The Corporate Press Is an Arm of the Destructive Left
Editor's Note
A totalitarian regime must control everything from top to bottom and into every corner of society. This is the aim of the woke revolutionaries gaining power in America today, even if their methods look different from totalitarian systems of the past. Josh Hammer examines how the legacy media — not just as dupes, “but as leading participants in the work of cultural revolution.” It is not controlled as tightly as the propaganda machines of, say, the Soviet Union; but it is every bit as bought in on the radical aims of the new regime. Only when we understand this — how far removed we are from the free press that upheld a republican way of life — can we begin to wrestle control of the truth (with all the political power it entails) back from a revolutionary enemy.
This is the first installment in a series of essays on the information theater of the cold civil war. Contributions by Geoff Ingersoll, Jude Russo, and Jacob Grandstaff will follow in the coming weeks.
In the proverbial halcyon days, the American press understood its calling as something greater than fanning the flames of rancorous partisan warfare. Journalists, so the popular mythology went, aspired toward objectivity, truth-seeking, and a basic orientation toward the common good. They were meant to serve as mediators between the broader public and the corridors of power — a “Fourth Estate” that kept elites honest and citizens informed. But that mythology is long dead, and its corpse is now used as a prop by a corporate media complex that has enthusiastically and irrevocably cast its lot with the most radical elements of the radical woke Left. The results have been nothing short of dire.
America’s legacy news institutions have not merely tilted leftward in recent decades — a trend that has greatly accelerated in the Trump era. They have invariably embraced a militant progressivism that treats dissent as heresy and traditional social norms as relics to be discarded. In doing so, they have ceased to be neutral arbiters of information and have instead assumed the role of megaphone, enforcer, and chief propagandist for a revolutionary cultural project. And that project, euphemistically laundered to the American people as “progress,” is actually tantamount to civilizational implosion.
Consider the past decade’s parade of cultural flashpoints. When the #MeToo movement erupted in 2017, it began with legitimate claims of abuse and corruption in Hollywood and other elite circles. But it quickly metastasized into a zealous purge of all purported thought criminals. Thousands of years of due process norms were mocked as an inconvenient bourgeois restraint hindering real “justice.” And the corporate press cheered, elevating unverified accusations into moral verdicts and fomenting a debilitating misandry. For the media, the narrative — women are perpetual victims, men are structural oppressors — became more important than the pursuit of truth.
Then came 2020 — a year when America’s cultural superstructure cracked open. After the death of George Floyd, the media covered the ensuing riotous summer as ideological activists. With a fervor rarely seen outside religious revivalism, newsrooms broadcast the message that America was irredeemably racist, law enforcement was a vestigial badge of chattel slavery, and the “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots that engulfed major cities were noble uprisings rather than spasms of fury. Newspapers rebranded looting as a form of anodyne economic redistribution. Editorial pages served as safe harbors for anarchic hysteria while shunning voices that questioned the Black Lives Matters movement’s Marxist dogmas.
This was not reportage. It was woke catechesis.
Black Lives Matter was elevated to sainthood. Its leaders’ own explicit goals — such as disrupting the nuclear family, abolishing prisons, and embedding race essentialism into public life — were euphemized by the press. When the riots caused billions in damage and left minorities in devastated neighborhoods begging for order, the media averted its gaze. In leftist ideological warfare, after all, the inconvenient truth always subordinates itself to the greater cause.
And this is the crux of the problem: When journalists prioritize narrative over truth, they cease to be journalists in any meaningful — or, at least, historic — sense of the term.
What drives this alignment with extremism? Many cite ideological capture — a generation of reporters indoctrinated by universities where “critical theory” and other woke gobbledygook is treated as incontrovertible fact. Some point to the related phenomenon of the insular, urban monoculture of newsrooms, where conformity is the price of professional survival. The truth is even more unsettling: America’s corporate media class have come to think of themselves not as passive onlookers, but as leading participants in the work of cultural revolution.
This conviction fuels the corporate media’s contempt for the traditional America that millions still cherish — faith, family, nation, stability, local community, ordered liberty. For progressives who dominate corporate media institutions, such values are not just outdated; they are obstacles to the creation of a new moral order. In this bastardized vocational self-conception, the media’s task becomes shepherding the public toward their dystopian dreams.
In the process, however, the corporate press has committed an act of national vandalism: It has shattered public trust, perhaps beyond repair.
When institutions treat decent citizens as morally suspect and punish all dissent, they invite backlash. Americans, unsurprisingly, began to look elsewhere for information. So, the corporate media inadvertently midwifed the rise of an entirely new informational ecosystem. Podcasters, independent YouTubers, Substack writers — many of them without traditional journalistic backgrounds — stepped into the void. Some are brilliant. Some are reckless. Some are both. Perhaps most important: The rise of this new class of content creators confirms that the truth cannot be bowdlerized out of existence by leftist ideological crusaders.
The corporate media establishment sometimes likes to blame this rise of independent voices for America’s “misinformation crisis.” But that crisis did not arise spontaneously: It is the corporate press itself that convinced Americans not to trust our would-be information gatekeepers. It is the press that jettisoned neutrality, credibility, and accountability. And it is the press that created a marketplace hungry for alternatives — some principled, some not, all empowered by a vacuum that the corporate media created through its own insufferable hubris.
This is the tragic irony: In trying to engineer cultural transformation from the top down, the corporate media has unleashed epistemic chaos from the bottom up. Americans of differing political stripes increasingly inhabit entirely separate informational worlds. Institutions that once served as shared reference points have become partisan battlegrounds. And the resulting information fragmentation is just one of many forces now tearing at the country’s fraying social fabric.
To restore trust, the media would need to rediscover its foundational purpose: truth-seeking unclouded by ideology. That would require humility — something in short supply. It would require professional courage — the ability to speak unpopular truths in newsroom Slack channels. And it would require the recognition that America is not a blank canvas for utopian experimentation, but a living civilization whose survival depends on shared norms, honest discourse, and respect for our inherited traditions.
There are some green shoots. Bari Weiss, the founder of the radically normal Free Press online journal, is now also editor-in-chief of CBS News. My own syndicated opinion column now runs, among other places, at the Los Angeles Times — where it has been promoted by the paper’s owner. Even the Washington Post’s opinion section, long a bastion of parochial Beltway liberalism, has been trending notably rightward. My own mainstream employer, Newsweek, has had an unapologetic right-winger — yours truly — on full-time staff for five and a half years. All of this is admirable.
Perhaps the times, they are a-changin’? You’ll have to forgive my skepticism: That’s still unclear, at best.
What is clear is that in recent years the corporate media, in casting its lot with the most radical cultural currents of our time, has chosen not merely a political side but a civilizational one. It has sided with the forces of civilizational arson in their roiling, cold civil war against those of us on team civilizational sanity. And in doing so, the corporate media has not just forfeited its role as guardian of the republic — it has become, wittingly or not, an accelerant in the work of those who would burn it all down.
Josh Hammer is Newsweek senior editor-at-large, host of “The Josh Hammer Show,” senior counsel for the Article III Project, and author of Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West(Radius Book Group).