Let’s face it — our elitist media had a very bad weekend. To fully delight in just how demoralized they all are today, we must first imagine their gleeful sense anticipation on Friday afternoon — like spoiled children on the day of their birthday party thinking only of ponies: “Stock market dives on Friday – yay! Anti-gun march Saturday – yessss! Stormy arrives Sunday – squeeel!! New polls on Trump’s job approval numbers Monday – whoo-hoo!”
And then…
Ker-splat.
Saturday’s attendance at the anti-gun march was, to say the least, quite underwhelming, especially when you consider all the energy our unbiased, objective media spent advertising it. The fallout from the march was even worse.
On Sunday, the super-hyped 60 Minutes interview with Stormy Daniels fizzled, landed with such a dud that is all anyone talked about Monday. The 21 million viewers might have delivered the newsmagazine its best night in a decade, but it was still way less than half of the 49 million who tuned in to see Monica Lewinsky’s 1999 interview.
Also on Monday came a huge bump for Trump’s job approval rating and…
A near-record day for the stock market.
To add insult to injury, last week, between the media’s porn-porn-porn-gungrab-gungrab-gungrab, they told us that President McStupidCrazyRacist had just launched a disastrous trade war and the apocalypse what nigh.
And then this and this happened.
Oh, and all the polls taken during the Stormy-era show the Republican Party in much better shape to house the House.
Oops.
The CNN-ization of the entire news media, this Zucker-ification against Trump that focuses only on nonsense and left-wing activism, has failed so hard, some within the media are actually wondering if the media should not focus more, say, issues the public actually cares about.
Amy Walter of the Cook Report tweeted Tuesday, “One reason why media gets low ratings: non-stop coverage of Stormy Daniels, little to none on top issue for Americans – health care/p. drug cost and access. Which one do you think matters more to their day to day lives?”
The National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar followed up with a “wonder” of his own — a wonder that wondered if the media ignoring the GOP’s “policy vulnerabilities” can explain all this wonder.
“[W]onder if all this Stormy Daniels talk HELPS Republicans — contrary to the CW of this week. Lots of people watching, but is anyone surprised at all about the salacious details alleged? And less talk about actual policy vulnerabilities,” he tweeted.
Even the far-left Hollywood Reporter published a long lament.
The other night, I succumbed to temptation. I lapped up every second of 60 Minutes’ Stormy Daniels interview, just like 20 million Americans and countless others around the world. My only regret was that there wasn’t more, which might explain why the ratings dropped off so precipitously. Once Daniels had made her exit, who needed to keep watching? The show started with a climax, so to speak, and went down from there.
I left the program feeling deflated. But it wasn’t because the interview disappointed. It was because I’d bought into the argument that it mattered in the first place, that everything to do with Daniels is Real News.
Real News is what’s going on in Syria and Yemen and Saudi Arabia and Iran. Real News is the hundreds of thousands of students who demonstrated in favor of gun control. Real News is the horror that 700,000-plus DACA kids may face if the government deports them. Real News is a budget that was just passed, with such token coverage by the broadcast media that I couldn’t even tell you what was in it.
Behind the scenes in MediaBubbleLand, there is no doubt that many Media Provincials are privately licking wounds and wondering the same.
But does anyone think we would see all this second guessing and sudden concern over The Issues That Matter To The American People if this weekend had not spectacularly backfired, had Trump’s approval rating done what the far-left CNN was expecting — dropped seven points to 28 percent as opposed to climbing eight points to 43 percent?
Our disgraced media seem to have forgotten four things…
1) The impossible-to-shame media’s partisan hypocrisy on the issue of personal matters. Former-President Bill Clinton was all about extra-marital affairs, even while president in the Oval Office. The media protected him, and protected him even more when he was credibly accused of harassment (Paula Jones won a judgment and $850,000), groping (by a Democrat), and even rape.
But now the media are freaking out because a man who has never presented himself as our moral savior might have had two consensual affairs 12 freakin’ years ago?
Please.
2) When the Republican Party went hard after Clinton over his private life, his job approval numbers also improved. The public does not like what they see as politically-motivated moral witch hunts.
3) It’s the economy, you stupes. While the media try to create a moral panic over something as dumb as a consensual boink 12 years ago, as the media’s wild-eyed conspiracy theories about Russian collusion collapse into a pile of Obama/FBI scandals, Trump has kept his eye on the ball, has done his job, and now his economy has inspired confidence, real job growth, and economic growth.
4) CNN is a last-place ratings catastrophe and a national laughingstock. Why would any sane news outlet follow the lead of a proven failure?
The good news is that there is no coming back for the media. As a moral authority, as a swayer of public opinion, the institution is deceased through an act of credibility-suicide.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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