It took the OG MAGA right maybe 3-4 years from the precipitous decline in influence of the legacy media to create a far worse bizarro version of that same media. They did a fast motion replay of the self-discrediting of the MSM, which really began with the rise of Rush Limbaugh.
The MSM was always liberal/deep state, since WW 2 at least, but did seek to maintain itself as an independent power relative to the two parties. Then Limbaugh came around and the media operatives told themselves they no longer had to make a pretense of including both sides (and
Reagan did remove a feeble regulation mandating something along those lines) and starting organizing themselves *against* "conservative talk radio" and everything that came in its wake (like the Gingrichian GOP majority). This intensified partisanship and therefore dishonesty.
The new online/podcaster media organized around Trump did the same thing from the beginning, deliberately and more intensively. This worked for oppositional purposes but couldn't survive contact with real power and responsibility. Rather than embrace power and responsibility,
this new media finds profit in continuing to organize around subversiveness, scandal and the mystique of being a persecuted resistance force. There are exceptions, and there will be more, but people who want an honest, critical when necessary, Trump-supporting media need to draw
lines. I keep focusing on Vance and his relation to this cohort precisely to foreground the need to make a clear break, which no one else is in a position to do. And if Vance thinks sticking with Tucker et al advances his political future, his political instincts are so bad
that it's best for that to be made clear as quickly as possible.