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Fox is an interesting case study because it is so clearly from top to bottom a media organization that exists to advance right wing politics in the United States but it's still driven powerfully by commercial interests and its audience. Rupert Murdoch is alleged by Dominion to have passed Biden campaign ads to Jared Kushner before they aired, the highest levels of the company have a strong political leaning. But if you read their internal communications they're not arguing whether promoting theories of a stolen election advance the long term goals of the American political right, but whether it will cost them audience share and stock price.
The big changes in political media have been unbundling and advances in user metrics. I don't subscribe to the local newspaper for sports news and the classifieds, you go to craigslist, /r/NFL and read substacks of the exact writers I like. I don't know if this is the case for Substack but NYT writers have said they can get metrics on exactly what point in the article most people stop reading. The upshot is that politics writers are now extremely responsive to small communities of political obsessives rather than broad constituencies. Even when corporate leadership is clearly aligned with one political party the audience's interests rather than strategic logic seems to drive their behavior.
The right has always complained about 'the media' and academia, but what has changed recently is not the ideological leanings of professors and reporters but the technologies of media distribution. The classic Burnham theory that management concedes to the political desires of in demand workers makes sense at tech companies where skilled programmers are scarce, but not as much digital media where writers aren't in great demand unless they can generate a personal following.
My guess is that the NYT trans open letter war is probably indicative of a genuine disagreement within the NYT's audience that falls along generational lines. Management is probably in conflict with the younger writers class on this, and I'm not sure how it'll play out. But I get the sense that management feels they conceded too much to staff during the Floyd summer and the firing of James Bennet after Tom Cotton's op-ed and they want to reel in the workforce. My guess is that this is a local maxima for coverage of the issue just because people lose interest, and there will be alignment against right wing anti-drag bills. But I don't think it's over and I expect continued coverage of the issue off an on over time because that division within the audience will persist.
Compare and contrast to 96% of journalist political donations in 2016 going to Clinton, journalists running article drafts by the Clinton campaign before sending them to press, etc.
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