Donald Trump loves to lambaste the media, but he’s a pure product of the media. Since the financial turmoil that overtook his real estate empire in early 1990s, his major business has been cultivating his brand, in selling the idea that he’s a genius businessman so he can license his name. “Trump,” Vox’s Matthew Yglesias notes, “is a true celebrity: a person who’s famous primarily for being famous. He earns a lot of money, but his income derives from the fact that he hosts a television show, not from skill at building and running companies.”

In his triumph as the Republican nominee, Trump received invaluable aid from one particular branch of the media: the right-wing noise machine that caters to the conservative faithful. While Trump might have been criticized for his bigotry and lies by liberal and centrist outlets, he continued to be lionized and defended by the likes of Fox News’ Sean Hannity, the Drudge Report, and Breitbart. The chairman of the latter website, Steve Bannon, was tapped this week to be the CEO of Trump’s campaign, thereby consecrating the union of right-wing media and Republican politics.

One salutary byproduct of Trump’s rise is that some in conservative media are having second thoughts, taking stock of how their own bad habits have enabled an unfit demagogue to become their party’s standard-bearer. For liberals, these self-assessments are especially gratifying since they vindicate longstanding critiques about how conservatives media caters to the worst instincts of the Republican base, thereby creating a right-wing bubble that’s immune to the truth.

Charlie Sykes, a popular right-wing talk show host in Wisconsin and a supporter of Ted Cruz, recently told Oliver Darcy of Business Insider:

There’s got to be a reckoning on all this. We created this monster. And look, I’m a conservative talk show host. All conservative hosts have basically established their brand as being contrasted to the mainstream media. So we have spent 20 years demonizing the liberal mainstream media. And by the way, a lot of it has been justifiable. There is real bias. But, at a certain point you wake up and you realize you have destroyed the credibility of any credible outlet out there.

As Sykes notes, conservative’s discrediting of the mainstream media has caused many Republican voters to distrust factual criticisms of their candidates. “We’ve basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers,” he said.

