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Renaming the Mainstream Media
This morning as I strode on the treadmill, I realized that David Harsanyi, on his podcast with Mollie Hemingway, You’re Wrong, planted a seed in my brain for a brand-new and more appropriate name for the mainstream media. Let me share how important I think this re-labeling will be for the foreseeable future.
Most of us on the Right refer to the mainstream media, or MSM, as newspapers that used to take pride in mostly publishing the news. Part of their purpose was supposedly to give us the truth, an objective rendition of what was happening in the world. (I know there are some who would debate this purpose, and we can certainly discuss that disagreement.) The New York Times and Washington Post in particular were supposed to be the bastions of newspapers everywhere, because they had the ability to position reporters all over the world. We trusted them, relied on them (foolishly, or not) to give us the facts, although we’ve known for a while that they were biased to the benefit of the Left.
In the last several years, though, these newspapers and those who genuflect to them have made their biases unequivocally clear. They are the handmaidens to the Left, although it’s unclear whether the Left or the media are the ones who are making the demands. Recently (it seems to me), the term “legacy media” has been used. Some people claim that this word is being used to suggest that the print media is archaic, and that we will be getting all of our news online; I suspect they may be right. Although I couldn’t help wondering whether the word “legacy” was also being used to suggest a format that was handed down from a long and venerable tradition.
I remember as a little kid, Walter Cronkite signing off his news with that sentiment, “And that’s the way it is.” My folks got their news from the evening editions on television, the morning newspaper, and radio. I was more interested in my friends, outdoor games, catching fireflies, and cookouts. Walter probably reported on maybe the Vietnam war, economic news, crime, and so forth. Life went on, we gathered together for dinner, and when the street lights came on, I knew I better get home to eat.
me in my tracks. (I seem to be doing a lot of that lately.) She said, “Black Lives Matter has gone mainstream.”
At 
“Among the many firsts, last year’s election gave us the gobsmacking revelation that most of the mainstream media puts both thumbs on the scale—that most of what you read, watch, and listen to is distorted by intentional bias and hostility. I have never seen anything like it. Not even close.”
