Thursday, August 21, 2025
The Briefing with Albert Mohler
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
4.8 • 8.4K Ratings
🗓️ 21 August 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
On today’s edition of The Briefing, I discuss the current shifts in mainstream media and what they mean for its future, how American universities could be undermining its national security interests through its enrollment, and the debate over higher education’s admissions standards.
Part I (00:14 – 15:19)
Mainstream Doesn’t Mean What It Used To Mean: MSNBC’s Transition to MS Now Raises Bigger Issue of the Shift in Mainstream Media and the Future
- The Race to Rescue PBS and NPR Stations by The New York Times (Benjamin Mullin)
Should Harvard Send Its International Students Home? American Universities Could Be Undermining the Nation’s Security Interests Through Enrollment
- Send Harvard’s Chinese Students Home by The Wall Street Journal (Mike Gallagher)
Higher Education and Admissions Standards: The Ideological Dimensions Are Still in Debate
- Trump Demands the Truth About Affirmative Action by The Wall Street Journal (Jason L. Riley)
- Don’t Let Grades Dominate College Admissions by The Wall Street Journal (David Wippman and Glenn Altschuler)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Thursday, August 21, 2025. I'm Albert Mueller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. |
| 0:14.0 | Well, one of the things we need to take into account is the media landscape at any given time. |
| 0:18.8 | And I'm speaking of the media landscape here in the United |
| 0:21.5 | States. The lay of the land, so to speak, how do most Americans receive news? How do they receive |
| 0:27.3 | information? How do they process it? Who's delivering it? What's behind that? What worldviews are |
| 0:32.2 | represented? Well, as you know, in the United States, we have a pretty clear worldview divide |
| 0:37.0 | at present. We have a pretty clear worldview divide at present. |
| 0:37.7 | We have a very clear partisan divide. The big story in American politics has been the disappearance |
| 0:42.9 | of the middle. And guess what? Pretty much the same thing is true on the media landscape. |
| 0:47.8 | And so you have the bifurcation, the division of the media, largely into more conservative |
| 0:52.9 | media, more liberal media. |
| 0:55.3 | And there are still some that would be described as the mainstream media, but let's be |
| 0:58.6 | honest, mainstream doesn't mean what it used to mean. And all that comes very much to mind when |
| 1:03.6 | we see that a major cable news network, very much a part of the media ecology in recent years, |
| 1:09.8 | is now under new ownership and is rebranding and |
| 1:12.8 | renaming itself. I'm speaking about what used to be MSNBC that is now going to be MS now. |
| 1:21.2 | Okay, very interesting. For one thing, just in terms of the name, why are they keeping MSNBC |
| 1:26.9 | was a joint venture between Microsoft MS, okay, that makes sense, and NBC, the long-time major television network. |
| 1:37.0 | So MS and NBC put together MSNBC, it made sense. It was created in 1996. The most interesting worldview dimension of this is how quickly |
| 1:46.3 | MSNBC, as trying to find its way, you might say, in the media landscape, went to the left. |
| 1:52.2 | And it went to the left a little bit, then a little bit more, and then pretty much all the way. |
| 1:56.8 | So over the course of the last several years, and the media ecology, say, on cable news, |
... |
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