I don’t like to make predictions, actually I hate it. If I knew what the future held I would’ve won the lottery by now, multiple times. As I am not currently on my G7 flying around the world sipping champagne on my way to one of my many palatial estates and instead am staring down the barrel of a deadline for this column, you can safely assume the title “soothsayer” will not be going onto my resume today or ever. My endless string of seeing what I openly root for in sports not happening – I’ve never won a sports bet, so now I don’t make them – always being fresh in my mind, I leave the predicting to people with no shame and an ability to plow through being wildly wrong and pretending they weren’t. I don’t have that gene. But at a certain point you do have to wonder: will there ever be any consequences for lying to your audience?
Maybe lying isn’t the right word, but I think it’s fitting in that most of these people, on the right and left, don’t speak in ways that hedge what they’re saying, they declare it to be (just not having happened yet). You can pick a side of the aisle, the results will be the same.
The fact is shamelessness rates. If you went on cable news or some radio show and answered any question about what was going to happen in the election with, “I honestly don’t know,” you’d never be invited back. You’d be telling the truth, but truth barely matters anymore in the news and commentary business. The only question that does matter is “does it rate?”
I once asked a cable news host why they had the same person on, on the same day, every single week. It didn’t matter the subject, that person was going to be on to talk about whatever. The answer I got back was, “The audience loves” them. I was a little shocked by the answer, assuming news value and knowledge of the subject were at least some factor in topic and guest selection (and I couldn’t see any in this person), so I didn’t come back with “How do you know a person gets good ratings if you never try anything different?” But I wish I had.
So much of what passes for news and commentary is “safe.” There’s an audience for certain people. They have large social media footprints or popular seeming this or that outlets. But being “popular” in a world of bots and bought downloads means very little at the end of the day. Sure, they get richer, but no cause is advanced (assuming they actually care about the cause and not their bottom line).
On its best night, cable news barely attracts more than 2% of the population of this country, combined. It barely rates. And the audience it does attract is the choir. How many liberals watch Fox (who aren’t paid hacks) and how many conservatives watch MSNBC? Not many.
I forced myself to watch MSNBC Monday night and it was like watching a broadcast from a different planet. It was the photo-negative of Fox – all the same races were discussed, they just had the Democrat candidate on as a guest. They, too, had their regular guests – contributors and the like – who all had their role to play, their lines to throw around. It was a lot of things, none of which were news.
You can’t find news anymore, only comfort food.
So, will there be a price to pay for any of it? The pollsters who were throwing around those cookies to both sides telling them exactly what they wanted to hear? Those pundits who declared races to be over before they began or close enough to go either way? The hosts who do know better but choose to tell their audience what they wanted to hear rather than what they need to hear?
Fetterman was going down, said the right (in spite of the fact that Oz was a horrible candidate and should’ve never won the nomination). DeSantis and Rubio were within the margin of error, too close to call, and all Democrats had to do was give a little more money and vote to toss them out on their rear ends (when they both won in historic blowouts).
Will there be a price to pay for lying, either directly or by pandering/wishful thinking? The “red wave” did not happen, even though a lot of people insisted it would. Even Democrat victories were narrow, no groundswell of support for the radical left. The truth was somewhere in between. The only questions that remain are does the truth still matter at all, and will there be any price to pay for those who it doesn’t matter to?
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!), host of a daily radio show, and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.
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