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This week Bari Weiss quit the New York Times with a sensational resignation letter.

It provides a fly-on-the-wall look at why Left-leaning companies are fighting over the same market and becoming more extreme, more emotionally-driven, with every passing page.

She writes, “...a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”

In her assessment, “Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.”

Worse still, this enlightened NYT elite felt empowered to make racist remarks about their own colleague. It is self-evident in their attitude that their in-group must shrink in size.

Weiss said, “My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again.’”

She admits that this led to self-censorship by her and others, which further perpetuated the rigid orthodoxy.

“If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets,” she wrote.

Weiss ironically concludes her letter with Adolph Ochs’ famous 1896 aspiration: “to make of the columns of The New York Times a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.”

This orthodoxy from the old mass media corporations happened due a constrictor-like squeeze in revenue.

There was a multi-sided revenue collapse due to loss of advertising exclusivity and loss of readership size. This squeeze motivated them to abandon “all shades of opinion”.

Most of the old mass media of newspapers, TV and radio are now politically and ideologically driven to attract highly emotionally invested, paid-up readers, who want opinions that affirm their ideology.

When the rivers of gold that were printed classifieds disappeared and TV lost eyeballs to social media, the old mass media lost to new online platforms in the race to match up customers and advertisers. Advertising income collapsed.

In a crowded market for news, slow-moving print-first mass media needed to convince readers to pay more for a product they can get cheaply or even free, according to Chris Berg of Cryptoeconomics.

This has driven many mass media companies to extreme specialisation.

According to Berg, “Newspapers now seek readers who have more emotionally invested in that particular newspaper brand. They’re the ones more likely to pay the higher subscription fees.”

“Ideology is a specialisation. Partisanship is a specialisation.”

“In other words, multi-sided market collapse explains the dominance of ideologically driven media outlets in the digital age,” Berg concludes.

In the end, the old mass media platforms are fighting over the same extreme-Left readers, a clear minority.

At the same time, Facebook is lapping up the advertising dollars of the political right, centre and left, while banning content creators who dissent from “the Silicon Valley bubble of omniscience”.

The Left preaches a lot about diversity, but cancels all opinions that dissent from its orthodoxy.

Twitter is increasingly being treated by media organisations overseas and in Australia as if it is representative of the general population.

What these organisations do not realise is that the end-game in chasing a cocooned minority that wants to shrink in size, rather than grow in membership, means the Left can only cannibalise itself.

Darryl Budge - FamilyVoice WA