Atlantic: The 'Mainstream Media' Has Already Lost

[Takket]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/01/joe-rogan-political-right-media-mainstream/680755/?gift=6OlzouYsen_aUF0MZ51jRSsYXWE_r42br-U8n143K50&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share



This October, in the closing days of the presidential election, the podcaster Joe Rogan said something extraordinary. He had just hosted Donald Trump for a three-hour conversation in his studio in Austin, Texas, and wanted to make clear that he had discussed a similar arrangement with Kamala Harris’s campaign. “They offered a date for Tuesday, but I would have had to travel to her and they only wanted to do an hour,” he posted on X. “I strongly feel the best way to do it is in the studio in Austin.” And so Rogan declined to interview the vice president.
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What a diva, some people said. If you’re offered an interview with a presidential candidate, get off your ass and get on a plane! But Rogan could dictate his own terms. He is not competing in the snake pit of D.C. journalism, where sitting opposite a major candidate delivers an instant status bump. He is the most popular podcaster alive, with a dedicated audience of right-leaning men who enjoy mixed martial arts, stand-up comedy, and wild speculation about aliens (space, not illegal); they are not political obsessives. Rogan knew that Harris needed him more than he needed her.


Nothing symbolizes the changed media landscape of this past election more than Rogan’s casual brush-off. Within a week, his interview with Trump racked up more than 40 million views on YouTube alone, and millions more on other platforms. No single event, apart from the Harris-Trump debate, had a bigger audience this election cycle. By comparison, Harris’s contentious interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, the most popular of the cable networks, drew 8 million viewers to the live broadcast, and another 6.5 million on YouTube.

Those figures demonstrate the absurdity of talking about the “mainstream media” as many still do, especially those who disparage it. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, Americans with a wide range of political views generally agree about which outlets fall within this definition: newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and television networks such as CNN. Everyone else who’s disseminating information at scale is treated like a couple of hipsters running a craft brewery who are valiantly competing with Budweiser.

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The irony here is there is no "liberal media". That term was the invention of rethugs who got tired of being called out on their bullshit, so instead of changing their positions to become honest and just, they decided to attack the media instead, and the media has responded over the years by moving WAY to the right to keep from upsetting them. The thanks they got for that is to STILL be vilified by the right, and now the left hates them too. Great job! But the persistent fallacy of a "liberal media" still affords them the opportunity to make people like Rogan and Fucker Carlson flourish in a "shunning the MSM" world while the people still watching/reading the MSM are being right wing brainwashed as well. In short, the rethugs own ALL the information and hey here is a shocker, now they own ALL the government as well thanks to their brainwashing.

The battle for disseminating information is one Democrats have to win to take back congress in the midterms. We ALREADY have them BEAT on policy. Our policies are widely popular...... but people keep voting against them!!!!!!!!

[SunSeeker]

1. K & R

[FuzzyRabbit]

2. K & R

[Jim__]

3. And our democracy has lost along with the media.

Both Aristotle and Socrates knew that one weakness of democracy was that it was largely helpless in the face of demagoguery. The wonder is that our democracy was able to stand for so long.

[Henry203]

4. We have entered the era of anti- intellectualism

I always thought we would look up to intelligence. What we have devolved into a country of ignorant people.