Between July 14 and July 20, the name “Epstein” was uttered 160 times on Fox News, which seems a little excessive for a one-week period. It comes to roughly 23 mentions/stories a day, and an “Epstein” each hour.
Of course, over the same one-week period, “Epstein” was cited 617 times by CNN — and a remarkable 751 times by MSNBC.
Which means, for MSNBC’s (few dozen) fans, they heard Epstein’s name mentioned over 107 times a day!
On a completely, totally unrelated note, MSNBC and CNN have been hemorrhaging viewers:
MSNBC and CNN suffered staggering losses in viewership over the past year — while Donald Trump’s ascendancy supercharged Fox News in the cable news ratings war.
The left-leaning networks — which will both be spun off by their respective parent companies — suffered year-over-year declines in all major metrics for the second quarter compared to the same period last year, according to the latest Nielsen data, which was reported by AdWeek.
Comcast-owned MSNBC, with its rabid anti-Trump lineup of anchors, drew an average 1.008 million primetime viewers from April to June, a year-over-year decline of 15%, Nielsen figures show.
CNN, which has languished in last place despite paying anchor Anderson Cooper a reported $18 million in salary, averaged 538,000 total viewers in primetime for the three-month period and 105,000 in the demo, according to Nielsen
Year-over-year, the network saw declines of 13% in total viewers in primetime and a 15% drop in the 25-54 demo.
The cable news pioneer, owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, dropped 14% in total viewers during the day, to an average of 406,000, and 16% in the demo, to 71,000, year-over-year, according to Nielsen.
Stephen Colbert’s CBS show, a decade-long celebration of liberal groupthink, is a dead man walking. (Yesterday, we predicted that CBS would pull the plug early.) The mainstream media — including CNN and MSNBC — is dying. The icons of yesteryear are on life support.
Related: CBS Is About to Have a Big, Expensive Stephen Colbert Problem — and Howard Stern Is the Precedent
Even Ozzy Osbourne is dead.
About 20 years ago, when “The Osbournes” aired on MTV and Michael Jackson was being tried for some very ugly charges, someone noted the weirdness of the era: “Today’s kids fear Michael Jackson more than Ozzy Osbourne! Michael is scary and dangerous; Ozzy is family-friendly and safe. How bizarre is that?!”
If you’re old enough to remember Ozzy’s (many) controversies — from urinating on the Alamo to biting the head off a bat — the ex-Black Sabbath frontman’s transition from the Prince of Darkness to Daddy Dearest was jarring. Until it actually happened, it was impossible to fathom.
But it did happen. And in his final years, Ozzy was adored worldwide.
Even if you hated heavy metal music, you still loved Ozzy. There was a childlike vulnerability to him. And honestly? The way he (and the seemingly immortal Keith Richards) made a mockery of every “Just Say No” warning was kind of inspiring to us weekend drinkers: Ozzy’s liver was the equivalent of a dandelion growing out of a crack in the sidewalk. It was frickin’ heroic.
And now, he’s gone.
Amidst this raging, never-ending tempest of life, death, and cultural change, there’s an important lesson for conservatives to heed: The audience makes the rules and sets the agenda.
The burden is yours.
It doesn’t belong to me. Nor any other pundit. And forget about those “influencers” on YouTube: In an attention-driven economy, audience apathy is kryptonite. It’s tantamount to a death sentence.
Our medium shapes the message, but the audience decides whether the message sticks.
On all sides of the Epstein controversy, there’s been a tendency to overstate the impact of pundits, scribes, and influencers. But ultimately, it won’t matter what Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, Candace Owens, Stephen Colbert, CNN, MSNBC, or anyone else says.
Liberals fondly reminisce over Walter Cronkite. For conservatives, it’s much more recent: Rush Limbaugh in 2021. But on both sides of the aisle, there aren’t any media “thought leaders” alive who can sway huge swaths of public opinion via their platform.
That era of media manipulation is over.
Today’s public already knows what it thinks, wants, and believes. For the most part, they’re searching for content that validates their opinions, sharpens their reasoning, and arms them with the “ideological weaponry” to out-debate their political opponents.
The telltale sign of a successful political podcast isn’t when it breaks news; that almost never happens. It’s when the host makes a clever argument that goes viral because everyone on his/her side repeats it.
The mainstream media still hasn’t caught on, but it’s no longer in the opinion-making business. That ship has sailed, and it’s never coming back. (“Thar be dragons” at the end of the old media map.)
Instead, they’re now in the argument-making business. Audiences want to hear clever, witty, compelling arguments.
Some on the left (John Oliver) are now focusing on an argument-driven media presentation, but most are still following the CNN/MSNBC/New York Times model of conferring with fellow liberals and deciding which “news is fit to print.” They’re still trying to play the gatekeeper game.
And today, they’ve decided that the Epstein scandal is all-important, so they’re gonna shove it down our throats, whether we like it or not.
But news isn’t scarce; the mainstream media monopoly is broken. There are no gatekeepers anymore.
The old paradigm no longer works.
About nine days ago, I began railing against certain MAGA-affiliated influencers who, in my estimation, were VASTLY overstating the “Epstein evidence” to build an argument that was unlikely to be true — but very likely to damage President Trump. And since I have a vested interest in the Trump administration succeeding, I thought it was important to present a counterargument.
But those “influencers” weren’t my primary target. Look, if Tucker Carlson can get 10x as many clicks for an Epstein segment as on the economy, then he’s not gonna focus on the economy. That’s bad business.
My focus was you guys.
If you’re 100% convinced that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad super-agent, running a star-studded pedophilia ring for blackmail purposes, you’ll continue to seek content that validates your position. Nothing I say or do will change that.
Epstein content is your comfort food.
But if you’re open to the idea that juuust maybe, Alex Jones isn’t the most reliable newsman on the planet, and so perhaps the most sensational claims of the “controversy” are overstated, then it’s important to present that argument, too. Not everyone in America will accept it, but hopefully enough will.
Meanwhile, Stephen Colbert is still pounding the Epstein drum — every single night on his (canceled) talk show. As are MSNBC and CNN (1,368 combined “Epstein” mentions in one week!). Along with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the rest of the mainstream media.
And their audience keeps fading away.
Keep it up, America!
