For my entire life, America has always had a left-leaning media. It's never been a secret, but I can remember a time when the media would at least put on a show of fairness. Some of the television journalists I grew up with included Ted Koppel, Sam Donaldson, Tim Russert, Peter Jennings, Mike Wallace, and Tom Brokaw. All Democrats. Every one of them. But I can recall most of them asking very tough questions of politicians on both sides of the aisle. I remember when 60 Minutes and Meet The Press could be nightmares for Democrats who misbehaved.
As we know, this legacy media no longer exists. All three broadcast networks, two of the three most prominent cable networks, and America's once-great newspapers have all become apparatchiks for the Democrat Party. They believe in narrative over truth and tribalism over objectivity (or at least the appearance thereof).
But when did it all change and why? Some new data from research scientist David Rozado might have some answers. This morning, The Rabbit Hole showed several charts of Rozado's research into The Washington Post and The New York Times from 2010 to 2019.
What it reveals is simply flabbergasting. Take a look:
The Woke Mind Virus in the New York Times and Washington Post.
— The Rabbit Hole (@TheRabbitHole84) December 30, 2024
This is why we need New Media. pic.twitter.com/KEaadnMElp
There is so much to delve into here, I am not sure where to begin, but let's start with the obvious. The charts cover 20 words associated with the woke agenda and to say that nearly all of them increased exponentially just in the past few years of the research timeline would be an understatement. (And remember, this data only goes up to 2019, so we can only imagine how much more all of these trend lines have skyrocketed over the past five years.)
Then there is the synchronization between two allegedly 'independent' media sources. Both the Post and the Times are nearly identical across all keywords, especially in the final few years. The 'r' number, the correlation between the two, is never below 78 percent and in most boxes is as high as 97 or 98 percent. I am not a statistician, but I'm going to guess that the likelihood of that being our coincidence is about a quadzillion to one ('quadzillion' being the largest fictional number I could think of).
Look at the top right quadrant. The phrase 'white supremacy' was virtually unmentioned before 2016. Almost like they made it all up. This is not to say that there aren't white supremacists living in the United States, but to call it a pressing national problem would have been unheard of prior to the Obama and Trump administrations. Then, all of a sudden, it jumps 4196 percent in the Times and 5931 percent in the Post.
Are you freaking kidding? You'd think there would be open Klan marches on every street in America, every week, to see that kind of increase.
Another interesting area is the instance of 'transphobia' and 'transphobic' (the two boxes on the right of the third row). Virtually zero until the end of the charts, where the mentions jumped so high, they couldn't even be measured because there was nothing previous to which to compare them.
But sure. 'Transgenderism' is not a manufactured social contagion or anything.
And this is just two outlets. You can bet that if you overlaid CNN, MSNBC, and the network news on top of this, the spikes would be almost identical.
That's it. That's all it took. Just a few years for the woke mind virus to infect news outlets and completely destroy them. Public perception of the news was bad in 2019, but the public is always a lagging indicator, so it would take another five years before the media lost all credibility and had Elon Musk declare them dead on November 6, 2024.
Is there a more ideologically captured institution than the legacy media...?
— Klay Thompson (@Thompsonklay) December 30, 2024
Citizen journalism is the path forward, the legacy media’s end is near. https://t.co/Ge1XjNPpk3
This is exactly it. Ideological capture. The 'news' is no longer the news. The news -- at least from legacy outlets -- is openly, brazenly, even proudly pushing an ideology. ONE ideology. That ideology is wokeness, anathema, and pure poison to objective facts and analysis.
The legacy media, while always biased, has now truly lost their way. https://t.co/E1qE4U9Gp5
— RRDEW (@Rrdew) December 30, 2024
Permanently. There is no coming back from this. Not in the current state and composition of the media, anyway. America has moved on. We get our news from independent sources. Those sources are fact-checked in real-time on Twitter (real fact checks, not the Glenn Kessler, Daniel Dale, or PolitiFact kind of 'fact-check').
And we are all better informed for it.
The only audience the legacy media has anymore are the people who want their wokeness affirmed, a rapidly and ever-shrinking population.
Wow... You know it's true, but man. When you see it in graph form, wow. https://t.co/243KXpseOK
— My Simple Vision (@CathyGarrison22) December 30, 2024
Yep. That's what I said too. This isn't exactly breaking news, but to see the data laid out clearly like this just makes me realize that it is so much worse than even I believed. (Especially that synchronization part.)
The Obama administration effect.
— Former Indian American (@EighthIndian) December 30, 2024
This is a popular theory since these charts cover all but the first two years of Obama's eight years in office and then into the Trump administration. There is no question that Obama flamed these divisions and encouraged this ideology. And then the Democrats, in unison, tried to blame anything and everything on Trump for the next four years.
But I think it's larger than that. Obama was powerful, but not that powerful. I think this traces back to academia, where Marxism and wokeness have been incubating for far longer than just 10 years. As the indoctrinated entered newsrooms, the mindset took over. It was ready to explode. Obama just made it a little easier for that to take place. And then he was followed by the perfect Orwellian 'enemy of the state' in Donald Trump.
They unleashed their ideology on America so fast and furiously, it is impossible for them to pull back and change course now (even if Jeff Bezos rightfully thinks that would be a good business decision). To do so would be to admit that everything they've been telling us for the past decade was all a lie. And then they lose all credibility again, just in a different way.
Is there a solution? No, not for the legacy media. Musk was correct to pronounce them dead. But there is a solution for America, one we seem to be embracing.
Cast them aside. Leave them in the dustbin of history to wither away.
That is what they have earned and that is what they deserve.
Don't take my word for it, just look at the data.
Finally, I wanted to give one final shoutout again to David Rozado, which The Rabbit Hole also did in presenting these charts.
Chart by @DavidRozado
— The Rabbit Hole (@TheRabbitHole84) December 30, 2024
Give him a follow 🔥 🔥
Yes, he is absolutely worth a follow. Not just for this information, but he conducts a lot of similar research. He has studied Wikipedia, which has at least three times as many mentions of 'extremism' in references to conservatives as opposed to liberals; he has charts about the explosion of 'prejudice' as a topic of academic papers (guess which chart that lines up with?); and he has even studied the political ideologies of GenAI large language models like Chat GPT and Grok.
Even if you are not a stat geek (and I am definitely not), he presents this information in a very easy-to-understand form. Then you are free to investigate further on your own.
The legacy media could learn something from Rezado's approach to analysis. But they won't.
And that, along with the infestation of the woke mind virus, is why the legacy media is the deadest of horses.
But don't worry. We'll keep beating them here at Twitchy.
