In 1969 at the University of California Berkeley, a promising student felt himself falling behind others he deemed less bright. The under-performing student’s stress level skyrocketed until, one day, he went berserk, running through the library shouting, “Stop working! Stop working! You’re getting ahead of me!”
Today’s under-performing and, too often, mal-performing legacy media find themselves in the throes of just such a breakdown. Studying their own dismal ratings exposes corporate media elites to the proverbial handwriting on the wall, a declaration of demise written evermore legibly from the hearts of the American people who, by departing from such platforms, spell out for media executives their own failings.
Mainstream media has been weighed in the balance, and found wanting.
Alternative media, long deemed by the elite to be but voices from the fringe, are not merely gaining ground on corporate media entities, but are vastly outperforming them. Media analyst Joe Concha points out that a Joe Rogan podcast garners 11 million views per episode, while CNN can’t manage 400,000 for its prime-time lineup, adding that, online, Elon Musk’s transformed X is the world’s No. 1 source for news.
As viewership tanks, one hardly need imagine mainstream media elites’ increasingly defensive and delirious shouting, “Stop working, you’re getting ahead of me!”
The public has lost trust in a medium disgustingly and unapologetically compromised by breathlessly reporting each Trump hoax, by four years of propping up White House lies about Biden’s cognitive impairment, by turning a blind eye to Biden family influence peddling and corruption, by applauding blatant DOJ/FBI weaponization against all things MAGA, by cheering every woke wave washing away traditional cultural mores of human sexual identity and behavior and by incessantly casting Trump supporters as a danger to democracy.
Oh, and, lest one forget (how could one?): January 6 – the “insurrection” that never was.
For the last four years, Jan. 6, 2025, has been envisioned by the mainstream media, and thus prepped, to be a day of epiphany for the American people: “Arise, shine! Your light has come, and WE are the bearers of that light. Behold the truth of Trump’s evil, not to be denied after the epiphany of January 6! Trump lost the election in a landslide because the people who sat in darkness have seen the light of our shining, of our holding truth to power!”
That’s the Jan. 6, 2025, they wanted.
Instead, Jan. 6 – which, in the Western church’s liturgical calendar is, actually and always, the Day of Epiphany – offers a startling reality for legacy media eyes to behold: “A new media king has been born!”
Americans refuse to buy into the absurd narrative that January 6 was, in any sense, an insurrection. Conservative America is repulsed at the irrational severity of punishments meted out to J6 participants who, caught up in the melee, entered the Capitol but did no violence. Yet more repulsed is conservative America by this week’s news of Biden handing out Presidential Citizens Medals to Liz Cheney and Bennie Thompson for their defective and deceitful leadership of the abominable January 6 House Committee.
Sending Donald Trump back to the White House, voters have declared a national January 6 Day of Epiphany, proclaiming that a new media king has been born, as Elon Musk wrote on X in the aftermath of Trump’s swing state sweep, “We are the media now. Citizen journalism is the future.”
The question now becomes, in the light of this birth of a new media king, what will the legacy media’s reaction be?
The biblical story of the first Epiphany offers two possible paths, the identical choices facing King Herod in Matthew’s gospel when the Magi, witnessing the new king’s star rising, came to seek the one born King of the Jews.
Faced with the possibility, logically perceived as a threat, of a new Judean king, Herod could either follow the lead of the Magi (the path he claimed he would follow), or he could double down on deception (the path he chose).
Expect most, thankfully not all, of our legacy media figures, like Herod, to double down on deception.
Matthew records: “Then Herod called for the wise men and … sent them to Bethlehem, saying, ‘Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I also may go and pay him homage.’”
Herod was saying to the Magi, “Your epiphany is my epiphany! Go, search, and when you find, please report, so that I may join you.”
Well, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. from Baghdad University to recognize Herod’s duplicity. Matthew writes that a dream warned the Magi not to return to Herod, but I suspect they needed no dream, knowing that a bending of the knee to a newly crowned King of the Jews would not be among Herod’s resolutions for the New Year.
With that Epiphany image of the Magi bowing before the newborn king, I was struck on this Epiphany morning by an Associated Press report about a Washington Post liberal cartoonist, Ann Telnaes, quitting her job after her most recent cartoon was rejected.
The description of her rejected cartoon seems to me meant as an Epiphany reflection, the newspaper’s owner and Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, along with other media executives, bowing before President-elect Trump and offering him bags of money, just as the biblical Epiphany story presents the Magi bowing before the child to offer gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
Said Ms. Telnaes, “I’m just a cartoonist, but I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, ‘Democracy dies in darkness.’”
Yes, so they say.
Conservative America laughs at such ludicrous pride, she claiming for herself and her paper (before Bezos bent the knee) to be the anointed bearers of light, the Post being a leader among media venues embracing every Trump hoax of the last decade.
I see a bit of Herod in the story, a cartoonist unwilling to give up the long unopposed media clout she and her woke ilk have enjoyed, and I see a great deal of our 1969 Berkeley student, shouting, “Stop working! You’re getting ahead of me.”
On this Day of Epiphany, Jan. 6, 2025, as Kamala Harris presided over the certifying of the election she lost to Donald J. Trump, I wish our WND readers a Happy New Year, rejoicing that a new media king has been born.
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