You wouldn’t think that “location” was important in the news business. You would be wrong.
An article in Politico crunched the numbers and tapped location as the primary reason why big media are simply incapable of understanding America:
“The results read like a revelation. The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political.”
Most of the members of big media believe that Barack Obama was a great president. They were absolutely sure that Hillary Clinton would be elected president in the 2016 elections. They simply couldn’t see anyone voting for anyone else!
If you look at the red/blue election map we’ve all seen of counties, however, most of the rest of the country disagreed. They went to the polls and voted for Donald Trump, in numbers large enough to give the Republicans a comfortable electoral victory over big media’s “can’t lose” candidate.
Why is that?
It’s because location matters. I’ve lived in a number of different places during my lifetime. Big cities, small towns and rural areas. Each one has been different. The people are different. The local economy is different. The jobs are different. Those who live there value different things, according to where they are located.
Most big-media people have lived their entire lives in a blue bubble. They work in an office full of people who are just like themselves. That’s why there were hired; to give the publication or news program its “voice,” which is what attracts a specific audience, which is what can be sold to advertisers who in the end must pay the bills to keep the show on the road – or in this case inside the blue bubble.
It’s a pretty simple model, really, It hasn’t changed much since before the online world existed, either. Produce content. Build an audience. Sell to advertisers.
I’ve been around long enough to know it’s almost always a mistake to assume that other people think like you do. Chances are, they don’t. That is especially true in a nation where people have been very mobile and chased economic opportunity, which took them someplace new. But even though they move from, say a rural area to an urban area, they oftentimes don’t change the underlying way they think. Does that make them wrong, and you right?
Once big media came to grips with the Internet, they employed big money to build big, fancy websites. The people who worked together to build this had gone to the same elitist universities, worked in the same offices, lived in the same suburbs or urban enclaves, had kids in the same daycare who they later sent to the same schools. In theory they are all unique individuals; in fact they live the same life. Only the names and faces have been changed. To them, their life is the only life there is. Life in the blue bubble.
I’m guessing many of them hate their lives. Yet they don’t believe anything else exists. When they do “get out” of the blue bubble for an assignment or vacation, they go to the same places their friends went when they “got away from it all.” When they come back, they’ll have the same thoughts their friends had about the same place. Life goes on … until it doesn’t.
Now a few personal observations about my 20 years at WorldNetDaily, and why it matters to you. When Joseph Farah started WND, he didn’t have the kinds of resources that would pay for office space in a metro area. He did, however, have the Internet. This meant that he could tap almost anyone, anywhere, to be a reporter, correspondent or columnist.
There was an interesting byproduct from that, however. We weren’t all located together in Los Angeles, Seattle, New York City or Washington, D.C. We were spread all over the country, wherever we lived, in different locations. Many times, because we were in locations different from one another, we thought about things differently. So we wrote about them differently. The great thing about WorldNetDaily was, it let us. We thought the way the people around us thought about what we were writing about, not the people we worked around.
If Joseph Farah had found big money in Washington, D.C., or New York City to start WorldNetDaily, he would have hired from the same labor pool big media hired from. The staff would have lived in the same cozy neighborhoods, put their kids into the same schools and thought about things pretty much like everyone else in the media bubble they lived and worked inside of.
Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Diversity of location is what gave WorldNetDaily diversity of opinion. Until you encounter opinions diverse from your own, you may not know what you really think about things that happen in the world. You’re the only one who can figure that out. You certainly won’t find it inside the blue bubble.
There are other things you can look at differently, too …
Media wishing to interview Craige McMillan, please contact [email protected].
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