Politico Co-Founder: Left-Wing Media Has ‘Never Been Weaker’

Interestingly enough, I agree with Jim VanDeHei on this claim … and with the New York Post on the context.

Mediaite interviewed Politico’s co-founder, apparently before the revelations of how much revenue the publication got from government bureaucrats, about the state of the mainstream media. VanDeHei appears to have focused mainly on the overtly ideological media in declaring that the industry has hit a nadir, and that it’s time for the left-wing media to look for ways to reinvent itself. VanDeHei mentions MSNBC as a property that could still transform and adapt, for instance:

Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei said in an interview published Tuesday that the liberal media has reached a low point in popularity and influence over the American public.

“There’s a market for ideological,” VandeHei said in an interview with Mediaite. “The left right now, liberal media, has probably never been weaker in my lifetime than right now.” …

“Could an MSNBC in a kind of a digital, social, traditional TV world, could they build that into something even bigger? They could, if you have smart leadership and you have a really good plan and you have personalities that people gravitate towards and they certainly have,” VandeHei said, mentioning hosts like Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.”

“There’s a lot to work with. You just got to change. You just got to stop worrying, thinking about how great it was, because it was great, and it never is going to be great again like that, right? But that doesn’t mean it can’t be good and that it can’t be successful. It just means you’re going to have to buckle up and be ready for extraordinary, high velocity change,” he continued.

That’s a curious example to use, since MSNBC is likely to blink out of existence — at least under that identity. Comcast has put the property up for sale, along with a handful of other cable channels, but the other channels haven’t lost a third of their audience year-on-year. MSNBC had fallen behind the Hallmark Channel in ratings since the election, for instance. Even more ominously, it appears that Comcast unit NBCUniversal will cut all ties between MSNBC and its news division, as well as require the cable channel to rebrand without using NBC. 

Reinvention is already on its way, whether MSNBC chooses it or not. It’s possible that a buyer will invest the money into the channel to gain some access to news and reporters, but it’s not likely to happen at the kind of scale necessary to the scale of the effort. 

But it’s curious that VanDeHei chose MSNBC in another way, too. MSNBC suffered a massive exodus of viewership after the election, largely because their reporting misled those viewers significantly about it. How often did they try to sell Joe Biden as “the best version” of himself ever, as “vital” and fully in command of his faculties before June 27? How often afterward did they sell Kamala Harris as “brat” and uber-able, only to have the campaign flop under the weight of her own incompetence?

Media can only lie like that for so long before they lose their audience. This hasn’t been the usual post-election doldrums, but a rupture of trust between a media org and its consumers. Anger over Donald Trump’s first couple of weeks may help to push some back into the audience, but the overall impotence of the left-wing elite clique to do anything to stop Trump probably won’t keep them there for long. 

That brings us to the New York Post’s example — the Washington Post. To be clear, VanDeHei does not identify the WaPo as an example of ideological media, but the NY Post does, and for good reason. Their market collapse surpasses even that of MSNBC’s, and it’s for the same reason. They have completely destroyed their credibility and have therefore mainly become irrelevant:

According to internal data shared with digital news site Semafor, The Washington Post lost most of its daily digital traffic during President Joe Biden’s time in office. Though the outlet’s website reached its peak daily online readership towards the start of the Biden administration, it lost nearly every one of those readers by the time it was about to end.

Semafor reported in January that “the Post’s daily traffic last year reached a nadir of just a quarter of what it was at its peak in January 2021. That month, the Post had around 22.5 million daily active users. But by the middle of 2024, its daily users hovered around 2.5-3 million daily users.”

That credibility destruction requires more than a “reinvention.” It requires accountability and a real change of direction. Thus far, none of these left-wing media platforms has even begun to change course; they haven’t even admitted to their serial misdirections in service to a left-wing cover-up in the White House of monstrous consequence to constitutional order. They have instead opted for a renewed obsession with L’Homme Orange Mal as a marketing ploy, even though that has not shown any sign of effectiveness. 

And as the WaPo example shows, the crash has come to more than just the overtly ideological media. It became crystal clear over the course of the Biden administration that the entire American media complex is “ideological media” now, and all of it going in the same direction. And that’s why it’s not just the “left-wing media” that’s at its nadir, but the entire Protection Racket Media complex.

VanDeHei ain’t wrong. He’s just far more correct than he’ll admit.