Conservative Media Is DOMINATING, Far Left Media FAILING
Conservative Media Is DOMINATING, Far Left Media FAILING. Fox News hosted a town hall with Bernie Sanders which shocked the left and the right. But time and time again it seems Fox News is willing to bring on left wing, far left, regressive left, and even social justice activists to have conversations where as MSNBC and CNN often don't allow adversarial opinions.As the left embraces regressive policies and refuses to engage moderates are looking for honest conversations. It seems that as time goes on the far left is either admittedly lying, like a Vox personality claimed they did, or refusing to engage in honest conversations.MSNBC ratings couldn't even break 100k viewers in the key demo and CNN struggled. Fox news ratings are often substantially higher than MSNBC and CNN and at the same time conservative news is absolutely dominating Facebook engagement.It seems that the left is fractured in more than one way and Mainstream Media chasing after various far left narratives are destroying themselves.
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The ratings are in, and Fox News is consistently destroying the other cable news networks in terms of viewership.
We also have a report from a group called News Whip showing that conservative media is dominating online in rather interesting ways.
The other night, Fox News hosted a town hall with Bernie Sanders.
Of all people, many people on the left were shocked that Fox News would do this, thinking that Bernie would, quote, burst their bubble.
And that's what they think happened.
But in reality, we see Fox News bringing on Donna Brazile, Democrat.
And even Donald Trump was shocked to see that they're doing this.
But it seems like Fox News is actually doing a better job of being moderate and mainstream than many left-wing media outlets.
The data keeps coming in, and in a rather shocking turn, the ratings for MSNBC this weekend are abysmal.
Lower than 100,000 viewers in the key demo.
Dare I say it, I think conservative media is dominating and maybe taking over.
Because not only are the ratings up, up, up, but left-wing media is laying off their staff and shrinking today.
Let's take a look at what's going on in this town hall, and then take a look at the terrifyingly bad ratings for CNN and MSNBC.
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But now, back to the story.
The story today from the Washington Post.
Bernie Sanders pierces the Fox News bubble, but only for a flickering moment.
The story begins, Senator Bernie Sanders went where the Democratic Party is unwilling to tread on Monday, participating in a lengthy town hall interview on Fox News.
The questions posed by Fox anchors Brett Baier and Martha McCallum aimed at poking holes in
Sanders' political rhetoric. But by the time the event had ended, it was Fox News' bubble
that had been pierced. Rest assured, the damage was quickly repaired as the network's programming
continued over the course of the evening. Before we talk about some of the issues
pertaining to the town hall, I want to mention something. A lot of people seem to think that
when a journalist pushes back on someone or challenges their idea, it's because they disagree.
But that's not the case.
If I ask someone a hard question, it's to see if they have an answer or have a thought-out position on what they're talking about.
That's normal for any journalist, and you shouldn't assume simply because I challenge their idea, I disagree with them.
Which is what the Washington Post seems to be doing with Bernie Sanders and Brett Baier.
Brett Baier needs to challenge the person at the town hall.
It's what they do.
CNN did the same thing to Bernie and Tulsi Gabbard.
But the response to me, it's kind of weird.
On Vox, they say, Bernie Sanders' Fox News town hall wasn't a debate, but Bernie won anyway.
In it, they have this clip from Jordan Ull that says, Brett Baier just polled the Bernie town hall audience, who would be willing to switch to Medicare for All.
It backfired spectacularly.
I don't think that makes sense, though.
I don't believe Bret Baier was trying to prove a point, at least not from this clip.
It just looks like Bret Baier asks a simple question and people raise their hand.
Bret Baier isn't known to be one of the partisan hosts of Fox News.
He's a news anchor.
He's not a primetime opinion guy.
The framing of this is really interesting.
It's rather adversarial.
They're shocked!
They think that Fox News is trying to get ya!
When in reality, Brett is probably just doing what a journalist is supposed to do.
And let's not forget that Fox News also has Shep Smith, who repeatedly gets ragged on by conservatives as being wrong or being a bleeding heart or being on the left.
Fox News seems to be doing more over time to bring in moderate voices, and it's really weird because I grew up with Fox News being the hyper-partisan fake news channel Now it looks like it's flipped, and as time goes on, ratings are skyrocketing for conservatives and shrinking for the left.
Before I get into all the ratings issues, I want to point out this tweet from Donald Trump this morning.
So weird to watch crazy Bernie on Fox News.
Not surprisingly, Brett Baier and the, quote, audience was so smiley and nice.
Very strange.
And now we have Donald Brazil.
Even Donald Trump is confused as to why Fox News is moderate and inviting on these left-wing individuals to have this conversation.
Anna Kasparian of the Young Turks responded, you scared?
And someone responded to her, I think he's illuminating the fact that Fox is making an
attempt at something the other networks have no interest in.
I'm sure that's lost on anyone with predisposed notions.
And look at how conservative David Wall responds.
Never Trump or Bayer was an embarrassment.
He sat there like a mannequin and didn't challenge Bernie on any of his far-flung crazy ideas.
Unfortunately, that's a reflection of the direction Fox is headed.
Off the left wing deep end.
I disagree with that.
I think Fox is trying to be more moderate to reflect their audience.
Because that seems to be where the Trump base is.
Kind of in the middle.
And you don't have to take my word for it.
There's tons of charts and graphs we're going to get to later on.
To show that when it came to the 2016 election, most of Trump's voters were split left and right while leaning conservative.
But now let's get to the shocking revelation that is the ratings of cable news this weekend.
This blew my mind.
CNN and MSNBC consistently failed to break over 100,000 key demographic viewers.
CNN was able to pull it off later in the evening, but MSNBC never even came close With even getting around 58,000 viewers in the 11th p.m.
time slot.
Fox News had no trouble breaking 100,000 in every time slot in the key demo.
But now let's look at Saturday's total viewership.
Of course things were down throughout the daytime for Fox News, but at night in their prime time slots they were nearing 2 million for 8 p.m.
to 10 p.m.
with Piro over 2.2 million views and Waters again at 11 p.m.
with a million viewers.
CNN barely broke half a million.
They did it only once with Sanjay Gupta.
And MSNBC did it only once with Hardball.
The Rachel Maddow show got 497,000 viewers at the 9 p.m.
slot.
And while Sunday night's total viewership was down for everybody, MSNBC did fairly better, getting more than half a million, even 600,000 in some slots.
But Fox News' Bernie Sanders town hall was over a million.
No one else even broke a million, and Fox News consistently broke a million in primetime hours.
Now, I don't know why this is.
It could be because there's many other different cable channels that are divided.
But when it comes to at least these on the Adweek scoreboard, Fox News is getting more than double CNN and MSNBC combined.
Basically the whole weekend, which is crazy.
And it's not just about cable television.
This is a huge issue for media consumption in general.
We're moving into a digital era.
What you're seeing here are the numbers, the viewership for my second channel, where I consistently average 900,000 views per day.
Take a look at my ratings for Sunday and Saturday.
Just around 900,000 each.
The reason I show these numbers is just to highlight the growing moderate space on the internet and in terms of viewership.
Not only are Fox News's ratings up and beating these other networks, so are mine.
Now there may be a lot of reasons for the decline of MSNBC and other left-wing outlets.
Perhaps it's years of Trump-Russiagate coverage where even The Guardian says, will Rachel Maddow face a reckoning over her Trump-Russia coverage?
Where even in 2018, In these times, a progressive outlet said, I'm sick and tired of hearing about Russiagate.
And then, of course, you had the infamous tweet from Matthew Iglesias of Vox, where he essentially claimed it was a success that they misled people into believing they weren't getting a tax cut.
He said, nobody likes to give themselves credit for this kind of messaging success.
But progressive groups did a really good job of convincing people that Trump raised their taxes when the facts say a clear majority got a tax cut.
How is that a success?
Progressive groups tricked people into believing fake news?
Maybe this is why people aren't watching you anymore.
Maybe this is why, as of March 29th, there was 2,400 people losing their jobs in a media landslide.
While some of these jobs were definitely conservative, the majority were BuzzFeed and Vice and other left-wing digital outlets.
Maybe when you have someone who's high-profile with Vox saying, we tricked people, good job, they're going to say, maybe I shouldn't read your content anymore.
I recently went to a bank and I was talking to one of their managers because I'm working on expanding Subverse, the brand that's over at youtube.com slash subverse videos.
And they told me, this woman, she said, I'm just sick and tired of CNN taking the tiniest thing and trying to blow it up into nonsense.
I just don't care anymore.
And I agreed.
I stopped watching them because it's just chasing after the Trump bump.
But there are other issues here.
It's not just CNN.
As I mentioned, I've got great numbers.
There's other evidence to suggest conservative media is dominating and becoming more mainstream.
Seriously.
This is a report from Newswhip, talking about data for 2018.
And take a look at this.
Top Facebook pages for political posts.
This is the top mainstream political content, which was Fox News and Occupy Democrats.
Okay, that's kind of crazy when you realize Fox News is a partisan conservative outlet, but is rated as credible by many credibility agencies and fact-checkers, and Occupy Democrats is considered to be a clickbait blog that's rated as questionable, putting out fake news information.
I'm not going to go by my opinion on this one.
NewsGuard is an independent service which has actually been challenged by conservatives.
But look at this.
They give occupied Democrats a proceed with caution.
They say they do repeatedly publish false content.
And Fox News is rated as credible by NewsGuard with their main concerns being they need to correct more often.
They need to disclose their ownership, and they need to show who's in charge.
But other than that, they say they do not repeatedly publish false content, they are responsible in their presentation of information, and they handle the difference between news and opinion responsibly.
They don't have deceptive headlines, and they do label their advertising clearly.
So think about this for a second.
When it comes to political content, Fox News is on the right, a mainstream, credible source, and Occupy Democrats dominates the left with more than double that of CNN.
Now, of course, the way they frame it here in this report, in terms of mainstream, you do have predominantly left-wing sources, although Donald Trump himself is in here.
Interestingly, NowThis News, at a convention in Los Angeles called VidCon, had their president say they worked with anti-Trump activists.
So, combined, you can see that it looks like, according to this, the left does get more engagement overall, not for any one brand.
But Breitbart is here as well, so the right isn't completely losing out, and they are dominating in terms of partisanship.
But more importantly, Occupy Democrats is fake news partisanship, and Fox News is just hyper-partisan but credible.
We can even take a look at Alexa traffic, where Fox News is rank 57 in the US, consistently watched and shared by regular mainstream Americans.
And Occupy Democrats rank as 505,000.
Not credible or mainstream at all.
Making things even more interesting is when we look at digital partisan-only outlets.
We can see that the Daily Wire in 2018 got 132 million engagements, and the biggest left-wing brand, overtly left-wing, was The Root with only 25 million.
Once again, the ratings as it pertains to digital are pushing heavily.
Now, I did show some examples of why this might be.
Rachel Maddow's Russiagate nonsense, Vox bragging about misleading people.
But there are other issues, and I think it has to do with who's attracted to Donald Trump's campaign, and who is tired of the far-left policies.
Because there's a ton of data, which I've highlighted over and over again, showing the Democrat median is staying the same while they're bringing on more far-left politicians, fracturing their base.
But interestingly, Paul Krugman tried writing an op-ed blaming the right, and I think he accidentally just proved why right-wing media is dominating and becoming more moderate.
Krugman wrote this op-ed yesterday.
Republicans are the real extremists, conspiracy theorists and enemies of democracy, oh my.
When I heard that, I found it kind of strange considering the data shows that conservatives
have moved over slightly and Democrats have moved to the far left.
So why would he think Republicans are the real extremists?
He says that the GOP commands a powerful propaganda machine, and this machine is now dedicated to a strategy of portraying Democrats as extremists.
It might work.
But it shouldn't, because Democrats aren't extremists.
Republicans are.
To back up his claim, he presented us with this graph, which I think actually proves the opposite.
He says, I keep coming back to this chart, which shows voters' political orientation on social v. economic issues.
There are a lot more voters on the left than the right.
So I decided to pull up the article he's referencing.
Political divisions in 2016 and beyond.
Tensions between and within the two parties from June 2017.
Krugman is trying to claim it's Republicans who are extreme, not Democrats, but in the
actual article he's quoting, they say, Trump general election voters, however, are more
widely dispersed on economic issues ranging more broadly from liberal to conservative.
And that's actually what we can see.
Conservatives comprise of a wide ranging group of people around the center, with many on
the left, many on the right, and some being in the center but leaning very conservative.
Whereas the Democrats are all the way over on the left.
This means there are many independent voters, the Republicans have, That are conservative and even on the left.
Trump's base, this is what we're looking at, Trump voters, are not completely left or right.
They do lean conservative on identity issues, but economically, they range from liberal to conservative.
Whereas the Democrats are overwhelmingly on the left for every issue.
Again, to reiterate, that Trump's voters more broadly range from liberal to conservative.
That doesn't describe extremists.
And I think this might be the explanation for a few things.
Why is Fox News trying to bring on more Democrats to have conversations?
Why are they hosting Bernie Sanders?
And why are they more than doubling the viewership of CNN and MSNBC combined?
Not all the time, but at least this weekend.
Why are ratings for conservative outlets absolutely destroying left-wing outlets?
Because at a certain point, people get tired of the nonsense.
And this is what I see when I read these sources over and over again.
Yes, there are conservative stories that I feel are out of context and misleading, but for the most part, they tend to fall with left-wing publishers.
You also have the right consistently saying, stop the violence, and the left saying, start the violence.
Even a show on CBS advocating for punching first in response to someone's hateful speech.
Regular people don't like violence.
Regular people like their jobs.
And yes, it seems like the narrative of the left is to lie, mislead, and push nonsense.
I'm going to state this one more time, because this is not my opinion.
Matthew Iglesias of Vox tweeted out their messaging success was convincing people that Trump raised their taxes when the facts say a clear majority got a tax cut.
Progressive groups did a good job of convincing people.
You want to ask me why I think they're laying people off, why their ratings are down?
Because they think it's a good job convincing people of fake news.
Whether or not that's a consistent position they have, We keep seeing these graphs.
The Democrats are moving left.
Conservatives are staying kind of in the median of where conservatives have always been.
The charts are showing that from left to right, Trump's base are liberal and conservative on economic issues.
But the left is just left, left, left.
If there are extremists, it's definitely the Democrats, with Rachel Maddow's Russiagate for years refusing to give it up, with even the left calling her out.
And Fox News bringing on Donna Brazile and Bernie Sanders to the confusion of even Donald Trump!
It seems like, whether or not you can say Fox News is moderate and conservatives are winning today, that's the direction we're headed in.
On YouTube, it's moderate voices that are making up the majority of channels.
While left-wing channels still dominate, and a left-wing anti-Trump narrative still dominates in terms of total viewership, there are way more moderate, centrist, and right-wing channels that are appearing on YouTube.
Perhaps people are sick and tired of the lies.
Perhaps people want real conversations.
Think about this.
Whether you like Andrew Yang or not, he sat down with Ben Shapiro.
Ben Shapiro, a staunch conservative.
And they had a real conversation.
And it was incredible.
People like what we're doing on YouTube.
They like what we're doing on Twitter.
We're engaging in long-form, unedited, raw conversations.
And that's enjoyable.
It's refreshing.
I think Fox News sees this.
And they're probably saying, Let's have Bret Baier do a town hall with Bernie Sanders and just be kind of chill about it.
Chill to the point where conservatives are mad at Bret Baier, like I showed you, and even Donald Trump is confused.
But I think this shows a good faith effort on the part of Fox News, which to me, as a lifelong liberal, was goddamn shocking.
But here's the shift.
The left is chasing after fringe identity politics, Russia conspiracies, and Fox News is having a conversation with Bernie Sanders, and Ben Shapiro is having a conversation with Democrat Andrew Yang, It is mind-blowing, but I think it's clear as day what's happening.
Let me know what you think in the comments below, and we'll keep the conversation going.
You can follow me on Mines at TimCast.
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