Bluesky Blues: Turley, Jennings Nail It on the One Post-Election Lesson Journos Refuse to Learn

When one loses an election in the way Democrats lost three weeks ago, you would expect there to be political post-mortems on what went right, what went wrong, and what can be done from now on not to make the same mistakes again in future elections.

While some of that is happening to varying degrees (with the rightness and wrongness of the conclusions up for debate), one area where we haven't seen a lot of introspection is from the mainstream media which is, let's face it, little more than an arm of the Democrat Party.

Instead of coming to terms with how their TDS-laced reporting influenced their readers and viewers away from the left's preferred candidates, many of them seem content with sticking their heads in the sand - and fleeing from Twitter/X to their Bluesky safe space in the process.

But as George Washington University Law School Professor Jonathan Turley observed, running away is the exact opposite of what they should have done:

Over at X, there is no shortage of trolls from the left and the right. However, it is hardly an echo chamber. Many liberals are among the most influential and criticize the right and others, including Musk and X. It also has its share of far-left trolls. However, it is the fact that it also allows such voices from the right that seems to produce the gasping, hypoxic response of liberals.
[...]
Ironically, one lesson from this election is the danger of both the press and pundits in becoming increasingly out of touch with most of the country. The shock expressed by many is due to a lack of exposure to opposing views — not the need for further ideological isolation.
That cathartic effort is evident in many subscribers who are now boycotting the Washington Post and MSNBC. MSNBC contributor and Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin appears to support such efforts. Rubin is an avowed Marxist. Groucho Marxist, that is. Marx famously said, “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”

It's similar to a very on-point observation conservative strategist Scott Jennings made during a Monday segment on CNN where his leftist co-panelists were in disbelief that their own network had reported that Twitter/X was more ideologically balanced than it ever had been.

After some back and forth yada yadaing about being "concerned" with billionaires buying media sites and social media platforms (which Jennings correctly pointed out was being done way before Musk bought Twitter), Jennings got to the heart of the matter of why there was such an uproar from media types and leftists about Musk's ownership of Twitter/X and them exiting stage left to Bluesky after the election:

.@ScottJenningsKY: But isn't the issue that the left has gotten so used to controlling almost all institutional information distribution arms in this country that when one little piece of it, whether it's @X or MSNBC or anything else gets taken away, the panic is so outrageous? pic.twitter.com/Zh8LUZwE43
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) November 26, 2024

Bingo.

What enrages them is the near-total loss of control over the political/cultural narratives they like to set and the filtered, carefully selected bits of information they want you to know about rather than give you the full, unvarnished picture. They've had control over information flow for decades but over the last few years it has slowly but surely eroded - and they hate it.

The fact that so many leftists and press figures have fled to Bluesky and other social media platforms like TikTok further speaks to that point and also confirms another one - that both of them as groups work hand in hand.

I mean, how else would you explain the fact that so many journalists, pundits, and other prominent public figures/commentators quit Twitter/X and ran off to Bluesky just as the left was touting its supposed benefits? This was not a coincidence and as far as I'm concerned, if you're a reporter and you rushed to Bluesky after the election so you could feel "free to speak your mind" you've told me exactly where you stand politically and how you feel about opposing viewpoints without having to say a word.