Fighting Corporate Media
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| Maya Rackoff Megyn Kelly |
1. Bucking University Journals
Maya Rackoff was a Bronx high school junior two years ago, when George Floyd’s murder ignited nationwide protests. Her school administration organized emotional support meetings.
Rackoff attended protests, taking the train alone to Times Square, Union Square, and Washington Square Park, joining thousands. She wrote:
I watched CNN’s and MSNBC’s coverage religiously. I embraced the BLM slogans and ignored the violence that accompanied some of the protests. To me, anyone who didn’t buy into the movement wholeheartedly was the problem. Why couldn’t they get over their own racism?
A Brown freshman a year later, Rackoff became a university political journal interviewer — “a big honor.” She scored an interview with Megyn Kelly, and the two discussed identity politics, academic censorship, America’s political divide— topics Rackoff thought would interest Brown students.
Kelly told her:
People have decided to obsess over their skin color, their heritage, their sexual identity, their gender identity, because we are in the blessed period of not fighting a world war, of not having undergone a terrorist attack.
Her editors responded to Rackoff’s draft by calling Megyn Kelly a racist and a sexist that didn’t deserve a Brown platform. They added Martin Luther King would have been offended.
Although not getting published didn’t end her world, Rackoff thought it wrong to hold her interview to a different standard than interviews with left-wing subjects. To her, “people who should have known better—including adults—let [censorship] happen, turned a blind eye, [never] waded in.”
Rackoff counters
scared adults in charge deprive us of one of the most important human experiences: engaging with smart, thoughtful people who don’t see the world the way we do. That’s something we used to value [as] a necessary step in teaching young people how to think critically.
Foiled by Brown, Rackoff took her article about the experience outside. It went to the top of Real Clear Politics' "most read" list.
A 2020 Pew study reported regular NPR political news listeners are 87% Democrat or Democrat-leaning. That makes taxpayer-supported NPR a “Fox News for the Left” (the Fox News audience is 93% Republican or Republican-leaning).
Ex-NPR CEO Ken Stern spent a year studying Red America. He learned that while conservatives “wanted to talk about the media, they were almost uniformly angry [and] felt patronized.”
The Reuters Institute Digital News Report for 2021 found the U.S., at 29%, has the lowest level of trust in media, ranking us 46th of 46 countries surveyed. And according to Gallup, 83% of Americans blame the news media at least partly for our political divisions, with nearly half blaming the media “a great deal.”
3. Moving Fox News Up
From TVNewser/AdWeek:
Fox News during the week of May 16 was in total day viewership the most-watched basic cable channel. In Primetime, Fox News slipped to 3rd behind only the NBA and NHL playoffs.
Fox averaged more total primetime viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined for the 45th consecutive week. MSNBC fell below a million (910,000) for the third consecutive week. Before May 2, MSNBC hadn’t been below 1 million non-holiday primetime viewers since 2016.
Meanwhile, CNN averaged a terrible 597,000 primetime viewers.
Comparing Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN to the same week in 2021, Fox News gained +9% in primetime viewers, with total day viewership up +27%. CNN and MSNBC, close to Fox a year ago, showed big losses. CNN dropped -5% in primetime viewers, -18% in total day viewers. MSNBC fell -39% in primetime viewers, -28% in total day viewers.
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