State Media, R.I.P.
State media is dead.
It has lost all power.
It has lost all legitimacy.
They lied to you about Issue 1.
They lied when they called it bipartisan.
They lied when they called it grassroots.
They lied when they called it anti-gerrymandering.
Every major state paper endorsed issue 1.
Only On The Record stood against the wave of propaganda, fact-checking the media’s fake news narrative at every turn.
Among the lies the state media told in their endorsements:
• Cleveland Plain Dealer: “Ohio government is broken.”
• Columbus Dispatch: “Issue 1 will end gerrymandering.”
• Cincinnati Enquirer: “Ohio, one of the most gerrymandered states in the country.”
• Toledo Blade: “The proportionality requirement will make more legislative and congressional districts competitive.”
The media just parroted the Democrats’ talking points and endorsed the Issue 1 campaign with scant critical review. All of the major papers’ editorial boards simply regurgitated leftist Democrat propaganda like stenographers rather than journalists.
You may find detailed and fully sourced refutations to all their falsehoods in our series fact-checking the Issue 1 campaign.
How did the opposition overcome all the odds?
One factor may have been a key.
For the first time, the state media machine was put on the defensive.
Week after week, On The Record called out their lies with fact-checks that were linked to credible and reliable sources.
We debunked their narrative and every detail of their fake news.
That forced proponents and their amen chorus in the state media to try to explain their support for Issue 1 in a way that was both clear and credible enough to persuade voters.
And they could not do that.
The numbers are staggering.
Issue 1 proponents outspent opponents by 5 to 1.
The left spent a jaw-dropping $37 million – almost all of it from out of state – much of it foreign – to try to overturn a key part of the Ohio Constitution, the redistricting amendments overwhelmingly approved by voters in 2015 and 2018.
But the people knew better.
Ohio voters could tell the difference between facts and propaganda.
Issue 1 went down to a resounding defeat, losing by eight points.
What really decided this race?
The power of the truth.
Truth trumped all their dark money.
Truth beat the machine.
And the machine is deader than an electric pickup truck going uphill in winter.
The death of our state media shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone paying attention. It has been dying for years.
On The Record chronicled the trend last year in our very first edition:
The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s circulation has dropped by more than half since 2013. It has dropped by 80 percent since the 1980s. Circulation of the Columbus Dispatch has fallen by more than 30 percent since 2017. The Cincinnati Enquirer lost 67 percent of its Sunday readers in the last four years. Newspaper circulation nationwide has dropped by half since 2000.
CNN’s ratings are the lowest in 10 years. Major media companies announcing massive layoffs include the Washington Post, NBC News and MSNBC, CNN (including the entire staff at Headline News), National Public Radio, Buzzfeed, Vox, and the nation’s largest newspaper chain, Gannett, which also closed numerous papers. Some of their remaining papers no longer even have reporters.
Most damning of all, the media’s credibility is shot. Trust in news has hit a historic low. A Gallup survey in July found only 16 percent of Americans trust newspapers. Only 11 percent trust television news.
Issue 1 was the final nail in the coffin.
Now the state media’s credibility is totally shot.
That’s part of what’s happening nationally. Our state media machine just followed the national legacy media (the formerly “mainstream” media) into oblivion and irrelevance.
The death of our state media is just part of the bigger picture.
The legacy media is dying all across the nation.
Don’t take our word for it. Just ask left-leaning Axios, which published a piece last week called, Behind the Curtain: The big media era is over.
Some excerpts:
[W]hen you're sitting at a table of people of different ages and politics, several of them probably get their information on platforms you've never visited ... from popular influencers you've never heard of ... on topics that might seem exotic or totally new.
Big, traditional media still has its moments — presidential debates, town halls and sit-down interviews. But even then, most of the narrative-shaping is done in quick-twitch video bites or reinterpretation on podcasts, social platforms or YouTube.
What's next: TV is dying, slowly but surely. The audience for TV is old and shrinking.
In a companion article in March, Axios also reported:
Not long ago, we all saw news and information through a few common windows — TV, newspapers, cable. Now we find it in scattered chunks that match our age, habits, politics and passions.
Why it matters: Traditional media, at least as a center of dominant power, is dead. Social media, as its replacement for news in the internet era, is declining in dominance.
What comes next: America is splintering into more than a dozen news bubbles based on ideology, wealth, jobs, age and location.
This means where you get your news, the voices you trust, and even the topics and cultural figures you follow could be wholly different from the person sitting next to you.
The Wall Street Journal published a story today headlined:
Trump’s Win Cemented It: New Media Is Leaving the Old Guard Behind
Podcasts are exploding, TikTok is a news source, and traditional media is shrinking in reach and influence
Excerpts:
Two weeks ago, Donald Trump sat down with the podcaster Joe Rogan for three hours, an episode that drew more than 45 million views on YouTube and over 25 million listens across Spotify and other platforms.
The percentage of people listening to podcasts in a given month has more than tripled in a decade. In the social-media realm, more than half of TikTok’s users say they regularly get news on the platform, according to the Pew Research Center.
The main three cable channels were down 32% in viewership collectively compared with 2020, to around 21 million, with CNN losing almost half its audience.
The median age of an MSNBC viewer is 70, while Fox News’s is 69 and CNN’s is 68.
But the legacy media’s main problem isn’t the medium – it’s the message.
The Trump landslide fully exposed the outright lies in big media’s official narrative.
"I also feel like this election as we sit here and pour over this tonight is something of an indictment of the political information complex," said CNN political commentator Scott Jennings. "The story that was portrayed was not true."
"We were told Puerto Rico was going to change the election. Liz Cheney, Nikki Haley voters, women lying to their husbands," he said. "Night after night after night, people were told all these things and gimmicks were somehow going to push Harris over the line, and we were just ignoring the fundamentals: inflation, people feeling like they were barely able to tread water at best."
Jennings pointed out how the media amplified a Democrat narrative that was often truly vile and despicable.
"I'm interpreting the results tonight as the revenge of the working-class American, the anonymous American who has been crushed, insulted, condescended to," he said.
"They're not garbage. They're not Nazis. They're just regular people who get up and go to work every day and are trying to make a better life for their kids. And they feel like they have been told to just shut up when they have complained about the things that are hurting them in their own lives."
The media refused to call out Democrats on their lies, or even cover the story of the decade: America’s mentally incapacitated president.
In February, Kamala Harris looked America in the eye and claimed, “Our president is in good shape, in good health, and is ready to lead in our second term.” And that Biden was "tireless in terms of working." (Even if he did call it a day at 4:00 pm.)
All of America knew that was lie.
They saw the evidence almost every time Biden spoke. Or tried to speak. Or tried to walk up the stairs. Or walk across a stage. Or figure out where he was and what he was doing there. Or how to debate.
The legacy media dutifully covered up for our senile president and promoted all the Democrats’ lies and propaganda against Trump and his supporters. Now it's clear they were smearing the majority of Americans, the media have no credibility, no real power, and almost no readers or viewers.
The Issue 1 campaign had the same disrespect for voters’ intelligence.
Figurehead and former Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor basically called Ohio voters imbeciles for rejecting Issue 1.
Trying to explain her landslide loss, O’Connor had the nerve to say, “[T]hose who voted ‘no’ thought that they were voting to end gerrymandering.”
In other words, voters are easily duped.
Too stupid to know what they are voting for.
That’s what the elite think of you, Mr. and Mrs. Buckeye.
Gee, it’s hard to understand how she lost.
Even after she judge-splained it.
All the lies added up – and they boomeranged on the media and Democrats.
Senator Bernie Sanders was scathing in his criticism:
"[I]t should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."
"First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well," Sanders continued in his statement. "While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they're right."
Many victorious Republicans, understandably, would rather look forward to building the future than relitigating the past.
But the senior editor at The Federalist argues, if we ignore the past we are doomed to repeat it.
John Daniel Davidson says the nation will never experience unity until and unless there is a reckoning, and consequences, for all the left’s lies:
Those in the news media who spent years calling Trump a fascist and comparing him to Hitler, claiming he represents a threat to democracy and that he’ll use his presidential powers to go after his enemies, should not be forgiven. Their lies and nonstop propaganda should not be forgotten. No one should ever take them seriously again. When they try to engage the public square, they should either be ignored entirely or met with a wall of mockery and derision. They are enemies of the American people, whom they openly despise, and there can be no real unity with them no matter what they might say in the future.
The truth is, if Trump hadn’t won he’d be going to prison. For supporting Trump, Elon Musk would have been targeted by the government, bankrupted, and subjected to years of lawfare. The people who howled loudest about Trump weaponizing the government against his political opponents have spent years doing just that to Trump and his associates.
The idea that we should just forget all that now for the sake of unity is deeply misguided and naïve. If those responsible aren’t held accountable, they will never stop trying to destroy their enemies by any means they can. Before we ever achieve anything like unity in America again, there must be a reckoning and there must be justice. Without those things, the divisions in our country won’t be able to heal.
Perhaps he’s right. Only time will tell.
The good news? Most of the country doesn't believe the lies anymore.
The legacy media is as dead phonebooks, typewriters, and newspapers.
And our state media let Issue 1 take their credibility to the grave.
Garth Kant is Senior Press Secretary of the Ohio Senate Majority Caucus