Jerry Shenk: ‘Zombie’ media — the living dead of modern journalism

Traditional sources for national and international news — newspapers and television networks — are interchangeably referred to as “legacy,” “corporate,” or “mainstream” media.

Today, traditional media face a crisis of their own making.

Traditional media’s demise began when they began ignoring their primary market, the majority of potential consumers, and attempting to “make” or “shape” rather than just report the news.

Over time, legacy media lost credibility and public trust by abandoning objectivity and turning against the mainstream of public awareness, opinion and tradition. Adopting and promoting nontraditional, even aberrational social and cultural causes also cost the media dearly.

Media bias wasn’t/isn’t confined to the editorials and related pieces that are clearly meant to convey opinions. Bias overwhelmed “hard news” coverage, too, and alienated consumers who disagreed, plus many looking for straight reporting, but were no longer receiving any from unreliable “mainstream” sources.

Mainstream outlets such as CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, the Associated Press, New York Times and Washington Post sell themselves as centrist and politically neutral. But, traditional media abandoned facts and fairness in pursuit of a liberal agenda long ago. They haven’t been centrist, neutral, or even honest for decades.

It wasn’t just bias, though. We know now that the US Agency for International Development (USAID), effectively a federal slush fund, funneled tens of millions of dollars without congressional oversight to Democrat-friendly media and other radical left-wing causes, domestically and worldwide.

Among many others, media recipients included The Associated Press, Politico, Reuters, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. Any major outlet with a subscription model may have benefited.

In other words, for years, traditional media “news” has been a huge, organized, top-down scam for which unknowing taxpayers have been footing the bill.

But, even without the USAID revelations, the 2024 presidential election may prove to have been a legacy media watershed.

Exhausted by the inconsistencies of first propping up Joe Biden, then Kamala Harris, the media effectively collapsed.

Their pre-Election Day coverage of Kamala Harris was 84 percent positive, and Donald Trump’s was 89 percent negative.

Media cooperated to ignore and/or gloss over Harris’ myriad problems, even though Harris was closely associated with every one of the Biden administration’s damaging blunders, an association in-the-tank media couldn’t offset by pointing to any major accomplishments.

Harris accomplished absolutely nothing positive as vice president. In fact, Harris’ record on illegal immigration and inflation devastated America’s middle-class and lower-quintile households.

Accordingly, Donald Trump’s overwhelming victory was a thorough repudiation of legacy media’s pervasive, impossible-to-hide political bias.

Post-election, left-biased media have been losing once-faithful consumers, and fellow liberals are upset that their “news” sources have no explanation for how they got things so wrong. And, now, everyone knows many were on the government payroll.

It’s uncertain if those consumers will ever return, or are gone for good.

Looking back, Donald Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory produced good times for the anti-Trump mainstream outlets that thrived as central elements of “the #Resistance,” but, this time, things were different.

This time, mainstream media got things unforgivably, embarrassingly wrong a second time; Trump’s favorability ratings have risen above 50 percent for the first time; Trump has assembled a cabinet of whom a majority of Americans approve; and he is acting to accomplish the objectives on which he ran and won a popular vote victory.

Traditional media may recover some disaffected consumers, but nitpicking Trump and criticizing his popular policy goals are unlikely to attract new viewers and subscribers. Moreover, as efforts to advance Trump’s agenda begin to produce positive results — some already have — media opposition will only further discredit them.

Unless they find a cure for their incoherent Trump hatred, traditional media will spend another four years destroying themselves — in the face of stiff competition.

Modern communications technology offers fast internet speeds, nearly universal connectivity, and low entry costs, so, today, traditional sources are hemorrhaging viewers, listeners, and readers across a new media landscape that includes talk radio, web-based alternative media, podcasts, and social media that gradually assumed important roles in presenting balanced national and world news.

Now that many/most Americans disapprove of their obvious mendacity and bias, one wonders, are the traditional media outlets that have already lost their one-time monopoly on the public narrative too calcified to change?

If so, traditional media will merely become a niche, zombies, the living dead of modern journalism.

Contact columnist Jerry Shenk at jshenk2010@gmail.com