Thursday, August 21, 2025

Part I

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Mainstream Doesn't Mean What It Used To Mean: MSNBC's Transition to MS Now Raises Bigger Issue of the Shift in Mainstream Media and the Future

Well, one of the things we need to take into account is the media landscape at any given time, and I’m speaking of the media landscape here in the United States, the lay of the land, so to speak. How do most Americans receive news? How do they receive information? How do they process it? Who’s delivering it? What’s behind that? What worldviews are represented?

Well, as you know, in the United States, we have a pretty clear worldview divide at present. We have a very clear partisan divide. The big story in American politics has been the disappearance of the middle. And guess what? Pretty much the same thing is true on the media landscape. And so you have the bifurcation, the division of the media largely into more conservative media, more liberal media. And there are still some that would be described as the mainstream media, but let’s be honest, mainstream doesn’t mean what it used to mean. And all that comes very much to mind when we see that a major cable news network, very much a part of the media ecology in recent years, is now under new ownership and is rebranding and renaming itself. I’m speaking about what used to be MSNBC that is now going to be MSNOW.

Okay, very interesting. For one thing, just in terms of the name, why are they keeping MS? MSNBC was a joint venture between Microsoft, MS, okay, that makes sense, and NBC, the longtime major television network. So MS and NBC put together, MSNBC, it made sense. It was created in 1996. The most interesting worldview dimension of this is how quickly MSNBC, as trying to find its way, you might say, in the media landscape, went to the left, and it went to the left a little bit, then a little bit more, and then pretty much all the way.

So over the course of the last several years, in the media ecology, say, on cable news, just to take three networks in particular, you have CNN, the Cable News Network started decades ago by Ted Turner, and then you have of course Fox News, a project largely of Rupert Murdoch in terms of his capital and leadership, and then you had MSNBC coming out of NBC.

Now, NBC actually in the cable age rolled out several different variants. MSNBC was the political variant and it was intended to go head-to-head against CNN, Fox News in terms of the news audience, and in particular the big money here is the evening news audience. But one of the big things behind all of this from our consideration is the fact that the big ratings aren’t all that big.

So just to put the matter bluntly, if you look at evening ratings for CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, you’re only talking about a few million people at the most. There are more than 300 million Americans. And something like, well, I don’t know, 1% of them apparently, maybe 1 to 2%, is watching any of the major cable news networks. You also look at the fact that in the age of streaming media, you have of course many other alternatives, the rise of podcasts and so many other variant means of news delivery.

But the fact is, when it comes to these cable news networks, they still have a lot of authority in politics. They still have a lot of influence in politics, or at least people think they do. And again, when it comes to the whether they do or not, at least a part of what we have to keep in mind is that the people who tend to watch these news networks are also probably the people who are more likely to vote in elections. So there’s an outside weight to this kind of news audience and understanding how it breaks up.

So here’s the interesting thing. You have the right, the left, and the middle. And on the conservative side you have Fox News. In the middle sort of you have CNN. I think CNN leans more liberal than conservative, but they do have on at least many panels with genuine conservative voices, so we’ll give them credit for that. But I don’t think they’re conservative in the classic sense by any means. Fox News is on the right. Now, I didn’t say exactly conservative because on the right and conservative is not exactly the same thing, but in terms of the political polarity, wow, conservatives flock to Fox rather than to the two other networks.

Now the other interesting thing is I talk about the disappearing middle. If you talk about a lot of rating sweeps, number one is going to be Fox by a long shot, and then you have MSNBC and CNN. But the interesting thing is that whereas once Americans would’ve been predictably headed towards the middle when it comes to cable news networks, that’s not that way at all. As a matter of fact, CNN often comes in third rather than second, much less first.

All right, so I mentioned the MSNBC really came in the heyday of the early cable expansion 1996 cooperative effort between Microsoft and NBC. And I said that it was in the beginning not necessarily intended to go left, right, or middle. It was a commercial product, but it did go left. And one of the reasons why it did is because that was the open space.

So here’s another very interesting world view dimension of our media environment. The media tend to be, in terms of legacy brands, very liberal. But in terms of the audience, not so much. Very interesting. This is why you have people on the Left in the media continually perplexed by the fact that liberal candidates, democratic candidates lose elections. This was famously or infamously crystallized in a moment back when it was President Richard Nixon who won election in a landslide. And Pauline Cale, the legendary theater critic of the New York Times, said, “Nixon can’t have won. I don’t know anyone who voted for Nixon.” Well, guess what? That said very little about Nixon, that said very little about the American electorate, it said a lot about the person who said it. The fact that she didn’t have any friends who voted for Richard Nixon turned out to say more about the liberal media than about the American electorate. That’s not particularly new.

But what is interesting is that if you go back to the 1970s and 1980s, even in that period, for the most part, you had very tight corporate constriction of the news media. You had radio, you had newspapers. Newspapers, they weren’t all liberal, but they tended to be, and the most influential people in the media tended to be very much on the Left, identified with the Democratic Party. Some would be I think perhaps self-described as center left, but the point is not that many people on the Right.

When it came to the three television networks, CBS and NBC first then joined by ABC, well, it had to be mainstream enough that Americans would watch it, but it still was at least somewhat to the left, center left perhaps. But all that began to change when you had transformations in the news media environment. And there’s certain people who deserve credit for really transforming that environment. One of them was Rush Limbaugh. And Rush Limbaugh began his radio program and is a syndicated program. He not only changed radio, he changed American politics. And Rush Limbaugh was of course a titanic personality. He was an entertainer, but he was an entertainer who also had very serious political principles. And he leaned into those political principles and he could define them and defend them in ways that built a vast audience across the United States. And thus he transformed radio. In some ways, you have people in the radio industry who will say Rush Limbaugh nearly single-handedly saved the industry from absolute disappearance in the second half of the 20th century, particularly in the last decades of the 20th century.

But then you had the advent of the internet age, and with the internet came all kinds of new opportunities for the delivery of news and in many different ways. And here again, the fact is that even in the big brand podcasters, the vast majority of the biggest brands are on the conservative side rather than on the liberal side, which leads a lot of liberals asking big questions like, “Why aren’t we entertaining?” And I’ve got some theories about that as a matter of fact. But I think the biggest issue is that when people have an alternative, they’re often going to turn to a more conservative alternative. And I think there’s a good reason for that. I think it’s something I can be honestly thankful for, but I do think it’s very interesting that MSNBC is now rebranding itself as MSNOW. And I think it’s interesting that it’s pretty much announcing that it’s going to stay in its lane, so to speak, on the Left, because there’s really no reason in terms of financial incentives for MSNBC, now MSNOW to move to the center. I think just in terms of our understanding of the media landscape, that’s all very interesting.

Fox News, far more conservative and in some ways far more entertaining than some of the others, and they kind of leaned into that. That’s a vast audience. There’s another question about the audience, and that is how does it break down? Say, look at a map. Where would you have the intensity showing up really hot and then cooler in other places? Age. Age is another factor. And that’s where Fox News has really a lock in many ways on older Americans who tend also to be more conservative, at least in terms of their network preference.

So interesting stuff going on, but it’s not just in commercial broadcasting, it is also in public broadcasting or what has been defined as public broadcasting. And it’s because in the Big Beautiful Bill that President Trump and the Republicans passed, there was a defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And so you have federal funding basically turned off.

Now it’s possible it could be turned back on, but the fact is there are a lot of good reasons why the faucet was turned off in terms of taxpayer money going to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. And it’s because honestly, both of them have been pretty much on the Left for a very long time. And so when you look at the Marxist understanding of ideological capture, it would be wrong to say it was absolute when it comes to public media, but it’s absolutely overwhelming, and that’s a reason why a lot of conservatives have been very upset for a long time with public funding. And so that’s coming to an end.

The New York Times and others are reporting just this week on how there is now a race on to rescue public media. The big issue here, by the way, is not so much at the national level because there’s so much major foundation funding and other private funding going into the national level, at least according to the news reports, the most vulnerable parts of the public broadcasting systems, radio and television, are the local affiliates. And you can kind of understand why. And a lot of them have depended upon taxpayer support, indeed channeled through things like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

So we’re going to find out whether or not private funds are going to pay for public broadcasting or what’s been defined as public broadcasting. And remember, this was really begun interesting. This is very interesting. It was really begun and especially gained momentum after World War II because Americans, at least many in the American government, they were somewhat envious of public broadcasting in other countries. And the gold standard there is the British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC. And so there were a lot of Americans, particularly in the cultural establishment, who felt that the nation would be well-served by having an American analog to the BBC. And one of the things that the BBC was understood to have, that American Public Broadcasting did not is well, a lot of just deep intellectual content, a part of the BBC legacy and also an incredible worldwide system of correspondents and others. The American public media never got to that second part. But in terms of a lot of specials and things, there was a lot of money spent on developing programming for public broadcasting, particularly when you think about public television.

But as I say, politically, let’s be honest, it’s been pretty much tilted to the left for a long time. And I paid a lot of attention to it because I’m interested in what that says about American culture. And I’ll just tell you, I have been just incredibly frustrated for decades at the fact that when you have a lot of people in public broadcasting say, “Okay, we’re getting a spectrum of opinion.” Yeah, the spectrum of opinion kind of begins in the center and goes left, and the people they call conservative are not in the main people conservatives would call conservative. And there’s a lot of frustration there. And that frustration eventually ended up with this bill.

Of course, it raises some questions of principle as well, such as when you have as free a media environment as we have, why would you use taxpayer money and spend it on broadcasting either on the radio or on television or what are now frankly streaming platforms? So it’s going to be very interesting to see, and the New York Times in this article by Benjamin Mullen tells us that you’ve got money going from major American foundations, predictably, to support public broadcasting with the cutoff of federal funds. It’s going to be interesting to see how this develops in the future, but you’ll notice no one has said, “We need to revisit this whole thing and take an ideological inventory, political inventory, worldview inventory.” So it’s going to be full steam ahead, but I think at least a lot of American taxpayers are saying, “Well, at least we don’t have to pay for it.”

Now in all this, there’s gain and loss. That’s so often the case in cultural developments. The gain has been that no longer are there these giant monopolies on the media. Now, it still is true that there are legacy media such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, we talk about them. They have outsized influence, and honestly, there’s virtually no way you’re going to create a new New York Times or Wall Street Journal. That’s the legacy part of legacy.

But on the other hand, there is loss in the sense that Americans used to have a common vocabulary and some common conversation because you were watching common news broadcasts and limited news networks. It used to be that whatever was on the three networks, that’s pretty much what Americans watched and what they talked about. So there is a loss in terms of a common culture, and one of the results of that is that conservatives can simply live in a conservative silo and liberals can live in a liberal silo and you can make money basically building those silos. But I still think that’s much to be preferred over a media monopoly by a cultural elite. So I’ll count this more gain than loss.

Part II

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Should Harvard Send Its International Students Home? American Universities Could Be Undermining the Nation’s Security Interests Through Enrollment

All right, obviously schools are getting back in session, students are showing up on college and university campuses. There’ll be a lot to think about and talk about in that regard, but a couple of things come to mind immediately, and both of these are going to be cited from the Wall Street Journal.

Wall Street Journal ran an article by Mike Gallagher, former member of Congress, and very interestingly, he is now Chief of Defense for Palantir Technologies. That is a major high-tech defense supplier here in the United States making a lot of news on its own, really interesting stuff, frankly, and this company has really been rising in terms of influence and business. And Mike Gallagher writes an article with a stunning headline, “Send Harvard’s Chinese Students Home.” He writes out of a sense of concern for America’s national defense.

He says this, “President Trump began his second term by picking a fight with an unaccountable leftist dictatorship that is hostile to American values, accustomed to taking advantage of American wealth, and actively abetting genocide in Xinjiang.” He says, “I refer, of course, to Harvard.” Now remember, this is a former member of Congress and a very prominent executive in the defense industry. Next, he says, “For decades, Republicans and Democrats agreed that our universities were crown jewels of American exceptionalism, and Harvard shone brightest of all. Mr. Trump, however, has an uncanny knack for exposing rotten shibboleths, and recent years has seen top universities unmask as global far-left patronage networks using research as a smoke screen to prevent scrutiny of campus hate as they aid adversaries like China.”

Okay, just put a stop there for a moment. This is really strong language, and it should be noteworthy because this isn’t appearing just in a tweet. This is not appearing just in somebody’s blog. This is appearing in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. It is also written by someone who is a major defense industry executive, also written by someone who is a former member of Congress. And so when you have this kind of language with this kind of argument showing up in this kind of media platform with this kind of credibility, wow, this should have our attention.

Here’s what he writes. He says, “Roughly 30% of Harvard’s student body is foreign. At Columbia, that share approaches 40%. America’s finest universities benefit from billions in government grants and tax breaks while admitting fewer Americans every year. Our elite universities need a change of mindset. They should make a priority of educating exceptional Americans and citizens of our partner nations, not our adversaries.”

He went on to say this speaking about labs, whereas Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexander Wang warned, the rate of AI progress may be such that, “You need to prevent all of our secrets from going over to our adversaries, and you need to lock down the labs.” Very interesting thing. Again, this is not a peripheral figure. This is the Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer at Meta who is saying, “Maybe we’re going to have to lock down the labs.” Well, it looks like it may be already a little too late, but that doesn’t mean that Americans and American universities shouldn’t act.

He writes this bluntly: “Thousands of Chinese citizens are working and studying in such labs. The US hosted 1.1 million international students last year. Of those, 25% came from China. In 2022, foreign nationals, many of them Chinese, accounted for almost 40% of science doctorates. In AI specifically, nearly 40% of top tier researchers at US institutions are of Chinese origins.” Later in the article, Mr. Gallagher writes, “Universities love Chinese students because they generally pay full freight, often subsidized by the Communist Party.”

I’ll just recall what Lenin famously said about when the time came to hang the capitalists, the capitalists would compete to sell the rope. There is an absolute irrationality to this that we need to note. And I can simply tell you that in the world of higher education, you see this just in full evidence, and a lot of America’s elite universities are decreasingly American, even as they would claim to be increasingly elite. And that is a huge problem. And a part of what people haven’t talked about is all the government funding that goes into higher education and President Trump, of course, has hit much of that head on with universities like Columbia and also Harvard and many others. And those negotiations in some cases are ongoing.

But what a lot of people don’t recognize is that the United States of America adopted an official defense strategy that basically outsourced a lot of the defense development to American universities, especially America’s major research universities. But you don’t hear the universities talking about that. And when you see the numbers such as Mr. Gallagher brings to the fore here, and when you consider that China is openly an adversary state, it has openly been taking American information, American education, and American secrets and technologies and transforming them into Chinese military might, which just about every front page of every day’s newspaper seems to bring a new headline about in terms of how a new Cold War is shaping up.

So again, it just seems that this is something that should be really easy to understand, but this tells us something about the world in which we live. Also about higher education, it’s not just Gallagher’s article about suggesting that Harvard should send its Chinese students home, and of course that’s an exaggerated statement, but it’s a very serious argument.

Part III

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Higher Education and Admissions Standards: The Ideological Dimensions Are Still in Debate

It’s also interesting that in a letter to the editor at the Wall Street Journal, you have a couple of professors who are pushing back on an article by columnist Jason Reilly about the failure of affirmative action, and in particular the DEI and other strategies that show up on so many college and university campuses, and especially in admissions policies. And Mr. Reilly was arguing that you need to use standardized tests, objective measurements for competitive admissions in America’s most elite universities. And it used to be taken for granted. That’s pretty much the way it was. If there’s an exception, it was for so-called legacies, and that was the sons and daughters of graduates of those institutions.

Now, I’ll also say, I think if you’re going to make admissions based upon the statistical and objective measures, then you need to do so, period. But you need to know the alternative here that certainly showed up with affirmative action is that you use other criteria. And Jason Reilly in his column just very justifiably asked the question, “What exactly would those things be?” And it’s basically trading objective numbers and grades for subjective evaluation.

Now, once again, when you get into the world, very rarefied world of American higher education, the most competitive institutions, I mean, the fact is that it’s been filled with ideological bias for a very long time. So guess what? If you’re going to use subjective measures, well, you can pretty much figure out which way those subjective measures are going to lead.

Okay, so these two professors and other institutions wrote in response and they said, “Grades and test scores do provide valuable information about academic preparation for college, but they are woefully inadequate in isolation.” They go on to say, “Grading is subjective, variable by teacher, subject in school. Grade inflation is rampant, and formulas used to weight grade point averages differ.” Then they say, “Grades and standardized tests correlate closely with socioeconomic status.” Well, that’s probably true. And by the way, as you look at these universities, their student bodies pretty much still prove that that’s true.

But instead of trying to improve education at every level in order to help more students to be prepared to be more competitive, instead, the argument here is that you need to get outside these objective measurements, SAT scores, objective tests, grades, GPAs, et cetera. And my point is simply this, that if you move into a subjective category, then you are pretty much deliberately just saying, “We are going to change the way we define these institutions such that it will fit somebody’s ideological and preconceived notion of what the ideal student body should look like.” This is going to be some admissions committee’s ideal of what the perfect or rightful student body at this institution would look like. And you know what? Study after study has shown that overwhelmingly that means it looks like them.

I’ll tell you something else as a seminary and college president, and I want to say this hoping parents will listen particularly to this. It is true that grades and objective scores don’t tell you everything. That is certainly true. But I also want to tell you that they do tell you a lot, and they are correlated with student success. And so I’m not saying that’s all there is to the educational equation, that wouldn’t be true, but I’m telling you that they are, in the end, highly predictive. Now, I’m thankful for all the young people who frankly may not have been too committed to learning when they were in grade school and in high school, and they have turned around with a new seriousness. That too is, that’s one of the glories of higher education. But I will tell you that by and large, the numbers do correlate. And of course, I know your child is not a correlate, but that child’s your child. But just to understand, this is the way primarily it really does lay out.

Of course, we should hope for and work for every child to be as productive as possible. But I’ll also say, I think you know this already, it really most importantly starts right at home.