Media discovers Republicans buy sneakers too

Trump won every county in West Virginia in 2016, 2020 and 2024. Republicans hold every state office. The last Democrat to win statewide office supported Trump; his Republican opponent did not. Republicans control the state Senate 32-2 and the House 91-9.

On Friday, the local newspaper’s editorial was “A way to get Dems back on track.” Its cartoon was anti-Gaetz. Its three columns were all anti-Republican screeds. In other words, it was a typical day for the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

Its news coverage reflects its editorial page. Its circulation reflects its editorial page too. The paper has already been sold once in bankruptcy court. Support local journalism, it proclaims online. Good luck with that plea for help because 70% of the state voted for Trump.

Michael Jordan famously said “Republicans buy sneakers too.” Nike sold $5 billion worth of Air Jordans through 2022.

Not every newspaper or news organization is suicidal.

MSNBC sent its morning stars — Joe Blow and Mistress Mika — to Mar-a-Lago on bended knee to try to avoid the wrath of the president. He granted them an audience.

They had pretended to be his friend in 2016 and then turned on him once elected. It was a network call.

All of NBC stabbed Trump in the back. It cancelled his hit TV show. Its former president turned CNN into an Obaman mess promoting the Russian hoax and distorting every thing Trump said or did. The media thought they defeated him in 2020, but the raid on his home and four years of persecution backfired.

Trump’s back and this time the people openly are on his side. They want nothing to do with the other side. They are buying their shoes and news elsewhere.

The Wrap reported, “MSNBC Viewership Drops by Half in Days After Trump Victory.”

Translation: Ad revenue dropped in half. This is happening all over the media landscape. You can see why the media is running scared.

Houman David Hemmati, MD, PhD tweeted, “This is a huge deal: the LA Times owner, Dr. Pat Soon Shiong decided to give a lengthy in person interview to Trace Gallagher in which Shiong explained how the election & declining readership pushed him to revamp the entire paper.

“ ‘We’ve conflated news and opinion. We want voices from all sides to be heard... the right, the left, the moderate. We want the news to be just the facts.’ ”

“It was easy for him to put out a tweet, but it’s very rare (if not unprecedented) for the owner of a major national newspaper to go on live TV, admit they’ve messed up for many years by being absolutely one-sided (and wrong), and lay out a plan for fixing it.”

That’s in California, a state that’s maybe 35% Republican.

This year, newspaper presidential endorsements were at a historic low. The Washington Post in a city that is 90% Democrat did not endorse. Jeff Bezos, the newspaper’s owner, spiked a five-part Pulitzer-seeking endorsement of Kamala. Staffers quit, which reduced expenses at the paper that is on track to lose $100 million this year.

Bezos explained in a column:

Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.

Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.

He did not get rich just digging a ditch. His brain worked so hard that, like Lex Luthor, he went bald. Under a second Trump administration, owning the Post is a liability and not the political asset in DC that it has been since FDR arrived from Hyde Park 91 years ago.

Other forms of the media are catching on. Viewership losses and the financial losses they incur are a great instructor. Liberals finally read Economics for Dummies.

The New York Post reported, “ABC brass scramble to bring in pro-Trump voices to The View and other shows: ‘Panic mode.’ ”

Pro-Trump? Meghan McCain’s out. Maybe Marla Maples is in.

Aladdin Umar tweeted, “Comcast is putting MSNBC up for sale.

“CNN just announced massive layoffs coming.

“Maybe the new owners will figure out that lying non-stop to your audience is a lousy business model.”

Trumplican Scott Jennings is doing a lot of shows on CNN since the election.

The New York Post reported, “CNN analyst Scott Jennings went scorched earth defending President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to tap Fox News host and veteran Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense — as he slammed the current Pentagon leadership over its disastrous record.

“Jennings, a former campaign staffer for President George W. Bush, appeared on CNN Tuesday night to discuss Trump’s unorthodox choice to have a cable news personality lead the US military strategy.

“The political strategist passionately went to bat for Hegseth, an Army National Guard officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, against his fellow panelists on the left-leaning broadcaster, which included journalist Carl Bernstein.”

The killer quote from Jennings was:

“He’s got 20 years in the service. Afghanistan, Iraq. Two Bronze Stars. Princeton, Harvard. Yeah, he’s on TV, but so are the rest of us.”

On TV? Not for long for some of them. I expect more appearances by Jennings and fewer by Bernstein next year.

CNN broadcasts in English and not Aramaic. That’s because the vast majority of Americans speak the former and not the latter. You play to your audience. If you want to play to yourself, go to the bathroom and lock the door.

The trickle-down to vendors of news organizations is happening. AP announced, “The Associated Press says buyouts and some layoffs are ahead as it seeks to cut its workforce by 8%.”

With Hamas cutting back, AP staffers will have nowhere left to go.

Not every media outlet needs to go right to survive. Vox will still cater to its lefty consumers. But it ran a piece on Friday, “Pop culture went MAGA before the election did.

“How culture, from Morgan Wallen to Twisters, predicted Trump’s return.”

As Andrew Breitbart declared more than a decade ago, “Politics is downstream from culture.”

Film critics John Nolte and Christian Toto follow that rule. The Babylon Bee is the most important online outlet for conservatives because it makes us laugh — at ourselves and our mortal enemies.

Vox gets it, saying, “In March, Ben Shapiro’s media company the Daily Wire released its first theatrical movie, the ‘satirical’ documentary Am I Racist?, which earned $4.5 million its opening weekend. Currently, it’s the highest-grossing documentary of the year along with a handful of other conservative nonfiction films including the Catholic documentary Jesus Thirsts: The Story of the Eucharist, the Dinesh D’Souza-directed Vindicating Trump, and the creationist movie The Ark and The Darkness all making the top 10 list.”

Meanwhile, woke bombs littered the movie theaters this year. Disney keeps postponing its release of its live action Snow White film because its star feels she’s an entitled Hispanic princess — a Megan Markle from Colombia. She keeps showing her ignorance like an awkward girl in the 1950s showing her slip.

Disney clamped down on Snow Brown.

Breitbart reported, “With her new Disney movie set to open in a few months, Snow White star Rachel Zegler has issued an apology for her recent comments about the presidential election in which she wished harm on President-elect Donald Trump and his 76 million voters, saying she hopes they will ‘never know peace.’

“Rachel Zegler blamed an excess of emotion for her ill-advised comments. ‘I would like to sincerely apologize for the election post I shared on my Instagram last week,’ she wrote in a new Instagram stories post on Friday. ‘I let my emotions get the best of me.’ ”

I expect commercials to lose their wokeness as well. More than half the country is white. They buy shoes too.

Zero Hedge reported, “Comcast, IBM, Disney, Warner Brothers, Discovery and Lionsgate Entertainment have all resumed ad spending on the social media giant - albeit this is more of a toe-dip than a full recommitment. According to Adweek, the brands collectively spent less than $3.3 million on X from January to September 2024, a far cry from the $170 million spent during the same period in 2023.

“Either way, it’s an admission that pulling ad spend over hate speech and anti-Semitism was nothing more than a giant virtue signal, particularly considering Facebook and Instagram's long history of providing a safe forum for child sexual abuse.”

Ouch.

The Michael Jordan Rule has not reached West Virginia journalists yet. Republicans buy shoes, but they don’t buy the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

Oh well, a newspaper can make a go of it with 30% of the possible circulation.