News and Commentary

Axios Co-Founder: ‘I Went Into The Trump Bubble,’ ‘You Would Think Every City Is On Fire’

“I went into the Trump bubble...”

   DailyWire.com
(L-R) Managing editor of TIME Richard Stengel and co-founder of Politico Jim VandeHei speak during Time Warner's Political Conference 2008 at the Time Warner Center on October 13, 2008 in New York City. 16949_717.JPG
Joe Kohen/WireImage

As the polls in the matchup between President Trump and Joe Biden quickly tighten, media heads have been begun to worry about the right-wing media “infrastructure” and its impact on voters.

Speaking on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Jim Vandehei, the co-founder of Axios, said that the right-wing media “infrastructure” has created a mindset in the voting populace in how it has influenced their reality.

“I went into the Trump bubble,” he said, as reported by Newsbusters. “I listened to Ben Shapiro, I listened to a tape of Rush Limbaugh, I looked at the top trending stories on Facebook—all of them from right-wing sites—and watched Fox News.”

“It’s not just Donald Trump who’s talking about this,” he continued. “This is all that the infrastructure of the sort of the modern Republican Party is talking about this. You would think that every city is on fire, that every city is being looted, that Donald Trump is the one man who stands up for law enforcement.”

Vandehei proposed that the strategy behind creating this media echo chamber is to instill enough fear into people so that they will vote for President Trump in the coming election.

“Their belief is that, eventually, that will get people, even if they won’t tell a pollster, get them to vote for Donald Trump, because they will be scared stiff by Election Day,” he argued. “I have no idea if it’ll work, but there’s no doubt that this is not just Donald Trump anymore. It is the entire infrastructure—and I think it’s an infrastructure that most people in the media don’t pay that much attention to, so they don’t realize the amplification of that.”

As the election approaches, he wondered exactly how this strategy would affect the polls, citing a story from The New York Times last week showing that in the “Facebook machine,” the news that seems to gain the most traction comes from sites and sources beyond CNN and other legacy media.

“If you put your head inside the Facebook machine, most of the stories that travel and get the widest audience tend to come from Ben Shapiro, Franklin Graham, Breitbart—sites and people that most Americans aren’t paying attention to, but people on Facebook are, and that is the Trump base,” he concluded. “And now the question is, over the next couple weeks, do we start to see those polls move, either private polls or public polls?”

Vandehei’s pontification about the right-wing media infrastructure comes after CNN’s Brian Stelter lamented that supposedly whole media outlets exist to attack Biden while no such apparatus exists to attack President Trump.

“When you see entire media companies essentially exist to tear down Joe Biden, is there an equivalent to that on the Left tearing down Trump?” Stelter asked a guest on his show.

“There really isn’t and what I would say, it’s really a diet of this type of information that a lot of these voters are getting,” the guest responded.

RELATED: Tucker Carlson, Greg Gutfeld Dismantle CNN After Claim That No News Orgs Exist To Tear Down Trump

Got a tip worth investigating?

Your information could be the missing piece to an important story. Submit your tip today and make a difference.

Submit Tip
The Daily Wire   >  Read   >  Axios Co-Founder: ‘I Went Into The Trump Bubble,’ ‘You Would Think Every City Is On Fire’