John Nolte writes at Breitbart that the Weekly Standard is in trouble. The flagship of pop Neoconservatism has been the home of Never-Trumpers since the campaign. But how many anti-Trump media outlets do you really need when 95% of The Elite Media Monoculture is aligned against Trump? You can’t escape the constant Trump derangement Syndrome from every corner of the media, so why did they think that they would be able to survive in a saturated media market?
The easiest way to sum up the failure of the Weekly Standard is this: Why would anyone on the right offer financial support to the Weekly Standard when CNN will call us a racist for free? And why would anyone on the left offer financial support to the Weekly Standard when CNN will call us a racist for free?
Sarcasm aside, that is the Weekly Standard’s primary problem. In the age of Trump, the publication offers nothing we cannot get everywhere else in the elite media, nothing we cannot find at the far-left Washington Post, MSNBC, New York Times, CNN, etc.
Smug virtue-signaling and superior Trump-bashing are the cheapest commodities in today’s news business. They are literally everywhere. And so, instead of offering a unique voice and perspective in an ocean of left-wing media, the Weekly Standard instead chose to sit in the middle of this ocean and sell saltwater.
Even those in the establishment media lamenting the loss of the Weekly Standard are all spewing some variation of the same thing: “An important conservative voice opposing Trump.”
Sure, we all understand why the corrupt media found this “important voice” valuable: it allowed them to exploit the Weekly Standard and its contributors as a club against Trump from the right, and there is no species on earth the media find more useful than a narcissistic Republican bashing one of his own.
Regardless, the media’s ability to use the Weekly Standard as a propaganda weapon did not make the Weekly Standard more interesting to the everyday news and opinion consumer. In fact, the Weekly Standard became so predictable in its reactionary response to all things Trump (and his supporters), so predictable, it ceased to be interesting (a problem the Weekly Standard shares with last-place CNN).
I don’t do boycotts, so I did not stop visiting the Weekly Standard for any other reason than I lost interest. The publication’s decision to sell out, to conform with the elite media, made it dull and wholly unnecessary.
