The Patriot Post® · Legacy Media: One Fail After Another
Donald Trump was a boon for mainstream media outlets. Many of them saw their bottom lines balloon as their coverage of the uncharacteristic candidate and then president became blatantly partisan on a level not seen in modern American history. Of course, most mainstream media outlets have long leaned to the left while claiming they were merely engaged in straight news coverage and repeatedly denying any political bias. But with Trump, that non-biased façade was quickly discarded and replaced with a self-righteous “resistance” that eschewed straight news as permitting the dispensing of “misinformation.”
The faces of this blatant embrace of leftist political bias were a growing number of commentators on outlets such as CNN and MSNBC. While the latter always embraced leftist political bias, CNN once sought to at least maintain vestiges of its non-biased façade. The truth is no one who watched believed it, but, infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome, they tuned in to get their daily fix. And CNN leaned hard into this, creating stars out of the likes of Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo.
Interestingly, Fox News, which has long been recognized as the sole major right-leaning news media outfit, also did well during Trump’s term. However, unlike CNN and other Leftmedia outlets, Fox News did not experience a significant dip in viewership following Joe Biden’s election. Naturally, Fox’s refusal to placate the MSM anti-Trump narrative clearly rubbed some of its own media personalities the wrong way, as both Shepard Smith and Chris Wallace left the company. They both now may be regretting their decisions.
We have repeatedly observed how CNN’s viewership numbers sank following Trump’s exit, even as the outlet changed presidents and claimed to want to move back to the middle. Furthermore, CNN’s once-popular commentators have fallen on hard times. Chris Cuomo got caught up in an unethical journalism scandal with his brother Andrew, the disgraced former governor of New York, and was fired.
As Don Lemon’s CNN primetime show was tanking in the ratings, the outlet tried various gimmicks like renaming his program before canceling it and then sticking him in a new morning show called “CNN This Morning.” However, as of last week, that show was able to pull in only 387,000 viewers compared to 1.5 million people watching “Fox & Friends.”
Maybe even more embarrassing was Chris Wallace, who left Fox to become the face of CNN’s new streaming channel, CNN+. But that $300 million disaster didn’t even make it a month before it was canned. That was ironic indeed given Wallace’s assertion that he left Fox News because he believed it had become “increasingly unsustainable.” Evidently, Wallace had become so infected with TDS that he could not see past the January 6 Capitol riot. Now Wallace is largely forgotten.
And Shepard Smith, who was a staple on Fox News for 23 years, also finds his career languishing. His program, “The News With Shepard Smith,” debuted on CNBC in September 2020 and was canceled last week. TDS appears to be what drove him from Fox News, as he couldn’t work alongside those who expressed “partisan” views.
Although MSNBC has never really sought to claim it was not biased to the left, it is revealing that even that network could not justify holding onto racist firebrand commentator Tiffany Cross. MSNBC fired Cross last week after she derided Florida Governor “Ron DeStupid” and disparagingly referred to the entire state as a certain body part. She failed to meet the outlet’s “standard,” MSNBC said.
The moral of the story is that admitting bias is not what turns people off. The offense is reporting and commentating that so blatantly ignores the truth for a favored leftist narrative and then labels all who object to the fraudulent portrayal as ignorant or racist rubes. Thankfully, fewer people are listening to these purveyors of anti-American hate.