Monday, January 14, 2019

He is disintermediating them and it is driving them crazy

Oh, dear. They can't stop themselves from talking about her. From Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has more Twitter power than media, establishment by Neal Rothschild and Mike Allen.

Click to enlarge.

Rothschild and Allen are focusing on AOC. I am focusing on everything else.

I have always assumed that President Trump uses twitter because it allows him, as radio did FDR, to circumvent the mainstream media. He can take his message directly to the public without being filtered by his political adversaries. And I still assume that.

I just did not realize the degree to which that channel is effective. If number of total interactions is a useful measure, then the above chart suggests that twitter is not valuable solely because he can circumvent the establishment MSM gatekeepers. It is valuable because he dominates the twitter terrain.

His total interactions on twitter outnumber those by the aggregate of MSM outlets by more than a factor of two. It is something like twenty to one for any single outlet.

In a nation of roughly 330 million, 40 million are listening to Trump and the largest single MSM outlet gets less than ten percent of that. No wonder he uses it so much.

Looking at this chart, and IF, that measurement is a useful indicator, it explains why the MSM hate him so much. Certainly it is at least in part because they are Progressive Democrats and he is governing as a classical liberal (i.e. traditional conservative/libertarian).

But there is something else. The MSM has always at least been at the national political table helping, if not to set the agenda, at least materially driving it. A model where the President communicates directly to the public without their spin, and in such numbers that he effectively sets the agenda is a grave threat to the past MSM model.

He is disintermediating them and it is driving them crazy. To a far greater degree than I was aware.

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