General Discussion

- see my OP and first reply at https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219714118 - but neither article was picked up by other media, and especially by MSNBC, as it should have been.

There was the same problem with stories about Curtis Yarvin.

Rachel Maddow waited until the night before the VP debate to tell her audience about Yarvin and his influence on JD Vance and Peter Thiel, Vance's enabler. She admitted she'd known about him for quite a while. My guess is that she waited to say anything about him because she thought her show about Yarvin, 24 hours before the debate, would be a bombshell and would dominate the headlines the next day, and make debate questions about Yarvin inevitable.

If that was why she waited, she miscalculated very badly. The CBS moderators would have had to spend a lot of time explaining to their audience just who Yarvin was, before that audience would understand why it was at all important to ask Vance about him. IF Maddow had started talking about Yarvin even a month earlier, she could have done a lot to help.

The Harris campaign also had laid absolutely no groundwork for an attack on Vance via revelations about the craziest tech bros behind him. Even though Gil Duran, who once worked for Harris as her communications director when she was California's AG in 2013, had been writing about this, warning people, and I doubt they were unaware of his articles and newsletters. Though I suppose it's possible they worried about an attack on Yarvin and his tech bro followers being mistaken for an attack on Silicon Valley in general. Maddow, if she'd given more time to this, could have gone after Yarvin and his followers with more precision and made it easier for the campaign to go after Vance on this issue.

I posted an OP since the election about Ron Filipkowski's explanation of why Democrats are having trouble with their messaging: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219828367 . Republicans have much more of a media infrastructure than we have, and they bombard their audience with their chosen messages, and take cues from social media.

Maddow alone couldn't have gotten the word out. She isn't that influential. Every liberal host at MSNBC should have been doing stories on Yarvin and tech bro fanaticism. I don't know why they didn't, and I hope to God there wasn't some "Leave this to Rachel to do an expose the night before the VP debate" agreement.

This wasn't the first time liberal media failed to cover an important story. Their failure to cover ALEC properly even while it was doing so much damage - https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x591230 - really hurt Democrats across the country.