Some of us are old enough to remember Walter Cronkite saying, "And that's the way it is," and give the date at the end of each news broadcast. Cronkite was the consummate professional. No one knew that Cronkite considered himself a liberal until long after he retired to his yacht. That was the way it used to be. But not anymore. Americans have grown numb to the bias in the mainstream media. However, one veteran of corporate media thinks that perhaps Americans are getting weary of hearing the opinions of the media and not just the facts and that their days might be numbered. Could she be right?
Former Fox News Channel anchor and now Sirius XM host Megyn Kelly appeared on a podcast hosted by retired Navy SEAL and CIA contractor Shawn Ryan. Kelly posited an interesting scenario. She stated that she believes that "Americans are 'living in the end times' of corporate media" and that they may ultimately be headed for extinction.
Kelly pointed out the general automatic negative coverage by the media of anything remotely related to Republicans and conservatives but then drilled down specifically to coverage of President Joe Biden's mental health. She said:
“Hello, we have a whole White House Press corp that didn’t figure out he was being visited regularly by a Parkinson’s doctor. You think they’d missed that with Trump?... They had no interest in finding out anything bad about Joe Biden. So I do think they’ll just drive more people away but they’re already dying."
So, is Megyn Kelly on to something? Is mainstream corporate media dying a slow, hideous death? What Kelly is pointing out could be the media smack in the middle of that slow death. The media's eventual demise has been in the making for some time as "citizen journalists," those who had no ties to any corporate media entity and were usually conservatives telling the side of the story the media wouldn't, began to emerge. People like Matt Drudge, who many credit with breaking the Monica Lewinsky story, and the late Andrew Breitbart, who wasn't afraid to call out the media for playing fast and loose with the truth, whether it was by commission or omission. It was people like Drudge and Breitbart who paved the way for an entire industry to be born. That industry has expanded in a way Drudge or Breitbart would have never imagined, and now, thanks to the internet, it also includes podcasts.
Americans have gone on to get their news and information from a variety of independent news sources. Many of those news sources lean decidedly left or right, but unlike the mainstream media, which continues to try to convince Americans that they are neutral, they are upfront about who they are. Americans are well aware of what they will find at "The Daily Caller" or "The Daily Beast." But the best part of independent news sources is that they will rise or fall based on whether they want to conduct their business with journalistic integrity.
Kelly also pointed out the views that corporate media supports that average Americans do not, like men competing in women's sports, open borders, and amnesty for illegal immigrants. She stated, "That’s not mainstream. Seventy percent, more really, but 70% of the Americans polled say they don’t want it."
Shawn Ryan asked Megyn Kelly the all-important question: what does she think will be the final "nail in the coffin" for mainstream corporate media? Her answer was a second term for Donald Trump, ironically, the one subject they have gotten so many viewers, listeners, and readership from. Kelly stated:
“They’ll do the same thing they did the first time. Everything will be negative, he will be the devil incarnate. They will find their oppositional media roots again, which they totally forgot during the Biden years.
Is the "jump-the-shark" ruin of the mainstream corporate media inevitable? That depends on the American people. If the media keeps assuming they are unintelligent dimwits who they can keep spoonfeeding erroneous information to when there are plenty of places to go for the correct information, the end times could certainly be near.