For decades, a recurring motif at Instapundit, where I’ve been co-blogging for over a century, was the saying,” Simply think of the internet as Democratic Party workers with bylines, and it all makes feel”. Glenn Reynolds came up with it, but Steve Green, my co-insta-blogger, and I have since used it.
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Not that we ever had little doubt, but thanks to their gigantic meltdowns last week at the L. A. Times , and , Washington Post, it was good of the media to fully verify Glenn’s hypothesis.
Both documents, each chockablock staffed with party-hack liberals, had their fully expected political endorsements for Kamala Harris squelched by their zillionaire users, Patrick Soon-Shiong at the , L. A. Times, and of course, Jeff Bezos at the WaPo.
Over the weekend, cable media broadcast channels owned by Warner Bros. Despite using Madison Square Garden over the years by both social functions as a popular meeting spot for huge social norms and demonstrations, Discovery and Comcast went all-in on calling a former president and his followers the second coming of the Third Reich when Trump held a rally there.
To know how we got below, the story is told in depth in the highly-readable fresh book” Against the Business Media:  , Forty-Two Ways the Press Hates You”, assembled by Michael Walsh. Walsh is the author of 2015’s” The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and a former director at Time magazine, the later Andrew Breitbart’s first” Big News” Website, and more recently, his own strength independence-themed The Pipeline page.
Walsh’s book is organized into eight chapters, each with articles written by such well-known conservative and libertarian pundits as Jon Gabriel, Andrew Klavan, David Reaboi, John O’Sullivan, Charlie Kirk, John Fund, Mark Hemingway, Monica Crowley, Steve Hayward, the aforementioned Glenn Reynolds, and others, including Walsh himself.
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Ground Zero for the Media Hate Weaponization
One of the most intriguing essays is Monica Crowley’s” Nixon and the Weaponization of Media Hate.” It serves as a reminder that the ongoing policing against former president Trump is not new for what Walsh has described as” a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.” However, Watergate is also presented in a new light by the Trump legal battle. ( As Zhou Enlai never actually said in 1972,” The French Revolution? Too soon to tell”. ) Crowley writes:
I became the professional confidante of a man who had altered American politics, altered global power balances, and was the first significant contemporary casualty of a newly aggressive, partisan, and activist American media during the four years he had been in charge until his passing in 1994.
[…]
The left-leaning press has always had a bias in the modern American press. The difference between the Nixon era and the Nixon era was the level of intensity and the transformation of its bias into direct action. Moreover, Nixon was too odious to be allowed to succeed in their corrupt judgment. When they first thought of his intellectual prowess, political acumen, and transformative agenda as existential threats, they bit into him like a junkyard dog and never let go.
[…]
” There are standards for Democrats, standards for Republicans, then there were standards for me”, he said.
” I was in a totally different category. The press did n’t trust me after]Alger ] Hiss, and they were just out there, circling and waiting…they were n’t interested in Watergate as much as they were interested in getting me on Hiss and on Vietnam. I gave them what they needed, but believe me, Watergate was just the excuse”.
Nixon felt that Watergate’s revelations made it clear that the hidden consequence of the Hiss case was that he had to be defeated as a force immune to the intellectual pathogens of the Left.  ,
If that sounds familiar, it’s because once Nixon’s enemies—including the press—claimed his scalp, they grew increasingly emboldened to hunt other high-profile Republicans, including and most notably President Trump. The press attempted to push the boundaries of weaponized hatred during Nixon’s protracted political career, which ultimately succeeded in extinguishing him. They continued, redoubled their efforts to destroy anyone who threatened their agenda and those of those they protected, armed with that kind of trophy.
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According to Crowley,” In the modern era, Nixon was truly “patient zero” in the fight against a weaponized media… the advent of Richard Nixon transformed journalists into hunters and leaders into the hunted.”
The Life and Death of the Blogosphere
Prior to the arrival of Rush Limbaugh in the early 1990s and Fox News in the middle of that decade, the first national radio networks established a virtual one-party monopoly in the 1920s. By the end of the ‘ 90s, the combination of always-on broadband Internet and cheap, sometimes free, easy-to-use self-publishing platforms gave birth to an alternative conservative media, such as Matt Drudge in his site’s original incarnation, with, in its first years, Andrew Breitbart as his lieutenant. Additionally, some more self-published libertarian and centrist journalists, including Andrew Sullivan, Virginia Postrel, and Mickey Kaus, made an appearance. Then in August of 2001, Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, decided to launch Instapundit, originally on the Google-owned Blogger.com platform.
In his essay for Against The Corporate Media,” The Birth of the Blogosphere”, Glenn writes:
We live today in a post-blogospheric media age. The blogosphere has n’t completely vanished, but it no longer serves the primary function it did between roughly 2002 and 2008. This is both the product of the evolution of the media and of some highly consciously chosen actions by some influential players in technology and government. The blogosphere’s successors, such as Facebook and Twitter, lack its independence, its decentralization, and its free-flowing nature. On the other hand, these organizations have empowered ordinary people to fight back against government- and media-initiated disinformation in a way that maintains the finest tradition of the classical blogosphere, which is very much against the wishes of their creators.
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The nostalgia that is contained within the phrase” the classical blogosphere” serves as a reminder of the deliberate error that so many bloggers made when they switched to Twitter and Facebook and abandoned their individual blogs:
Over the following years, many people who had previously read and published blogs drew in to the walled gardens of the likes of Facebook and Twitter. The allure was seductive: less hassle and overhead, easier access to an audience, improved ability to actually connect with people you knew. And for a while, there was n’t much of a downside.  , Unsurprisingly, plenty of people left the blogosphere behind.
Then, starting in the mid-2010s, these walled gardens started slamming the gates shut. From being free-speech zones, they became increasingly Orwellian patches overseen by “fact checkers” who made up facts, and” Trust and Safety Councils” whom no reasonable person could trust, and from whom no criticism of the dominant narrative was safe. I have a strong suspicion that this was not an accident, but rather a recognition by hippies as The Establishment that unrestricted media were a threat to their hegemony.
[…]
After the 2016 election, this trend grew even more so after the Covid narrative, when all kinds of entirely accurate information were suppressed in the name of” safety.” Even though it was accurate, the Hunter Biden laptop story was shut down, to the point where Twitter blocked sharing links to the story even in direct messages. ( After my column on Hunter Biden’s laptop was spiked, I switched from my weekly column at USA Today to writing one for the New York Post. )
But now there’s some pushback. Elon Musk purchased Twitter, now known as X, and despite its politicized staff trying to stop his free speech campaign from happening again, the platform is fundamentally different from what it was. This has made Facebook and other platforms have to somewhat relax the censorship. Substack, a free-speech platform that functions  , almost like a blog-hosting site, but with subscription and revenue features, has attracted a large number of independent writers, including  , some old-time bloggers—Andrew Sullivan and Virginia Postrel have  , moved there, and I have a Substack site where I publish a lengthy essay every week—and people like Bari Weiss who have left Big Media platforms to escape censorship and groupthink.
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Recommended: ‘ Megalopolis’: Making Sense of Francis Ford Coppola’s Fever Dreams
The Bezos Epiphany ,
A veteran media grandee frequently emerges at the end of or immediately following every presidential election, and vows that they have learned their lesson and will never do it again. It’s rare that the actual owner of a publication issues a mea culpa, but on Monday, in a piece at the newspaper he owns headlined,” The hard truth: Americans do n’t trust the news”, Jeff Bezos wrote ( or had written for him under his byline ):
Journalists and the media have consistently fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress, in the annual public surveys about trust and reputation. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our industry is currently the least reputable of all. Something we are doing is obviously ineffective.
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 equally crucial 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. The majority of people think that the media is biased. Anyone who does n’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. A victim mentality will not help us as we continue to lose credibility over time and with it, which is easy to blame. Complaining is not a strategy. To improve our credibility, we must exert more control over what we can control.
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To understand why the media has fallen to this point over the last 50 years,” Against The Corporate Media” is indispensable. Since this review started with an” Insta-phrase”, allow me to come full circle and end with one as well:” Read the whole thing”.
