who voted for Donald Trump but a wider section of middle-class America.
As we see Hollywood movie stars professional athletes and the mainstream media types line up along uniform ideological lines a substantial portion of the American ticket and TV watching population are turning them off sometimes taking hundreds of millions of dollars from the bottom line.
This payback being dealt out to urbane culture-meisters by the deplorables" are evidenced by historically poor ratings for such hyper-politicized events as the Oscars last year as well as this years Emmys. The current controversy surrounds the NFL player protests which are lowering already weak ratings down 10 since the national anthem protests as well as plunging movie ticket sales.
The oddly political sports network ESPN has seen declines close to catastrophic although how much their often strident resistance" turns off viewers is widely debated.
Jettisoning your audience
American movie stars whatever their background were Anglicized and could at very least pass" for northern Europeans. In recent decades the definition of everymen" thankfully expanded albeit imperfectly to African Americans Hispanics Asians Jews Muslims and gays.
In the process Hollywood and sports managed to expand their market by appealing to an ever more diverse consumer base both here and abroad. But with the rampant politicization of culture sports and information the notion of a common cultural market has all but disappeared.
Among those in control of mainstream media culture newspapers magazines movie studios and television networks attention is focused on an affluent progressive audience concentrated in urban 
centers.
From a mass to a niche industry
Sandy Climan a widely respected Los Angeles entertainment industry figure and investor suggests that factors like globalization and technology also have played a major role in this transformation. You cant be all things to all people anymore" he suggests. Todays era will be dominated instead by the need for the highest engagement niche entertainment."
As Climan notes technology the rise of cord cutting and the availability of movies online allows for unprecedented opportunities for niche marketing. Large cultural companies see their future not so much as appealing to the mass audience but to a large often wealthy audience that shares their increasingly homogeneous world views.
The rise of Trump has been a huge boon to resistance" media like the New York Times MSNBC late night talk shows and Saturday Night Live all thriving from those millions who cant get enough anti-Trump.
The big open question however is who will capture the 40-to-50 of America that the mainstream media finds deplorable."
This alternative audience is not made up entirely of repulsive alt-right white nationalists and is clearly underserved in our mainstream media. They may not be generally as erudite as readers of the New Yorker or the New York Times and perhaps less attractive to the luxury advertisers who sustain those publications but they are not necessarily illiterate dopes.In fact the average Trump voter appears to have been wealthier and even better educated than those who voted for Hillary Clinton. Today only a small part of big media notably talk radio as well as Fox News and other outlets of the Murdoch empire have targeted this audience.In addition the conservative mainstream has spawned such alternative voices as Pajamas Media Breitbart The Federalist the Daily Caller and a host of other small web-oriented publications. The growth of these outlets reflects how many Americans no longer trust the established media as being
either objective or sharing their values.
Who wins & who loses?
The likely winners in the new media landscape will be those who can carve out a strong niche capable of supporting advertising or gaining sufficient eyeballs. Sadly this tends to weaken any sense of national unity. Rather than a moderately liberal mass media that at least pretends to respect differing opinions we may see a cultural landscape that more resembles competing armies or football teams and forget the nuances.
Its not pretty. We see conflicting outrage from both the unhinged man in the White House and his claque and an endless stream of drivel from almost embarrassingly ignorant celebrities including that intellectual icon of our age Kim Kardashian. The real loser is our democracy the quality of information and largely unrepresented less politicized Americans often stuck between two sets of hardened partisans.
In such an environment our national culture has become increasingly difficult to define. But the reduction to a niche strategy could pose a particular threat to the information and entertainment sectors so prominent here in Southern California. Our region has thrived by spinning popular tales and designing the lifestyle that appealed to a mass national and global audience.
But as Hollywood the world of design sports media and theater embrace an increasingly brazen partisan role they may find much of their market bolting for the exits and taking with them a good 
chunk of their future earnings.
Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and is executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism.
