[continued from previous message]   
      
   conservative or even extremist perspectives among podcasts, YouTube videos,   
   Substack newsletters, and boutique platforms like Rumble. “There’s a lot of   
   choice,” Polskin said. “Even if [the big] sites went out of business   
   tomorrow, there are a lot of voices still out there.”   
      
   The DIY ethic is embodied by the likes of Megyn Kelly, Bill O’Reilly, Steve   
   Bannon, and Carlson, who became conservative celebrities while working for   
   established media organizations but have maintained their profiles after   
   leaving them in disgrace. Since being fired by Fox News last year, Carlson   
   has moved his contentious commentaries and interviews (including one with   
   Vladimir Putin) to X. Kelly has come back from a messy divorce with NBC in   
   2019 (which followed an unhappy exit from Fox News in 2017) to host a   
   massively popular podcast. O’Reilly, likewise forced out of Fox in 2017,   
   has kept talking via newsletters, video streams, and weekly appearances on   
   the NewsNation cable channel. And Bannon, the former Trump consigliere who   
   left Breitbart, which he founded, after publicly criticizing the Trump   
   family, has gone the podcaster route himself; his War Room podcast was   
   ranked as the leading source of false and misleading information in a broad   
   study of the medium by the Brookings Institution last year.   
      
   The precipitous decline in traffic to conservative publications raises a   
   larger and possibly unanswerable question: Did these operations ever really   
   hold the political and cultural clout that critics ascribed to them at   
   their peak? Recall the liberal anger in 2020 when Ben Shapiro was routinely   
   dominating Facebook’s most-engaged content list, generating accusations   
   that Facebook’s algorithm was favoring right-wing posts and pushing voters   
   toward Trump. Yet Joe Biden went on to win the election easily, and   
   Democrats overperformed in the 2022 midterms. Now, as conservatives cry   
   that Big Tech has crushed their traffic, Trump is running neck and neck   
   with Biden in the polls, even with a legal cloud hanging over him and   
   shortfalls of campaign cash. Maybe who wins the traffic contest doesn’t   
   matter as much as it once appeared.   
      
      
   https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/04/conservative-digital-   
   media-traffic/678055/   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)