Really good article.
Donald Trump broke the conservative media
*snip*
In fact, throughout the election season, it has appeared that Republicans have fielded more attacks from their supposed friends on the right than their political opponents on the left. It's an incidental twist, considering how Republicans helped foster the growth of the conservative news media in order to avoid the skewering of mainstream journalists.
Instead, it appears their plan of using friendly pundits to tap directly into the vein of red-blooded Americans sympathetic to their political views has backfired. That has boosted the candidacy of Donald Trump, who last week named Steve Bannon, the former chair of the Trump-friendly Breitbart News, as his campaign's CEO.
"The analogy that I think of is somebody who has a baby alligator in their bathtub and they keep feeding it and taking care of it," said Charlie Sykes, a popular conservative talk show host in Wisconsin. "And it's really cute when it's a baby alligator — until it becomes a grown-up alligator and comes out and starts biting you."
"There's a certain sense that these guys were empowered, but they were empowered when these guys thought they were on the same side. There was a time when Breitbart was edgy, but on the mainstream of conservative," he said, referring to the website founded by the late Andrew Breitbart. "And people actually thought we were all pulling in roughly the same direction."
"I think that, in retrospect, they really did empower the instruments of their own destruction," Sykes said of the GOP.
The roots of the conservative news media industrial complex came in the 1990s with the rise of three key forces: Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Matt Drudge.
All broke ground and revolutionized their respective platforms: Fox News opinion programming on TV, Limbaugh on radio, and Drudge on the web.
In the years that followed, many emulated their successes. What Limbaugh did with talk radio paved the way for hosts like Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, and more. And what Drudge did with the internet helped spawn a slew of conservative websites. Breitbart, TheBlaze, The Daily Caller, Hot Air, and Townhall came online to serve a right-leaning audience with an insatiable appetite for news told through a conservative lens.
But in the 1990s, the conservative press was not very hostile to politicians on the right. In its formative era, the conservative-media movement mostly played friendly with Republicans. It instead spent its energy zeroing in on President Bill Clinton. Perhaps the peak came with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, during which the conservative media relentlessly hammered the president.
For the most part, Republicans and the conservative media existed symbiotically. Republicans used their newfound apparatus as a vehicle to drive home their message to supporters. Simultaneously, the conservative news media sought to lock in its audience by characterizing the mainstream press as an industry comprising dishonest liberals — something with which the GOP was more than happy to go along.
"What it became, essentially, was they were preaching this is the only place you can get news. This is the only place you can trust. All other media outlets are lying to you. So you need to come to us," said Ted Newton, president of Gravity Strategic Communications and former communications adviser to 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
"And so in an attempt to capture an audience, they almost made them slaves to those news outlets. So there is a whole group of people who will only watch Fox, who will only read Breitbart. And they are living in a bubble," he added.
*snip*
Fast forward to the beginning of the 2016 election cycle. To avoid being called a RINO (Republican in name only), a Republican would have to take a hardline conservative position on nearly every issue. If, say, they were to hold conservative positions on 90% of the issues, the conservative press would focus on the 10% where there was disagreement.
It appeared that, for conservative media, only one candidate could be conservative enough to support for president: Cruz.
The Texas senator had carefully struck a balance between the various facets of the GOP, positioning himself as traditionally conservative on most issues, but one with a libertarian streak. That made him wildly popular with the conservative press leading up to 2016, and it appeared he had checked all the necessary boxes to easily win approval from its members.
But something went awry. The most aggressive right-wing members of the conservative press — the members who constantly lambasted certain Republicans for not toeing the hard-right line on every issue — got behind perhaps the most unlikely candidate of all: Donald Trump.
"America is a great place to make a living off an identity crisis. I mean, these guys just sold out to the highest bidder," said Rick Tyler, the former communications director for Cruz's presidential campaign. "If you're a conservative, you couldn't have possibly gotten on board with Trump. It's not reconcilable."
*snip*
"We have reached the bizarro-world point where, for all intents and purposes, conservatives are RINOs," said John Ziegler, a nationally syndicated conservative talk show host who called Andrew Breitbart a friend. "There is no place now for real conservatives. We've also reached the point, I say, we've left the gravitational pull of the rational Earth, where we are now in a situation where facts don't matter, truth doesn't matter, logic doesn't matter."
Newton echoed that sentiment.
"You look at someone who a few cycles might have been derided as a right-wing lunatic, now they aren't conservative enough," he said. "People who were darlings of the conservative movement are now RINOs. I consider myself a fairly conservative person on most issues, and you wouldn't believe the kind of hate that is being spewed at me on Twitter. The pendulum has definitely swung."
*snip*
Hannity in particular has faced criticism from some colleagues in the conservative-media sphere who allege he has been too cozy with Trump. Ziegler, the conservative radio host, said there's "there's no question" a "monetary element" drove coverage overall.
"Hannity is desperate for every ratings crumb on the Fox News Channel. ... It's all about ratings," he said. "Hannity is not particularly talented, he's not a smart guy — he used to just be a Republican talking points talk show host who happened to be in the right place at the right time. So he's very vulnerable at any time. He's not entertaining, so he constantly has to make sure his ratings are at the top of the Fox News primetime schedule. So when he started doing Trump material and his ratings go up, he benefited."
*snip*
That has left conservatives who oppose Trump in a tricky position when trying to get their message to supporters. No longer can Ryan or Cruz turn to Hannity for a softball interview. They can't work with Breitbart or rely on Drudge to help with their legislative agenda.
These Republicans have effectively been exiled from the conservative news media, leaving them with a problem.
"They don't have any place to go. How else do you get your message out? You can't do it in the mainstream. This is the way you reach conservatives," Ziegler said. "We have taught conservatives for many years to trust nothing other than what they hear in conservative media. Yet the conservative media has now proven to be untrustworthy."
"You have to go to the old mainstream media and at the end of the day, you will be the only reasonable, rational conservative standing," Sykes said. "That would be the best-case scenario."
*snip*
One of the chief problems, Sykes said, was that it had become impossible to prove to listeners that Trump was telling falsehoods because over the past several decades, the conservative news media had "basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers."
"There's nobody," he lamented. "Let's say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it's a falsehood. The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that, 'By the way, you know it's false.' And they'll say, 'Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.' Or they'll say, 'I saw it on a Facebook page.' And I'll say, 'The New York Times did a fact check.' And they'll say, 'Oh, that's The New York Times. That's bulls---.' There's nobody — you can't go to anybody and say, 'Look, here are the facts.'"
"And I have to say that's one of the disorienting realities of this political year. You can be in this alternative media reality and there's no way to break through it," Sykes continued. "And I swim upstream because if I don't say these things from some of these websites, then suddenly I have sold out. Then they'll ask what's wrong with me for not repeating these stories that I know not to be true."
Ziegler said he faced much of the same problem.
"If you are a conservative talk show host, which I am, if you don't accept that it's likely Hillary Clinton has taken part in multiple murders, or that Barack Obama is a Muslim extremist sympathizer who was probably born outside this country — if you don't accept those two things, it's almost as if you're a sellout. You're a RINO. You're somehow part of the liberal elite. It's nuts. It's making my own show very difficult to do. It's almost where to the point where we are not able to function."
He continued: "It's almost like it's a disease, and it's taken over people. I don't remember this being the case four years ago. But something has happened. Something snapped. But now all of a sudden, if a story comes out, and it's not on Breitbart or endorsed by Drudge, it can't be true. Especially if it's about Donald Trump. Which is flat-out ludicrous."
Donald Trump broke the conservative media
*snip*
In fact, throughout the election season, it has appeared that Republicans have fielded more attacks from their supposed friends on the right than their political opponents on the left. It's an incidental twist, considering how Republicans helped foster the growth of the conservative news media in order to avoid the skewering of mainstream journalists.
Instead, it appears their plan of using friendly pundits to tap directly into the vein of red-blooded Americans sympathetic to their political views has backfired. That has boosted the candidacy of Donald Trump, who last week named Steve Bannon, the former chair of the Trump-friendly Breitbart News, as his campaign's CEO.
"The analogy that I think of is somebody who has a baby alligator in their bathtub and they keep feeding it and taking care of it," said Charlie Sykes, a popular conservative talk show host in Wisconsin. "And it's really cute when it's a baby alligator — until it becomes a grown-up alligator and comes out and starts biting you."
"There's a certain sense that these guys were empowered, but they were empowered when these guys thought they were on the same side. There was a time when Breitbart was edgy, but on the mainstream of conservative," he said, referring to the website founded by the late Andrew Breitbart. "And people actually thought we were all pulling in roughly the same direction."
"I think that, in retrospect, they really did empower the instruments of their own destruction," Sykes said of the GOP.
The roots of the conservative news media industrial complex came in the 1990s with the rise of three key forces: Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Matt Drudge.
All broke ground and revolutionized their respective platforms: Fox News opinion programming on TV, Limbaugh on radio, and Drudge on the web.
In the years that followed, many emulated their successes. What Limbaugh did with talk radio paved the way for hosts like Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, and more. And what Drudge did with the internet helped spawn a slew of conservative websites. Breitbart, TheBlaze, The Daily Caller, Hot Air, and Townhall came online to serve a right-leaning audience with an insatiable appetite for news told through a conservative lens.
But in the 1990s, the conservative press was not very hostile to politicians on the right. In its formative era, the conservative-media movement mostly played friendly with Republicans. It instead spent its energy zeroing in on President Bill Clinton. Perhaps the peak came with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, during which the conservative media relentlessly hammered the president.
For the most part, Republicans and the conservative media existed symbiotically. Republicans used their newfound apparatus as a vehicle to drive home their message to supporters. Simultaneously, the conservative news media sought to lock in its audience by characterizing the mainstream press as an industry comprising dishonest liberals — something with which the GOP was more than happy to go along.
"What it became, essentially, was they were preaching this is the only place you can get news. This is the only place you can trust. All other media outlets are lying to you. So you need to come to us," said Ted Newton, president of Gravity Strategic Communications and former communications adviser to 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
"And so in an attempt to capture an audience, they almost made them slaves to those news outlets. So there is a whole group of people who will only watch Fox, who will only read Breitbart. And they are living in a bubble," he added.
*snip*
Fast forward to the beginning of the 2016 election cycle. To avoid being called a RINO (Republican in name only), a Republican would have to take a hardline conservative position on nearly every issue. If, say, they were to hold conservative positions on 90% of the issues, the conservative press would focus on the 10% where there was disagreement.
It appeared that, for conservative media, only one candidate could be conservative enough to support for president: Cruz.
The Texas senator had carefully struck a balance between the various facets of the GOP, positioning himself as traditionally conservative on most issues, but one with a libertarian streak. That made him wildly popular with the conservative press leading up to 2016, and it appeared he had checked all the necessary boxes to easily win approval from its members.
But something went awry. The most aggressive right-wing members of the conservative press — the members who constantly lambasted certain Republicans for not toeing the hard-right line on every issue — got behind perhaps the most unlikely candidate of all: Donald Trump.
"America is a great place to make a living off an identity crisis. I mean, these guys just sold out to the highest bidder," said Rick Tyler, the former communications director for Cruz's presidential campaign. "If you're a conservative, you couldn't have possibly gotten on board with Trump. It's not reconcilable."
*snip*
"We have reached the bizarro-world point where, for all intents and purposes, conservatives are RINOs," said John Ziegler, a nationally syndicated conservative talk show host who called Andrew Breitbart a friend. "There is no place now for real conservatives. We've also reached the point, I say, we've left the gravitational pull of the rational Earth, where we are now in a situation where facts don't matter, truth doesn't matter, logic doesn't matter."
Newton echoed that sentiment.
"You look at someone who a few cycles might have been derided as a right-wing lunatic, now they aren't conservative enough," he said. "People who were darlings of the conservative movement are now RINOs. I consider myself a fairly conservative person on most issues, and you wouldn't believe the kind of hate that is being spewed at me on Twitter. The pendulum has definitely swung."
*snip*
Hannity in particular has faced criticism from some colleagues in the conservative-media sphere who allege he has been too cozy with Trump. Ziegler, the conservative radio host, said there's "there's no question" a "monetary element" drove coverage overall.
"Hannity is desperate for every ratings crumb on the Fox News Channel. ... It's all about ratings," he said. "Hannity is not particularly talented, he's not a smart guy — he used to just be a Republican talking points talk show host who happened to be in the right place at the right time. So he's very vulnerable at any time. He's not entertaining, so he constantly has to make sure his ratings are at the top of the Fox News primetime schedule. So when he started doing Trump material and his ratings go up, he benefited."
*snip*
That has left conservatives who oppose Trump in a tricky position when trying to get their message to supporters. No longer can Ryan or Cruz turn to Hannity for a softball interview. They can't work with Breitbart or rely on Drudge to help with their legislative agenda.
These Republicans have effectively been exiled from the conservative news media, leaving them with a problem.
"They don't have any place to go. How else do you get your message out? You can't do it in the mainstream. This is the way you reach conservatives," Ziegler said. "We have taught conservatives for many years to trust nothing other than what they hear in conservative media. Yet the conservative media has now proven to be untrustworthy."
"You have to go to the old mainstream media and at the end of the day, you will be the only reasonable, rational conservative standing," Sykes said. "That would be the best-case scenario."
*snip*
One of the chief problems, Sykes said, was that it had become impossible to prove to listeners that Trump was telling falsehoods because over the past several decades, the conservative news media had "basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers."
"There's nobody," he lamented. "Let's say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it's a falsehood. The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that, 'By the way, you know it's false.' And they'll say, 'Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.' Or they'll say, 'I saw it on a Facebook page.' And I'll say, 'The New York Times did a fact check.' And they'll say, 'Oh, that's The New York Times. That's bulls---.' There's nobody — you can't go to anybody and say, 'Look, here are the facts.'"
"And I have to say that's one of the disorienting realities of this political year. You can be in this alternative media reality and there's no way to break through it," Sykes continued. "And I swim upstream because if I don't say these things from some of these websites, then suddenly I have sold out. Then they'll ask what's wrong with me for not repeating these stories that I know not to be true."
Ziegler said he faced much of the same problem.
"If you are a conservative talk show host, which I am, if you don't accept that it's likely Hillary Clinton has taken part in multiple murders, or that Barack Obama is a Muslim extremist sympathizer who was probably born outside this country — if you don't accept those two things, it's almost as if you're a sellout. You're a RINO. You're somehow part of the liberal elite. It's nuts. It's making my own show very difficult to do. It's almost where to the point where we are not able to function."
He continued: "It's almost like it's a disease, and it's taken over people. I don't remember this being the case four years ago. But something has happened. Something snapped. But now all of a sudden, if a story comes out, and it's not on Breitbart or endorsed by Drudge, it can't be true. Especially if it's about Donald Trump. Which is flat-out ludicrous."
