The Gerrymandering of Everything
The media has been gerrymandering their audiences for decades. Now its over.
I know that Elbridge Gerry’s namesake has been in the news lately – but when you think about it, gerrymandering is everywhere, especially in the left-wing media.
Over the years, CNN, MSNBC, Colbert, and Howard Stern all gerrymandered out every conservative viewer/listener they had, and the result was a loss of half their audience.
And it has reached a crescendo under Trump.
They cannot report a story fairly, not even to allow for the obvious.
Look at a few recent stories:
Trump fires the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he claimed “without evidence” the office had been politicized. Trump might be wrong, but there is enough evidence for the office vastly overestimating labor numbers that were loudly touted as “Bidenomics is working!”, only to quietly revise the numbers down significantly – and very quietly – the following month. Could that have something to do with her firing? You bet – but it was never mentioned.
College students scream for “freeing Palestine” and it is reported as if that is the only view of the story. Gazan’s want their own state - and who doesn’t want independence, but their “independence” comes with the destruction of Israel and a side of Jewish genocide - and they are not shy about saying it. It is literally the example of that cartoon where Hamas is at the table with John Kerry and Netanyahu and Hamas is holding a list of their demands, the only one is “Death to all Jews” and Kerry looks at Bibi and says, “Can’t you just meet him half way?”
How about Texas redistricting? It is reported as if this is the only time a state has ever done a mid-decadal period redrawing of House districts, this one is Trump ordered, and is the end of democracy when New York state just redrew its districts last year, the DOJ sent a letter to Texas about curing some alleged race- based apportionments, and gerrymandering has been a practice since 1812 and democracy hasn’t ended yet. Both parties have done/are doing it -but based on the percentage of red vs. blue votes, the blue team is much better about it.
But reaching back to the first Trump term, perhaps the best examples were when the New York Times humanized Iranian general Qassim Suleimani after Trump red-misted him and when the Washington Post called ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi an "austere religious scholar" in an initial headline for his obituary after Trump ordered the moving up of his expiration date.
There is rarely any time given to explain to people that there are other things at issue when it comes to reporting on Republican leadership – every report begins and ends with the premise that some way, somehow, the Bad Orange Man is actively seeking to become a fascist dictator, and all Republicans are Handmaid’s Tale Nazis. There is no other explanation their audience expects, desires, or can even contemplate other than OMB (Orange Man Bad). Nothing Trump does is right, lawful or successful and everything Democrats do is.
The result of this has been predictable.
Colbert and Stern are out of a job, following in the wake of people like Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo, Jim Acosta, Joy Reid, Chuck Todd, Terry Moran, Jennifer “Brain Worms” Rubin, alleged “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler, and other media figures who gerrymandered their audiences into exclusively left-wing eyeballs.
Fox News now has higher ratings than the over-the-air networks, something unheard of in the cable news business. The leftist media created an exclusive constituency with no room to grow.
States like California, New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois have done the same with their representatives, and for all their bluster about sticking it back to Texas for their redistricting, like the left-wing media, they have nowhere to go either.
The great irony back in 1992, when the Supreme Court upheld “minority-majority” redistricting demanded by Democrat controlled state governments, was that the resulting gerrymandering (especially in the South where most of these districts were created) helped the GOP take control of the House in the 1994 elections. I know this is counter-intuitive but here is the explanation: while redrawing the lines to create districts in which blacks or Hispanics formed a majority would likely win the Democrat a few new seats the effect of corralling ( dare we say segregating?) minority voters was that those voters were taken OUT of their former districts. Often races are won or lost by margins of voters. So in effect for every minority-majority district created three to four more lily-white districts were created whose white majorities were less likely to swing to the Democrats. This put the Democrats in an awkward dilemma: they could not in future renounce their backing for creating minority-majority districts without offending minority sympathies but the underlying math tended to favor the GOP. A good example of the law of unintended consequences.
I thought all this began in the '60s with Gerry Manders as the beaver.