In the 1990s, someone wrote in The Weekly Standard — it may well have been Matt Labash — that for conservatives to triumph, they had to attack the messenger rather than the message. His advice was to go after the media, not the news.
Attacking the messenger was all well and good for the neoconservatives. Still, their less-thoughtful successors, MAGA supporters, are killing the messenger.
The press — always identified as the “liberal media” — is now often seen, due to relentless denigration, as a force for evil, a malicious contestant on the other side.
No matter that there is no liberal media beyond what has been fabricated from political ectoplasm. Traditionally, most proprietors have been conservative, and many, but not most reporters, have been liberal.
It surprises people to learn that when you work in a large newsroom, you don’t know the political opinions of most of your colleagues. I have worked in many newsrooms over the decades and tended to know more about my colleagues’ love lives than their voting preferences.