An anti-woke counter-revolution is sweeping through the media

The purchase of Paramount and CBS by David Ellison – scion of Larry Ellison, the world’s third-richest man, with a $250 billion tech fortune – marks a shift away from one-party domination of the media and culture. It follows Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now X, and the Trumpian capture of Washington DC’s Kennedy Center.

Long a cakewalk for progressives, the culture war is edging towards high noon. For the first time in decades, the left faces competitors who read from different scripts and come from different perspectives.

Naturally, progressives are not happy. Robert Reich, a leading left-wing economist, denounces – rightly – the ability of the ultra-rich to buy media outlets and push an agenda. Yet he and others had no such qualms when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, when Salesforce’s Marc Benioff snapped up the moribund Time magazine, when Laurene Powell Jobs took over the Atlantic, or when another well-endowed heir purchased the New Republic from Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

Perhaps most unsettled are those who profited from decades of one-party cultural rule, stretching from Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Manhattan. Bari Weiss’s pledge to ‘blow up’ CBS – Paramount has announced plans to lay off 2,000 workers in Hollywood and New York – alarms the likes of Katie Couric, the onetime CBS star, nominally because it undermines ‘independent journalism’. Progressives will certainly attack CBS for moving away from promoting climate hysteria, which no longer enjoys its own special desk. Worse still for the left, conservative voices – such as the ubiquitous Mormon Wives, glamorous mothers and reality-TV stars who stand in sharp contrast to the over-the-top Kardashians – are gaining traction on television.

Why is this happening now? The re-election of Trump, the ultimate anti-wokist, has emboldened some oligarchs to enter what was once the exclusive domain of the left. But political power alone does not explain the shift. Trump’s influence will fade, after all. Demographics and customer preferences matter more.

Mainstream media have become disconnected from at least half their audience. Overall public confidence in the press is near a historic low: barely a third express trust, half the share that did so in 1978. This is not just an American phenomenon – the travails of the once-respected BBC in the UK make that clear.

The gulf between the media and audiences widened after the George Floyd riots, when major media companies – in print, film, radio and online – doubled down on an ever more overt progressivism. They downplayed far-left violence and embraced a mission not of informing or entertaining, but of ideological propagation.

Their worldview now rejects basic realities – humanity having two sexes, for example. Glamour magazine recently bestowed its Women of the Year Award on men who identify as women. Climate catastrophism, pro-Hamas agitation and radical income-redistribution schemes are now ideological lodestones of the press. It was not a workers’ takeover of the media, but a revolt of the urban professional classes – the same classes that just elected the new ‘socialist’ mayor of New York.

A key driver is the vast overproduction of arts graduates over the past decade. Those holding a Master of Fine Arts degree, some costing as much as $100,000, are overwhelmingly left-wing and poorly paid, earning essentially poverty wages in New York or LA. In literary circles these junior employees have blocked anything not ideologically pure, much as happened in newsrooms like the New York Times.

Conservatives have been long absent from the cultural and media establishment. Many progressives still push for greater exclusion, particularly in the literary world, where woke orthodoxy rules and there have even been efforts to ban not only conservatives but also Jews who fall outside the robustly anti-Zionist line. In elite literary circles, male writers are dispatched to the cornfield, mirroring media panic about ‘toxic masculinity’.

The good news is that some of this may be reversible. Unlike in Europe or Canada, where big media outlets are often bound up with the state, Hollywood and the American press have been driven by profit and markets. Entertainment was forged largely by Jewish immigrants who had previously worked as upholsterers, butchers and furriers. The Russian, Chinese and European communications apparatus never stood a chance against competitors determined to monetise their audiences.

Some in corporate America still claim that wokeness is good for business, but evidence is thin. Writing off vast audiences – young white males, conservatives, families – is hardly a growth strategy. Ratings for the traditional networks have cratered, while Hollywood’s politically correct remakes have bombed. Box-office revenues remain in secular decline; this year the Halloween season was the worst in 32 years.

This reflects the widening gulf between elite culture and potential consumers. The collapse in viewership for the Oscars and Grammys is one sign. Big-budget films like Disney’s Snow White and the radical-chic One Battle After Another have been both critically acclaimed and commercial flops. Even Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, a biopic of a figure long associated with the left, failed at the box office.

Recently, some in Hollywood seem to be getting the memo. Netflix has cancelled a sizable batch of shows, including gay-oriented animated comedy Q-Force, LGBT-heavy Wings of Fire and Antiracist Baby, based on Ibram X Kendi’s tract of the same name. ‘It’s kind of bad to spend $50million on something that doesn’t sell’, notes one long-time agent.

This shift upsets progressives at places like the New York Times, who fear Hollywood is ‘regressing’ from the progressive agenda and – gasp – once again embracing cop shows. But others, not only Paramount, see gold in appealing to middle America, particularly young men. New filmmakers are creating content for families – PG and PG-13 films now rake in huge box-office numbers.

There is something of a boomlet in productions aimed at traditional families and religious audiences, an occurrence rarely seen in recent years. Faith-based films have been on the rise. New studios like Angel have built followings at home and abroad. Legacy Productions has drawn huge numbers with its King David miniseries, which garnered over 44million viewers and became Prime’s most popular US programme last year.

News media are also shifting towards more viewpoint diversity. Audiences for the left-leaning Washington Post and LA Times have collapsed, with both incurring heavy losses and shrinking circulation. Embracing wokeness has not proved a path to profitability in the brutal digital marketplace. CNN – once the cable-news wunderkind – has seen ratings shrink alongside its obsessive focus on Trump.

At root is a massive cultural – and market – disconnect. In an era when the personal is increasingly political, elite culture stews in its own juices, championing causes – reparations, race quotas, bans on fossil fuels, EV mandates, lax immigration – often wildly out of step with voters. Its worldview reflects that of underpaid MFAs in Los Angeles, New York or Silicon Valley – places with few children, many singles, and high concentrations of LGBT people and hardcore feminists.

But this is only a slice of America, and not the one driving population growth. The expanding regions are largely conservative states, drawing immigrants and domestic migrants from alienated blue bastions. There is also a widening fertility gap: religious, family oriented and more conservative communities have far higher birth rates than progressive ones.

It will take years before the now-childless generation is overtaken by those with children. Some outlets, like the New York Times and the Atlantic, can still thrive in prosperous progressive enclaves, charging advertisers for access to their niche, affluent readership. For some – in Hollywood or Manhattan – this may be enough for a time. They will benefit, for the next decade or two, from the rise of the post-familial class.

But others in media and entertainment seem unwilling to abandon the views of most Americans – if only because advertisers and audiences matter. The family market is the future: around a million millennials become mothers each year, and many will seek culture that acknowledges family life and sacrifice.

The medium- and long-term future belongs to those who have children. The opportunity lies in producing content that appeals to broad audiences, not the boutique tastes of insiders. Many Oscar-worthy films today gross less than the cost of a ‘modest’ Beverly Hills mansion.

A way forward is to embrace what progressives see as Hollywood’s worst capitalist instincts. The industry rose through intense competition. The early moguls were crude and decidedly non-elite – they didn’t come from MFA programmes. Yet they produced great, popular films like West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and more recently, the original Lord of the Rings trilogy.

There is clearly a market for manly, patriotic films. Tom Cruise’s unapologetically traditionalist Top Gun: Maverick – to the dismay of the Guardian – earned at least $1.5 billion worldwide, making it 2022’s second-highest-grossing film. The success of the Vikings series (2013-2021) also shows strong demand for manly, violent, un-PC entertainment.

For the first time in decades, the progressive dominion over Hollywood is buckling. There is even a new Hollywood PR agency specialising in conservatives. Studio bosses are rediscovering their primary duty: profit. ‘In the end no one cares much about politics, but they do care about money’, one Hollywood executive told me. ‘Sex and violence sell better than political lectures. If you want to send a message, use Western Union.’

We are at the beginning of a new and less predictable era in media. New players like Legacy Productions and the Free Press challenge the old guard, while the likes of the LA Times and the Washington Post are trying to edge back towards the centre. The real driver of change is not values or politics – as some Trumpists might like to think – but the marketplace.

In the years ahead, the new outlets will produce their share of clunkers. Some will fail. But for the first time in decades, the media barons are reassessing their assumptions and preparing for a showdown on America’s Main Street.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.