The wake up call

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

Stories have always been an important part of the human experience. Even people who don’t consume books, movies, or television shows still embrace stories. It’s how we recount our experiences and how lessons have long been passed from one generation to the next, even before we could use to to reach the masses.

There’s a reason good storytellers become icons now that you can tell that story to millions of people.

And the storytelling industry—television, movies, books, video games, etc.—was an instant target for the left. They wanted control and, when they got it, used it to push a particular narrative that wasn’t based on popular demand, just local demand.

What I mean is that these industries tend to be so insular that they only know what those in their industry think, and that’s who they cater to.

But the tides may be shifting.

The purchase of Paramount and CBS by David Ellison – scion of Larry Ellison, the world’s third-richest man, with a $250 billion tech fortune – marks a shift away from one-party domination of the media and culture. It follows Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now X, and the Trumpian capture of Washington DC’s Kennedy Center.

Long a cakewalk for progressives, the culture war is edging towards high noon. For the first time in decades, the left faces competitors who read from different scripts and come from different perspectives.

Naturally, progressives are not happy. Robert Reich, a leading left-wing economist, denounces – rightly – the ability of the ultra-rich to buy media outlets and push an agenda. Yet he and others had no such qualms when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, when Salesforce’s Marc Benioff snapped up the moribund Time magazine, when Laurene Powell Jobs took over the Atlantic, or when another well-endowed heir purchased the New Republic from Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

Perhaps most unsettled are those who profited from decades of one-party cultural rule, stretching from Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Manhattan. Bari Weiss’s pledge to ‘blow up’ CBS – Paramount has announced plans to lay off 2,000 workers in Hollywood and New York – alarms the likes of Katie Couric, the onetime CBS star, nominally because it undermines ‘independent journalism’. Progressives will certainly attack CBS for moving away from promoting climate hysteria, which no longer enjoys its own special desk. Worse still for the left, conservative voices – such as the ubiquitous Mormon Wives, glamorous mothers and reality-TV stars who stand in sharp contrast to the over-the-top Kardashians – are gaining traction on television.

Why is this happening now? The re-election of Trump, the ultimate anti-wokist, has emboldened some oligarchs to enter what was once the exclusive domain of the left. But political power alone does not explain the shift. Trump’s influence will fade, after all. Demographics and customer preferences matter more.

Mainstream media have become disconnected from at least half their audience. Overall public confidence in the press is near a historic low: barely a third express trust, half the share that did so in 1978. This is not just an American phenomenon – the travails of the once-respected BBC in the UK make that clear.

The gulf between the media and audiences widened after the George Floyd riots, when major media companies – in print, film, radio and online – doubled down on an ever more overt progressivism. They downplayed far-left violence and embraced a mission not of informing or entertaining, but of ideological propagation.

We all remember “fiery, but mostly peaceful” on our television screens as a building burned in the background. It was just too much for a lot of people, and trust in the media immediately began declining.

It kept going, too.

But the news was only part of it. You can’t keep telling people they suck simply for existing and expect them to enjoy it. Some people are into that sort of thing, admittedly, and will pay good money for it, but most people aren’t and won’t. I’m one of them. You’re not going to tell me I’m awful in ways that I’m not and expect me to keep giving you money.

And the storytelling industry did that for years and years. They got away with it when it was subtle, but then it got more and more overt until people finally got sick of it.

Disney’s Snow White bombing was part of that. The outrage over a black Ariel in The Little Mermaid was another part.

But rather than accept that maybe they were putting out trash no one wanted, they attacked audiences.

People didn’t like the Ghostbusters reboot trailer and rather than think, “Maybe we screwed this up,” the director attacked the audience as sexists. The trailer was awful, and from what I’ve seen, the movie isn’t any better, but rather than accept that, it was just easier to blame the people who were your targets all along.

After all, Chris Hemsworth played the same essential role as Annie Potts did in the original, only he was a complete moron, while Potts’ Jeanine was anything but. In other words, men suck, women rock, and you’re just supposed to take it on the chin.

Now, the non-woke have, well, woken up and are pushing back. They’re buying up entertainment companies and are likely hoping that by just reining in the radical fringes, they can get massive market shares.

And they’re probably right, too.

I mean, a network that just tries to put out good television? A studio that just tries to produce entertaining movies? A publishing company that wants to put out books that grab you on page one and don’t let you go until the end?

Who doesn’t want that?

No, not everything these companies would put out would be universally beloved and a massive hit. No one can get it right all the time, so there would be at least some misses along the way.

But I can respect the effort. I can respect the decision to appeal to as many people as possible and not worry about the perpetually aggrieved who aren’t going to like it anyway, no matter what you do.

The question then becomes what the odds are that new ownership will be enough. After all, they’re at the top, and they’ll have to rely on others to handle the day-to-day stuff. Those are the same people who have been pushing this crap for years now, so unless the new owners clean house, I don’t really know what we’re going to see change.

I’ll be happy to find out I’m worrying about nothing, and I’ll be glad to see these problem people bounced out onto their asses, which should have happened ages ago.

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