Gutfeld: The death of the legacy media
'Gutfeld!' panelists discuss CNN's partisan turn, dismal ratings and more.
What an amazing week we've had. For one, the legacy media is dying.
What is the legacy media, you ask? Exactly my point. In another year or two, it's going to be a distant memory, a relic, part of a bygone era like silent films, 8-track tapes, and "The Late Show" with Colbert.
In short, it's the monster that manufactures absurd narratives from this thing called life. Sounds like I'm describing a Bette Midler one-woman show, but it's worse.
Unlike me and my staff, the legacy media writes, creates, and produces, not for you, but for their industry to feed their own egos and bank balances.
It's a self-preservation hive mind, but like a hospital powered by windmills, they operate only in darkness.
But when the lights go on, they die like ants under a magnifying glass at high noon. You're seeing it now, the manipulation bubble in all its nakedness, but like that two-way mirror I installed in my guest bathroom, it's a bubble they claim to see out of, but won't let you see in.
But you see it all right now, and you've seen it before in drips and drabs because sometimes the news is so orchestrated, it makes the Ohio State marching band look spontaneous.
Take the holidays or the last weeks of summer. The news just stops.
It's not like life stopped or life suffering stopped or crime suddenly went away. No, the faucet just got turned off because the people who run the news are at the Hamptons.
Did you notice how nothing happens during the Super Bowl? You'd think that would be the best time for something newsy to occur. But no, it's like even Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, lowly street thugs and even hurricanes and tornadoes have money on the big game.
And aside from some intimately situated bottle rocket injuries, nothing happens on July 4th.
And yes, the world is still turning. But there's no one there to create the spin.
Meanwhile, throughout the year, actual news is avoided in favor of conflict-driven clickbait. Making people angry is their business model.
They prefer that we be mad at each other. As the deficit hits $330 trillion, the border's a mess, and crime runs rampant — because that stuff throws their authority into question.
Now, how can you tell the legacy media is truly dying? Well, they're turning their fire not toward people who want to limit speech, but toward those who create more speech, meaning the people whipping their a--.
Turns out, democracy dies when you get 10 times their best audience. What do you say, Doughboy?
BRIAN STELTER: Not all opinions are created equal. You think about major newsrooms like CNN that have health departments and desks and operations that work hard on verified information on COVID-19. And then you have talk show stars like Joe Rogan who just wing it, who make it up as they go along, and because figures like Rogan are trusted by people that don't trust real newsrooms, we have a tension — a problem that's much bigger than Spotify.
CNN's Brian Stelter. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Vanity Fair) (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Vanity Fair)
Yeah, you should ask why they don't trust you. But he's panicked. You could tell by the sweat. His dome is shinier than a Christmas ornament.
But he shouldn't worry. When CNN goes away, he can always work directly for the DNC, and I hear they have great donuts in the break room.
But CNN claims the truth is in danger and we need action right now, which is how legacy media tries to protect itself by silencing the competition.
They tried to do it to Trump. Now, their new target replacing Trump is Rogan. But it's too late. CNN is in a death spiral. And why is this important? Because for the longest time, they had us. There was no alternative.
CNN was up there with death and taxes. Viewers were like suckers paying 10 bucks for an awful, pre-made ham-and-cheese sandwich at the airport.
Where else are you going to go? But that's changed.
Here's a fact: Liberals and Democrats now watch Fox more than they watch CNN or even MSNBC. New Nielsen ratings showed that in October, Tucker was the number-one watched host among Democrats in the key 25-to-54 age demographic across all networks.
Rachel Maddow and "The Five" tied for second, and something called "Gutfeld!" rounded out the top five — never heard of him.
Poor CNN. Not only are we eating their lunch — we're doing it in their kitchen with stuff from their fridge. So you can grow some amazing conclusions from this first. The Fox audience isn't as easy to define as the bitter left would have it to be.
So when they insult our viewers, often they insult themselves. Our viewers are — what's that word? — diverse. But this is what happens and when you betray your viewers by claiming something's true when it turns out to be a lie over and over and over again.
CHRIS CUOMO: Show me where it says the protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.
Chris and Andrew Cuomo. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) (CNN | Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
STELTER: What does Putin have on Trump? Has Trump been compromised?
CHRIS CUOMO TO FORMER GOV. ANDREW CUOMO: This was the actual swab that was being used to fit up that double-barrel shotgun that you have mounted on the front of your pretty face.
JIM ACOSTA: We are not fake news. We are real news.
DON LEMON: If you watch a certain state TV and you listen to conservative media, you would think that, you know, entire cities are just, you know, in brawls and fights and fires and whatever. We went out and had a great dinner. The biggest terror threat in this country comes from radicals on the far right, primarily white men.
CNN’s Don Lemon. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for WarnerMedia)
CNN HOST: Much of the dossier has been corroborated.
CNN HOST: Some rioters were planning to murder lawmakers.
CNN HOST: It does look like that young man, to me, is taunting the Native American Vietnam vet, and he's in his face.
No wonder CNN is trying to build a censorship version of the Berlin Wall. I wouldn't want anyone to point out that crap, either.
CNN just makes everything else look better — especially Rogan. When he's wrong, at least he didn't have an entire newsroom to blame.
So, like the drifter clawing his way out in my trunk, legacy media needed to die.
They ignore crime and inflation and the border. Things that affect you, but not them. They created Russian collusion to help Hillary.
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They laughed off the crime wave to protect the progressives. They denied that Hunter's laptop was real. They claimed racism is now a health hazard, which shouldn't matter since we'll all be dead in eight years — thank you, climate change.
CNN is like the stripper that tells you you're so handsome during a lap dance, but everything they told you was a lie just to make a profit — I wouldn't know.
But now they're that wounded gazelle that can't keep up with the pack, and we're that pack of lions ready to finish the job.
It's just nature playing out the way it's supposed to where the strong survive and the weak get eaten.
And man, does CNN taste delicious.
This article is adapted from Greg Gutfeld's opening monologue on the February 4, 2022 edition of "Gutfeld!"
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