Legacy Media, Meet Legacy Politics
We turn from useless narratives to relevant information, we also turn from useless politics to American renewal
I tend to write long as I explore the shifting world. This post seeks (relative) brevity.
Jews have been at war since October 2023. Fighting accelerates reality: new enemies and new alliances emerge. Combatants develop new methods and new technologies. Same with ideas. Deeply held thoughts vanish in a snap. New ideas rush in.
If they don’t, that’s fine, but you and everyone you love will die.
Sounds dramatic, then let me tell you about family and friends in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv cowering in bomb shelters last month, including a single mom from San Diego touring the country with her young daughter.
Ideas matter. Appraising reality matters. The stakes couldn’t be higher in war. No one has time for a social justice media story when missiles rain down. You need to know where the bomb shelter is.
Here in America, the stakes are also high. We’re not dealing with missiles thankfully, but we’re struggling against crushing inflation of housing, healthcare, education and transportation—which is tightly bound to our decaying infrastructure and false narratives that tell us that preferring people by their skin color, gender and national origin is more important than providing opportunity and safety for all.
While Israelis, Ukrainians and soon, Taiwanese, need reliable information to survive the night, Americans need reliable information to make political decisions to improve our lives by day. And with our shift from legacy to new media forms, like social feeds and podcasts, we also need new politics to respond to our needs. This is why Republicans have changed and are ascendant while Democrats haven’t and aren’t.
Media and politics are tightly bound. Same with technology and ideology.
To explain the why people first shifted from CDs to $10 iTunes downloads, and now $12 monthly Spotify subscriptions, look at the emergence of new tools on the one hand, and the intransigence of record companies who kept charging $18 for a CD.
Sure, technological innovation seems inevitable, but Google hasn’t destroyed libraries or book publishing, it’s just changed them. You can imagine a world where people at home have tidy Blu-Ray collections of their favorite artists, with liner notes, lyrics and photos (one Blu-Ray disc = twelve vinyl LPs) and then enjoy streaming algorithms to discover new music when they’re on the go.
Google and ChatGPT have transformed how we access information, yet last year book publishing increased 6.5%. Nimble organizations can respond to change. Ideologically orthodox groups can’t.
It’s not considered biased to say we have a Legacy media anymore. It’s reality. The Web, apps, wifi and smartphones have transformed news publishing, broadcasts and cable.
What’s more interesting to observe is that the ideological choices of the Legacy media—much like the ideological rigidity of record companies in the 2000s to keep CD prices high—has accelerated the shift.
Almost all Legacy media outlets, from Reuters to the New York Times to NPR to CNN, have adopted ideological missions to change society according to their values—instead of maintaining a ruthless dedication to objectivity, even if that’s an asymptote.
The WSJ and Bloomberg seem like exceptions, but when you realize they report market information to stay in business, it makes sense that they haven’t become as mission-driven as their non-financial publishing peers.
People consume podcasts, substacks and social feeds not only because they can, but because they must. If you can remember the early 2000s, people moved to iTunes because Steve Jobs only charged $10 an album. They soon realized they could now consume even more music than before because digital also means portability and fungibility—from laptops at home to iPods outdoors.
Similarly, democratic citizens, who need good information to make optimal political decisions, have fled the identity politics of Legacy media to new media forms with new messages. What seemed like an innovation—posting vacation pics on Facebook—ten years later become an information necessity on Twitter.
It’s not just that viewing a short form video on your phone is easier than sitting through an hour-long news broadcast with advertisements, which requires an expensive monthly cable subscription and an expensive one-way monitor. An Instagram reel can also offer qualitatively more relevant information than establishment narratives. These legacy narratives focus on perceived social justice values rather than as-objective-as-possible information about, say, Covid transmission, a president’s acuity, Middle East wars, trans risks, public safety and real inflation, to name a few.
Liberals educated at highly-selective colleges dominate establishment media. They took the Civil Rights Movement and Sexual Revolution from the 20th century and, in the early 21st century, developed an extremely narrow and I think bizarre value system focused on ranking people on an unquantifiable spectrum of victimhood to privilege, based on skin color and gender.
This distorted moral vision of victims in need of promotion over others, with a side helping of Islamist anti-Westernism, tainted our universities starting in the 1990s—with the rise of niche ethnic and Women’s Studies departments. That soon tainted our media, as elite college grads became elite professionals. Meanwhile, both media and the academy infiltrated arts institutions and the Democratic party.
Questioning this ideology was punished. Universities required highly curated diversity pledges and axed professors who were perceived to be non-compliant. Museums selectively promoted artists based on identity over relevance or accomplishment. The New York Times fired James Bennet for publishing a Republican senator opinion piece in 2020.
Since media and politics are as intertwined as ideology is with technology, let’s take the next step and ask how this impacts politics.
What happens when a smaller, less trusted, more ideological media adheres to a single political party?
The voting majority answered the question last fall. That’s why Republican candidates won across the board. It’s why their party has improved year-after-year in every county in America except for a handful of high net worth locales. It’s why even left wing statisticians observe that had a different MAGA Republican run instead of Trump, he or she might have won by a landslide.
It’s also why the trend away from legacy news means our next elected officials will be social media stars, from Zohran Mamdani to JD Vance. Meanwhile, editorial boards endorsements have evanesced—not because their editorial boards don’t matter, but because their entire organizations are self-obsoleting. In the name of justice! For a few people! Who need the elites to tell them they need elite help!
As Democrats compress into a more refined and more pure form of identity preferences—what they call being progressive—I think it’s reasonable to predict the party will become more shrill and more shrunken. Just like the legacy media.
The one exception to this legacy moment is economics. Progressive Democrats have zero record of municipal performance on any measure of infrastructure development, public safety, educational achievement, new housing or any other success metric. But they are excellent at mentioning what the prior generation of Centrists ignored: affordability.
We’ll see if Republicans, as the only relevant party, can deliver. Either way, for now, we have one party in charge, and another party relegated to legacy and lore. And soon, it’ll be footnoted and forgotten.