For quite a few decades, the mainstream media (MSM) has enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the entirety of newsprint and broadcasting. This media could select stories to publish and could embellish, suppress and distort whatever they wished. Their business model evolved and depended on news control.
Under the Obama administration, the MSM became particularly lazy and corrupt. Not only were many administration appointees in some way related to media personalities, but the exchanges of information “under the table” were all too common. While this collusion benefitted the MSM and the Obama administration, it undermined the principles espoused in the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights where freedom of the press was specially set aside to protect the public.
President Trump is developing a new and more distributed media news structure. Instead of some ten or so MSM gatekeepers, there is now the potential for hundreds of different news outlets to educate the public. Breitbart News, Christian Broadcast Network, Conservative Treehouse, Gateway Pundit, Daily Caller, local news (like the Virginia Gazette) and even bloggers now have access to the highest levels of the administration to ask new and previously suppressed or ignored questions. In addition, the President, through the use of twitter and direct contact with the American people, is making the MSM less relevant. The MSM doesn’t like this one bit.
Under these new circumstances, it is not unusual for the MSM to pull every stunt in the book to undermine the integrity of the Trump administration. There is real loss of corporate profitability when advertisers find themselves having to reduce their budgets for the MSM in order to spread the limited dollars more broadly. There is real loss of journalistic reputation as many MSM pundits find themselves in competition with newly emergent thinkers (especially on the conservative side). In an ideological sense, the MSM has lost the propaganda advantage that previously favored the socialist and globalist agenda.
The bottom line is that the behavior of the MSM is quite self-serving. They are in a panic over lost revenue and reputation, and sense that their survival as top dog at the apex of the news pyramid is slipping and crumbling. They are right to be concerned. They have worked against the interests of the American citizenry, and the fury that is being directed at them is not about to stop any time in the near future.
