It's Thursday, November 21, 2024. I'm Albert Moller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

A major shift in social media can represent a major shift in the culture. Then again, the very emergence of social media as a major factor in the

electoral process, not to mention in the culture at large, that's a fairly new thing. And still,

there are some very interesting developments. The New York Times recently ran a front page business

section story with the headline, Liberals are left out in the cold as social media veers right.

Now, in cultural analysis, one of the things we need to note is that different sectors of the

society, marked by, say, different ideologies or different political polarities,

tend to be directed towards and influenced by different sectors of the entire society, different

sectors of the information economy. Just to put the matter bluntly, when you had a much smaller

media economy, it was much easier for an establishment to take control, and that's exactly

what they did. We had three major television networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC.

For the most part, those television networks and their affiliates controlled the political discussion

because Americans didn't have other forms of media to which they could turn. Well, you say there are newspapers.

Well, of course, there were newspapers.

But when it comes to the newspapers in the major cities, many of them were also very much captive to the left. There was a media establishment. There were some standout conservative newspapers

back in those days. But for the most part, it was a media establishment in which you could

look at a very privileged few who had gone to

just a few prep schools and just a few universities, and they were basically part of what was

established as a media elite, and they operated just as an elite always operates. That is to say,

they operated in control of ideas. You could look at something of different flavors

when you think of the major networks in that era of their dominance, CBS, NBC, and ABC, but it was a

difference of personality, maybe a difference even in tone. It was not a difference in basic

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