re: #26 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

The squeaky wheel gets the oil.

For every viewer of those Fox programs there will be 10 others who agree with them.

But those “tiny minority” are much larger than audiences for other shows (whether contemporary event or not.)

Again, my comment was in reference to why outlets like the NYT seem to bend over backwards to appeal to Trumping masses.

It’s because NYT is a business, and the biggest markets for “news” are the old white folk.

I really don’t think this is true. As has been shown in elections, the hardcore right that every major media outlet tries to pander to is a minority. Even if they are a sizable minority, it doesn’t make good business sense for all of these outlets - CNN, NYT, FOX, OANN, Epoch Times, even MSNBC - to try to compete for the same minority, even if that minority is comprised of especially gullible people. Business 101 suggests that it would make more sense to try to capture a market that nobody else is even competing for, especially if that market is a majority.

We must conclude, then, that it’s not about business, money, clicks, page views, or anything like that at all. These media outlets aren’t catering to reactionary white people in order to capture their business. Instead, outlets like CNN and the NYT see themselves as the arbiters of American culture, as the ‘mainstream’. And the people that decide the news narratives don’t see it as their job to follow the trending viewpoints of Americans, but rather to determine them. They are reality shows. And like any reality show, they see it as their job to create a narrative that will resonate with people so that their target audience will internalise it. And the nature of America is that the only ‘target audience’ that has ever mattered in this country is average white people. Their opinions are sacred and cannot be wrong, even if they’re not exactly right. What we call bothsiderism is basically just the arbiters of US culture trying to give credibility to any stupid crap that a large number of white people think, for no other reason than ‘a large number of white people’ cannot be wrong.

Outlets like FOX, on the other hand, aren’t trying to give that same target audience credibility. They know that whatever they say becomes what that target audience thinks. So they make something up and set the story, several million white people chant it in unison, and the NYT then accepts it as automatically valid because average white people think it. No matter what it is, it can’t be wrong, so it becomes part of the narrative, so that the only demographic that matters in America will internalise it.