Conservatives vs. Legacy Media: Why the Real Fight Is Elsewhere

Photo by Kayla Velasquez on Unsplash

Conservatives should heed the story of Hiroo Onoda.

As World War II came to an end in August of 1945 and the official Japanese surrender documents were signed in Tokyo Bay the next month, word was sent to the Japanese fighting forces abroad to stand down. The war was over.

Fearing an enemy ploy, many soldiers retreated into the jungle and remained active in the fight, refusing to believe the war had come to an end.

There were many, but the most famous was Onoda, a Japanese lieutenant who had been sent to Lubang Island in the Philippines to help fight Gen. McArthur’s "return.”

Of course Japanese soldiers had previously been told not to surrender under any circumstances, so Onoda remained on Lubang Island in a state of war … for almost 29 years.

Onoda officially surrendered in March of 1974, but only when his commanding officer came to Lubang Island and officially relieved him of duty.

For 29 years, Onoda fought a war that wasn’t happening.

What is the lesson for conservatives?

Conservatives spend much time and energy fighting what they call the “legacy media,"  which isn’t influencing much of anything outside its own inner circle.

Loosely defined, the legacy media are the three major networks (ABC, NBC and CBS) along with the Washington Post and New York Times newspapers.

These outlets were the primary sources of news for many years, but not anymore.

Around 1980 when Walter Cronkite delivered the CBS Evening News at 5:30 p.m. central time every weekday, about 28 million people watched and trusted him. A few million less watched NBC Nightly News and ABC World News Tonight, but ratings indicated that almost half the country’s television sets were tuned into these broadcasts each day.

The New York Times boasted a print subscription number of 1.1 million in 2000, and the Washington Post hit its peak subscriber number of 832,000 in 1993.

These legacy media entities leaned left.

Today, ABC World News Tonight leads the legacy network ratings with a quarter of the viewers Cronkite had in 1980. Keep in mind also that the U.S. population has grown by more than 100 million since 1980.

The New York Times and the Washington Post have between a third and a quarter of the subscribers they had at their peak, understanding of course that digital views do put additional eyeballs on their material.

Simply put, conservatives are raising arms against a lifeless enemy.

Yes, conservatives had no real voice in the media for a long time. Now, conservative media is more influential than liberal media.

If anything, conservatives should be celebrating a victory. They’ve vanquished the standalone, one-voice media. Once consumers had a chance to sample other viewpoints, they gravitated away from legacy media. That’s a win.

Conservatives have made their point, and they’ve won the debate. This was illustrated perfectly during a recent appearance by CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, when Colbert tried to state that CNN objectively reports the news. Even the friendly Late Show audience didn’t take that statement seriously.

You can watch the exchange here.

More people watch Fox News than CNN and MSNBC combined. Newsmax also beats CNN and MSNBC in primetime ratings.

But forget television for just a minute, because few people under 50 get news there.

This is how much conservatives are hammering the wrong nail:

ABC World News Tonight leads the legacy media ratings. However, it draws only 654,000 viewers between the ages of 18 and 49. There are around 69 million people between these ages living in the United States, and this group represents about half of the swing voters that will decide the upcoming election.

People under 50 are getting their news — if they get it from anywhere — from podcasts and/or YouTube.

It’s hard to pinpoint where Joe Rogan is politically, but his podcast consistently draws close to 10 million views on YouTube, and that is just one way to consume his podcast. That one metric alone is about 25 percent more than the entire audience for ABC World News Tonight. His guests run the gamut, but he’s had right-friendly guests such as Jordan Peterson, Gad Saad, Brett Weinstein, Kid Rock, Chris Rufo and many others this year and he recently said that, since COVID, he believes most conspiracy theories espoused by the right.

His podcast is downloaded a whopping 200 million times per month.

Conservative talk host Ben Shapiro’s podcast draws millions of views/listens. Overall, conservative voices control the podcast and radio audience. Rogan, Shapiro, Tucker Carlson and Dan Bongino are all among the top podcasts in the country.

We should all understand by now that news outlets spin either left or right. It’s time to spend energy elsewhere.

This is just a bit from Vice Presidential Nominee J.D. Vance and his recent campaign speech in Atlanta:

Now, after covering up Joe Biden’s incompetence for the last three and a half years, our friends in the media are at it again. This time they’re gaslighting us on Kamala Harris’s radical record. They want to portray her as some kind of sensible moderate, despite all evidence to the contrary. Now, this is the same media that told us, remember my friends for three and a half years that Joe Biden, who couldn’t complete a sentence was Albert Einstein. And now they want to tell us that Kamala Harris is Abraham Lincoln.

Trump took the stage a little later:

And that was the end of him (Biden). That was the end from that. Then they said, okay, this was a disaster. So then they started doing interviews with people that are 100% bought. The media, the fake news media, they had some people interviewing him like George Slopidopoulos. ABC. ABC is one of the worst, by the way. They’re all sort of bad when you get right down, but ABC is bad. And they’re asking them hardball questions like “Where did you stay last night? Did you think you did well in the debate, even though you could…” Did you ever see a guy in the debate? They give you two minutes to answer. And you want to use up, you got so much fertility in there, you want to use up every second, and then answer a question. “You have 92 seconds left.” And I kept saying, “I’ll take them.”

In fairness, Vance spoke for 24 minutes and Trump for an hour and a half (yikes). And you certainly must fire up the base with some red meat.

I think, though, it’s safe to say the base is fired up. In fact, both bases are galvanized now with the switch from Biden to Harris.

The messaging from the Trump campaign since the switch has been so awful that this election went from slam dunk to toss up.

That’s why the race is tight, not because of the shrinking legacy media.

Want to save thousands of hours watching election coverage? This is the race in a nutshell: If the Trump campaign makes this race about the issues (immigration, economy, crime, etc.), he wins. If the campaign makes it about personalities and/or victimization from an unfriendly media, he loses.

Someone needs to be telling this campaign that the election will be decided by about 100,000 voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and Georgia. These voters absolutely do not care about George Slopidopolous and his questions.