National Review Takes on the Right-Wing Mass Media
Published at 09:02 on 9 August 2016
This is an interesting article because it comes from a conservative source and basically confirms what the Left has been saying about there being a right-wing echo chamber in the media.
It does contradict the Left’s line about the media in general being pro-Establishment… at first glance. But it’s not too hard to see reality seeping in:
Besides the fact that left-leaning mainstream news outlets help Democrats get their message out, they have the additional benefit of helping Democrats refine their own policies and messages. Smart Democratic strategists know that if a scandal is a problem to their unaffiliated sympathizers in the press, it is something worth taking seriously.
By and large, conservatives have no such positive feedback loops. Instead, the Right’s media monoculture has created negative feedback loops whereby people with little political acumen like Mark Levin, Michael Savage, and Glenn Beck are able to fill Republican voters’ heads with nonsensical ideas like planning to shut down the government with no backup plan or electing fewer GOP officeholders in pursuit of more “pure” ones, primarily because they grossly overestimate the number of conservatives in America. It is poetic justice that many of the same people who pushed these naive positions and strategies saw their own imbecilic noise machine turned against their preferred presidential candidate, Ted Cruz, in this year’s Republican primaries.
In other words, implicitly an admission that the “left-leaning” mainstream media actually isn’t as biased in the liberal direction as conservative sources like Fox News are to the right.
And yes, the echo chamber does seem to be hurting the ideological camp that invented it. Poetic justice indeed.