Legacy Media Fuels Corporate Wokeness But Will Always Choose Wokeness Over Corporations

There’s a misconception that legacy media is an arm of the Democratic Party. There’s also a misconception that legacy media is pro-corporate. It’s true that legacy media is almost always pro-Democrat and almost always pro-corporate. But last week’s Netflix dust-up clarified something important.

In recent weeks, Matt Taibbi and Katie Herzog have documented the egregiously bad coverage of Netflix’s internal turmoil over “The Closer,” Dave Chappelle’s latest special for the streamer. Journalists cheered the company’s pro-trans troublemakers with coverage that ranged from deeply misleading to outright false.

This isn’t downstream of conspiracies in smoke-filled backrooms. This is the consequence of an ideology so deeply rooted in our technocratic elites, they no longer recognize it as ideology.

The coverage collected above by Herzog is not neutral and it’s not pro-corporate. It takes the side of protesting employees. Companies like Netflix employ powerful armies of publicists to massage their image in the press, which creates a clubby relationship that leaves major corporations with more favorable coverage than they often deserve. But why didn’t it work for Netflix this time?

The legacy media is both pro-woke and pro-corporate, but when those ideologies are in conflict, wokeness wins. The Netflix case study illustrates this perfectly.

There are still plenty of Boomer executives who will choose cash over ideology ten times out of ten (see: “The Morning Show”) but their power is diminished amid the growing army of young progressives they’re forced to employ who refuse to accept anything less than the dogma. Because the media is now overrun with these ideologues, executives on the wrong side of a conflict are convinced they’ll lose money over a PR crisis but also convinced it’s easier to give an inch and hope they aren’t giving up a mile.