The mainstream media has elected another president

My sister, who is only vaguely interested in politics, told me the other day that the Dems are lucky, because they’ve got such a deep pool of candidates for 2016 — and then proceeded to name Hillary and Cuomo.  She had no idea who Rubio, Jindal, West, Love, etc., were, and she knows who Ryan is only because he was on the Romney ticket.  The reason for my sister’s ignorance is simple:  On the rare occasions when she tunes into the news — meaning the MSM, not alternative media — these stations make no mention whatsoever of rising conservative stars.  Further, if she bothered to watch Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, who do mention young conservative guns, she would come away believing that they’re stupid and cruel, and that they hate old people and minorities (or are self-hating minorities).

Here’s the dirty secret of the 2012 election:  The mainstream media still rules.

We conservatives, optimistic to the point of stupidity, foolishly believed that the liberal media’s lies and hysteria during the Bush years was such that Americans stopped trusting it and tuned out.  Obama’s election, we thought, was the last gasp of a dinosaur press.  We assumed that it had impaired its brand so much that it would soon be reduced to irrelevancy.

What we didn’t realize was that during the Bush and Obama years, the drive-by media didn’t destroy its credibility.  Instead, it effectively destroyed the average American’s credulity.  The media still rules and it easily managed to put another one of its own into the White House.  Even more impressively, this year the media did it with the gloves off.  It made no pretense whatsoever of objectivity and, as it happily discovered, the voters didn’t care.

It’s at times like this that I really miss Andrew Breitbart.  He understood how to play the media.  No one else seems to, and I say that with all due respect to the energy, effort, and initiative that conservative stalwarts show every day.

As Breitbart understood, Obama and his ilk are not the enemy.  They’re the enemy’s spawn.  The real enemy is the media, and the question that must occupy us during the next I don’t know how many years is how we re-balance the media, either from the inside by breaking the Progressive hold or from the outside by setting up equally strong media alternatives.  Fox and AM radio, despite their popularity amongst core conservatives, are not changing the nation’s zeitgeist, which is still manipulated by a very-much-alive Progressive media.

One of the worst things about the media is how slavishly America’s young people follow it.  Whatever happened to teenage rebellion?  For better or worse, in the 1960s, teenage rebellion was about remaking the world, with drugs and sex as an enjoyable byproduct.  Now, though, teenage rebellion is about drugs and sex and, once having attained those “edgy” attributes, America’s young people willingly fall into the lockstep dictated to them by old Hollywood and Manhattan fat cats.

Can we make Individualism edgy?  That is, can we entice young people into breaking with their parents by embracing individualist, free-market ideas as an act of rebellion that goes beyond drugs, sex, and mimicking the latest mindless Leftist out of Hollywood?