Politics & Power Quote by Howard Fineman

Fineman’s line is built like a bait-and-switch: he opens with the kind of cable-news melodrama everyone recognizes ("a political party is dying") and then yanks the rug out from under it. The twist isn’t just a joke; it’s a diagnosis. By calling the mainstream media a "political party", he’s arguing that journalism has been functionally recoded in the public mind: not a referee, but a faction with interests, enemies, and a base. That’s the sting. He’s admitting the loss of the old civic fiction that the press sits above the scrum.

The subtext is even more pointed: if the media is treated as a party, it becomes fair game for the other party’s war tactics. "Destroyed by the opposition" frames the press not as a failing business model but as a targeted institution, undermined through delegitimization campaigns, audience polarization, and alternative information ecosystems that don’t just compete with legacy outlets, but define themselves against them. The "opposition" here isn’t merely rival networks; it’s a political movement that has learned that you don’t have to win an argument if you can bankrupt the venue where arguments are adjudicated.

Contextually, this lands in the post-2000s collapse of the old media order: shrinking ad revenue, fragmented attention, and an increasingly tribal news diet. Fineman’s provocation is that the crisis isn’t only economic or technological. It’s constitutional in spirit: if the press is reframed as partisan, its authority doesn’t erode gradually; it gets voted off the island.