The Corporate Media Collapse is Here

The audience for the "mainstream" media's big stars has disappeared

Who do you trust to give you the news in the midst of the total collapse in the prestige and reliability of American journalism: Glenn Greenwald or Chuck Todd? Matt Taibbi or Matt Lauer? Chris Rufo or Chris Wallace? Joe Rogan or Joe Scarborough? Candace Owens or Andrea Mitchell (or Nora O’Donnell or Gayle King)?

Let’s take the comparison a step further. I would wager that there are anonymous Twitter accounts and satirical media websites that are more trusted today than most major corporate outlets. The Babylon Bee or the Boston Globe? Cat Turd or George Stephanopoulos? Zero Hedge or CNBC? Techno Fog or Jeffrey Toobin?

As I’ve argued before, this collapse in the popularity of the corporate mouthpieces is most noticeable on social media sites like Twitter. Just scan the accounts of corporate media "star" journalists there, and you will see that most of them have lost their audience. Count the number of Likes and Retweets and Comments these corporate “stars” get — it’s embarrassingly low. One of the things that most irritated my fellow journalists was that I was not shy about pointing out that I had nearly 500,000 followers on Twitter while most of them had less than a tenth of that number — even though many of them worked at so-called “major” outlets.

Twitter (in particular) has accidentally revealed the relative unpopularity of America’s corporate media figures. Ari Melber has almost one million followers but he can't get 50 likes on most of his tweets. Chuck Todd has 2.1 million followers but he can't get 200 likes most days. Why does Andrea Mitchell’s account have 1.9 million followers and zero interest? Why doesn’t anyone care about George Stephanopoulos’ tweets either? Just look around at all these empty accounts: Savannah Guthrie, Bret Baier, Brian Stelter, Ezra Klein, Christiane Amanpour. Take your pick. They’re ghost towns.

The big corporate media outlets are busy trying to hide their unpopularity by “padding” a lot of social media accounts with fake followers. The so-called “bots” have to be added. The tweets have to be "boosted." The ratings have to be manipulated.

As I’ve pointed out before, our so-called "prestige" legacy outlets like the Washington Post have obviously lost their popularity as well. The Washington Post’s own Twitter account supposedly has 18.5 million Twitter followers but it can’t get 50 likes on most of its posts on any given day!

This helps to explain the corporate media’s war against Project Veritas and The Babylon Bee and Tucker Carlson (and many more). Liberals can read ratings just as well as the rest of us. They know that their audience has left them too. Why do you think The New York Times attacked The Babylon Bee in the first place? (That’s another war they lost badly by the way.)

One of the mental blocks that Americans have to overcome is the stubborn habit of thinking that the American corporate media is acting in good faith. Why do you think most corporate media journalists are in favor of “regulating” social media? Why do you think the regulation they favor involves conservative and independent journalists being censored and de-platformed? These people know that they’ve lost their audience and they don’t really appreciate the exposure on social media.

They can tell when their time is up.