In the media’s post-news environment in which reporting is almost entirely confined to advancing ideological narratives, this is not unexpected.

And yet it is striking.

The media reported at length a brief temper tantrum thrown at the UN by Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old environmentalist activist, as if it were a powerful speech, while barely bothering to report on an actual speech at the United Nations by the President of the United States.

If you stop to think about it, that’s really bizarre. 

Picture the New York Times deciding that a rant by a teenage activist was more newsworthy than a speech by President Eisenhower.

That would have been unimaginable. And yet this sort of thing is now routine. It’s so routine that some would think that it isn’t worth noting. But it’s important to remember that the media is no longer in the news business. It’s in the narrative business.