audience to get away with it (not that that makes it right.)

There once was a concept in our society of the public intellectual.  I remember people like William F. Buckley and Christopher Hitchens.  Who are today’s public intellectuals?  Chuck Todd, Jake Tapper, Joy Reid, Morning Joe and Mika?  The WaPo editorial board, Jennifer Rubin, Eugene Robinson, et al.?  Or on the right: George Will, David French, Bill Kristol?  All these people have absolutely zero influence on people who can think for themselves.  That, above all, is what bothers all of them the most.

I’ll leave you with a couple of my favorite (paraphrased) quotes:

The only difference between readers of the soviet era Pravda and the readers of the New York Times is that the Pravda readers KNEW they were being lied to.

And to tag my earlier reference, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs” — though most often attributed to Stalin, it was actually from another New York Times reporter, Walter Duranty who gaslighted NYT readers mercilessly with his endless stories of the glories of the Bolshevik revolution while millions were dying of famine in the Ukraine.  Upon reading this, George Orwell famously quipped, “Where’s the omelet?”

Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.