They have called it the "prestige press." But what good is this alleged prestige when the audience walks away?
Liberal media outlets have so obsessed with carrying water for liberals, particularly if they are anti-Trump, that - not a newsflash! - slowly but surely they have lost audience. And lost that audience to the peril of survival itself.
Case in point? The Washington Post, those agitators against "Democracy Dying in Darkness."
Here are a few recent headlines about the Democrats’ favorite newspaper in the nation’s capital.
From the Post Millennial:
BREAKING: Washington Post has lost nearly 90% of its audience since 2021: report
From 2021 to 2024 daily traffic dropped by 20 million.
From the Associated Press:
Washington Post report: Subscriber loss after non-endorsement reaches a quarter million
From The Hill:
Washington Post loses 75K subscribers after Bezos-ordered op-ed pivot
From The Wrap:
Washington Post Has Lost 500,000 Subscribers Since Biden Took Office
The legacy publication is not expected to generate a profit this year
And the Post is not alone. It’s leftwing compadre the New York Times has drawn headlines like these:
From Reuters:
New York Times forecasts subscription revenue below estimates on stiff competition
From The Wrap:
New York Times Says Missed Revenue Impacted by Advertisers ‘Avoiding Some Hard News Topics’ Like Israel-Gaza War
Digital ad revenue fell 3.7% year-over-year, with five fewer days in the quarter and declines from podcasts and creative services
From Insider:
New York Times Loses Subscribers After Revealing Whistleblower Details
From the UK’s Press Gazette:
Third of New York Times subscribers do not pay for its news product
The number of news-only NYT subscribers dropped 30% year-on-year as the company encouraged them onto "bundled" subs.
From Harvard’s MBA Student Perspectives:
Finding the New York Times’ Lost Subscribers
And this type of story is not restricted to the East Coast liberal favorites. From out on the West Coast are stories like these:
From Adweek:
The Los Angeles Times Said to Have Lost $50 Million in 2024, as Subscription and Ad Losses Mount
From The Wrap:
The Los Angeles Times in Crisis: Stalled Subscriptions, Drowsy Leadership, Slack Channel Trash Talk (Exclusive)
“This very much feels like a sink-or-swim moment for the paper,” a veteran reporter says
From Seattle’s Post Alley:
Staring into the Abyss: The Seattle Times’ Kafkaesque Subscription System
And from that dot of leftism in Texas:
Austin American-Statesman canceling Saturday print edition, ramping up digital
One could go on - and on and on - with similar headlines, realizing what they all have in common, beyond the decline of newspapers in general.
They are left-leaning - sometimes far-left leaning - journals. And in the increasingly conservative Age of Trump (and even before!) the hard fact is that at the grassroots level American readers in those and other areas mentioned above simply are not interested in reading the same old, same old leftist and now anti-Trump propaganda. Propaganda that they have voted against when in the quiet of their polling places.
This fact has been duly (and amazingly!) noted in the precincts of the Columbia Journalism Review. The CJR headlined this all the way back in the Stone Age of 2019:
How conservative media has grown under Trump
Amusingly, an alarmed CJR has also headlined:
What if the right-wing media wins?
Conservative critics of the press want more than just a louder voice. They want The New York Times and The Washington Post to go away.
Safe to say, to answer the CJR question, “right-wing media” is already winning. And for a reason.
Take but one incident from just the last week. There in the heart of left-leaning Manhattan, home to a defund the police movement, a guy armed with an M4 rifle walked brazenly into an office building housing, among others, offices of the NFL, and, without a cop to stop him before he got inside proceeded to shoot and kill four people before turning the gun on himself.
The message delivered almost instantly by outlets of the conservative media -in New York that meant the New York Post - was that defunding the police was a seriously bad policy. (Ya think?) And the Post, the prime “conservative media” outlet in New York City was right there to hold to account the far-left, socialist New York City Democrat mayoral selection Zohran Mamdani, headlining:
Zohran Mamdani explicitly backs off unpopular ‘defund’ police stance after officer shot dead in Park Avenue horror
Which is to say, it is more than plausible to ask if there were no conservative New York Post to hold Mamdani to account whether the candidate literally labelled a Communist by his Republican opposition would be, after the shooting, backtracking.
Bottom line?
All the way back there in the modern media Stone Age era of 1955, when conservative William F. Buckley Jr. launched the ground-breaking National Review conservative magazine, there was no such thing as conservative media. From Buckley’s journalistic seed and the rise of modern technology that brought along talk radio, cable television and the Internet, conservative media grew like, as they say, topsy. Producing stars like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck and, eventually, Fox News, Newsmax, and sites on the Internet like this one - the Media Research Center’s NewsBusters.
And yes, without doubt, in part because of the Left’s self-inflicted craziness - and in today’s world it’s Trump Derangement Syndrome - the liberal media has and is losing considerable ground to conservative media.
And as the headlines above illustrate - newsflash! - only the Left is shocked about this.
