Conformity Killed the Weekly Standard
6th December 2018
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 Standardwhen 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.
They were living, breathing examples of the cuckitude with which ZMan has so much fun.
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).
Fortunately, we still have an economic system in which losers fail.
The Other McCain puts the boot in:
What’s the value-added of your journalistic product, as a conservative magazine, if your essential message is, “Liberals are right”? It is possible to dislike President Trump or to criticize his policies without joining Bill Kristol, Rick Wilson, Jonah Goldberg and Rich Lowry in the #NeverTrump chorus of sore losers whose basic argument is that the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for Trump were wrong to do so. According to the #NeverTrump chorus, because their favorite candidates did not win the GOP nomination, therefore Hillary Clinton should be president. They have devoted themselves to delegitimizing Trump’s presidency, and are we surprised that this message was so unpopular with conservatives that the Weekly Standard became a publication without a readership?