Why I want Dems to rely on MSM

39 shopping days left until the inauguration

Ryan Cooper is the Prospect’s managing editor. He wrote, “Democrats Lost the Propaganda War.

“The party used up about $5 billion on political ads in 2024. There’s a better way.”

Kamala raised $1.5 billion and spent $1.52 billion, three times what Trump raised and spent. Cooper did not consider that maybe Trump won because he was open and honest with the public while Kamala kept trying to hide her communist within.

But being a media type, he believes all that Marshall McLuhan jazz about “the medium is the message.” For clinging 50-year-old sophism, I thank Cooper because as long as Democrats beat up the messenger, they will hang on to that message that fails to resonate with voters.

In his post-mortem, he said, “I believe two things happened here. First and most importantly, there is a vast and exceptionally well-funded right-wing propaganda machine that pipes Republican messaging directly into tens of millions of homes, day in and day out, influencing people both directly and through conversations with families and neighbors.”

Those dastardly billionaires bankrolled “conversations with families and neighbors.” Silence! We need a new Don’t Talk, Don’t Tell policy.

Cooper then said, “Second, the mainstream media, for a variety of sociological and political reasons—including outright meddling from Trump-supporting billionaire owners—refused to give Trump the full-blown scandal treatment, with many consecutive days of inflammatory headlines and articles, no matter what he did. Democrats have relied on the MSM to do their messaging for them, but they did not and will not do it.”

He acts as if there were no daily coverage of Trump’s three trials in New York alone. Courtroom sketch artists made a mint. The reality is, the convictions and civil verdicts against him backfired just like that mugshot that Democrats coveted for so long.

Mainstream media carried the Kool-Aid for Democrats. Voters pissed in it. The message of making your daughter share the shower with a man failed. The message of turning your son into a girl failed. The message of teachers talking about gay in kindergarten failed.

These are side issues, the left now declares but that begs the question of why did the left fight so hard for them?

Trump was wiser. He ignored his role in overturning Roe-Wade. The Des Moines Register assured its readers that the abortion issue would carry Iowa by 3 points for Kamala. Trump won by 13.

We won, why brag? Especially after losing the midterms.

Democrats are stuck on wanting to kill the messenger and I hope they continue to blame the mainstream media for Democrat losses because that keeps them from ditching their message and their aims.

After Mike Dukakis lost in 1988 to the third consecutive Republican landslide, Bill Clinton led the movement to abandon the Democrat platform of acid, amnesty and abortion—having accomplished the last two. They embraced gun control and being tough on crime. It was a winner.

Now I want them to keep bowing to LGBT, illegal aliens and whining about Trump because all three issues are losers. Trannies set LGBT back a couple of decades. Gay Pride Month is on its way to being another Arbor Day.

The public wants the deportations to begin yesterday. Mayor Adams in New York is telling illegals there is no room at the inn because illegals are draining the city’s budget. Not that Hizzoner should care because I am sure the kickbacks are large from paying luxury rents to luxury hotels to house illegals in Home Alone 2 suites.

Adams said, “We’re not going to be a safe haven for those who commit repeated violent crimes against innocent migrants, immigrants and longstanding New Yorkers. That was my conversation today with the [incoming] border czar, to figure out how to go after those individuals who are repeatedly committing crimes in our city.”

Hmm. Biden indicting Adams worked about as well as Biden indicting Trump.

But mainly the anti-Trump campaign failed because voters knew what Trump did as president and preferred him to FJB.

Relying on the legacy media to carry that message was a hilarious error. These cats were wrong about Trump so many times that the media is now a joke.

How out of touch is the media? Yesterday, the cable news and network news outlets droned on and on about Boris Epshteyn. Was he the prime minister of England or the president of Russia? I forget.

Oh, some Democrat shills do blame the media but for the wrong reason.

Josh Marshall wrote in his paywalled site, “Republicans are like the weather. Destructive and unpredictable, perhaps capricious and sometimes dangerous. But who shouts at the rain? Those are the deeply carved grooves into which our elite media narratives all turn. How else do you explain the vastly bigger press uproar over Biden’s pardon than a notorious charlatan who’s promised to abuse his power at every opportunity being on a fast track to take over federal law enforcement?”

Ah, Hillary’s VRWC whine returns. It did not age well in 30 years.

Meanwhile, conservative social media flourishes because it didn’t get the 2016 or 2024 elections wrong and it is diverse. Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly built up audiences on TV, got kicked to the curb and now flourish online and in Kelly’s case, Sirius XM.

Decades of media adoration made Democrats fat and lazy. Unchallenged by reporters, their debating skills dulled. Conservatives upped their game. Scott Jennings now dominates CNN discussion panels. It is called preparation.

Democrats tried paying people to tweet. But money can’t buy you love. Kamala did a podcast or two. But she is incoherent without a script. The campaign bought celebrity endorsements. But Dylan Mulvaney already showed what a disaster that can be.

Still, the left blames the media for its lousy message.

Cooper at Prospect wrote, “In short, Democrats Lost the Propaganda War, which brings me back to local news. A poll back in April, before Biden dropped out, found that he was winning voters who get their news from newspapers by 49 percentage points, while Trump was winning those who don’t follow political news at all by 26 points. No doubt that is partly demographics, but also partly due to opportunity: In a large chunk of the country, there is no local paper even available, and in a much larger chunk the few papers that remain are private equity–gutted carcasses with little aside from Associated Press reprints.

“A recent study by Paul Farhi and John Volk at Northwestern found an even more stark gap in the worst-off counties. Trump won 91% of news desert counties—where there is no local coverage of any kind—by an average of 54 percentage points. Notably, several of these are heavily Latino counties on the southern Texas border, which saw enormous swings toward Trump.”

The reason there are no newspapers is there are not enough advertisers and newspaper readers. The papers shrank physically and spiritually. Cooper blamed Facebook and Google but Craig’s List wiped out half the classified ads nearly 30 years ago. With that $2 per line cash cow gone, the downward spiral accelerated.

Without newspapers, who was left to carry Kamala? Not one.

Cooper came up with a good one, telling readers, “Democratic funders could set up new local papers in strategic counties, or buy up some of the remaining husks and staff them up. I would just put together a bog-standard paper with some liberal editorials, but one could make it tabloid-y or explicitly partisan to taste. Lord knows there are plenty of unemployed journalists willing to work. Sample subscriptions could be handed out en masse, and revenue bolstered by directing liberal advertisements their way. A dozen such papers could be run for half a decade with maybe a tenth of what liberals spent on 2024 election ads.”

Democrat funders brought the Charleston (WV) paper out of bankruptcy. The state continued to go red. West Virginia was second only to Wyoming in supporting Trump in his three presidential wins.

But yes, build a newspaper empire, which is your way to becoming a millionaire—if you are a billionaire.

I hope Democrats keep focusing on the medium and not the message because the more they broadcast their terrible message, the more we Make America Great Again.