The Election’s Second-Biggest Loser? Legacy Media.
Mike Gonzalez /
The 2024 presidential election shattered two monopolies the Left had counted on for decades. One was the lock it had over that section of Americans labeled as “Hispanics” and the other one was over the media. In this column, I will deal with the second one.
Breaking the leftist monopoly on Hispanic Americans, the subtitle of a book I wrote in 2014, shatters a long-standing strategy by the Left to win power.
But seeing the legacy media crumble after decades of watching them snootily dictate to all of us is not just equally monumental but also more gratifying because it is to many such well-deserved retribution.
It’s not just that the voter has now said the press have no clothes. More importantly, President-elect Donald Trump was able to use an online ecosystem that now far outstrips anything the legacy media have to offer. Conservatives have a right to be excited about this brand-new development.
Part of the reason people have been flocking to nonlegacy media sources, including the many podcasts Trump went out of his way to appear on over the course of his campaign, is that the legacy media long ago shed all semblance of impartiality.
Newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, broadcasters such as NPR and the three major TV networks, as well as wire services such as The Associated Press and Reuters have behaved as though it were up to them to prevent a Trump victory. And they didn’t care if it was obvious.
The Media Research Center, a conservative outfit that has performed invaluable service studying the media for years, confirms that this year’s coverage, in particular, was the worst of any election in history.
Its analysis of how the two candidates were treated in the networks’ evening news showed that Vice President Kamala Harris received 78% positive coverage, while Trump’s share of positive coverage was only 15%. That was a Democratic advantage of +63, compared to +58 in 2020, +35 in 2008, and +22 in 2004.
The public knew it. A YouGov poll revealed that only 7% “trust the media to tell the truth.” As a former journalist of almost 20 years, I experience no schadenfreude in writing this.
Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, himself lowered the boom by writing a column that defended his decision not to have the paper endorse Harris in this context. It began thusly:
In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working. … Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion.
Writing in The Hill, Becket Adams correctly observed before the Nov. 5 election that this extreme partisanship by journalists who are supposed to be objective showed they were panicking about a possible Harris loss. “A confident team doesn’t resort to these types of desperate measures,” he wrote.
Underlining this panic was the media infighting, always a sign that things are internally coming apart, that accompanied the decisions by The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times owners not to endorse Harris.
And postelection, the media are still stuck between denial and anger. There is no self-reflection, repentance, or even taking stock. There is no plan.
But if you are a media outlet lacking credibility, you need a plan because consumers are abandoning a stultifyingly sectarian product and flocking to podcasts, YouTube channels such as the NELK Boys, X accounts, TikTok, and other internet-based platforms on which speech is freewheeling. As mentioned before, Trump made ample use of them.
On this score, members of the media are paying attention, but only to decry that it is happening and call for regulation (read censorship). “So here’s how we got beat,” commentator Van Jones said on CNN. “We got beat because the Republicans and conservatives built a different media system that has to do with online, that has to do with podcasts, that has to do with streaming platforms.”
Over at MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” an equally despondent Anand Giridharadas had a meltdown.
“What they have done in their online media ecosystem is build a radicalization engine,” he said. “It’s an elaborate, multibillion-dollar infrastructure, and there is nothing like it on the pro-democracy side. … We don’t have the equivalent of Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson to move that man in a feminist direction.”
It is comically unself-aware that Giridharadas calls his side—which believes in censorship, lawfare, and running a presidential candidate who didn’t get a single primary vote—the “pro-democracy” side. But put that aside, and the analysis is spot on.
There isn’t a liberal Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Joe Scarborough certainly aren’t. The “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast has 14 million Spotify followers and 17.9 million YouTube subscribers, making Rogan the most listened to U.S. podcast, according to Newsweek.
Over at The Washington Post, there was the same need for smelling salts, as writers decried that Trump’s use of these platforms meant that men “between the ages of 18 and 29 swung enormously for Trump.”
“Trump’s staggering showing among this demographic was the culmination of a yearslong effort to reach young men devoted to the beacons of American machismo: pranks, combat sports, stand-up comedy and the often-misogynistic online fringe known as the ‘manosphere,’” the authors of an analysis agonized.
So, even if they know they are facing competition, don’t expect media companies to do anything about it. With Trump in power, their hopes of government censorship likely won’t materialize.
As Vince Coglianese said in his popular radio showmon WMAL, the media’s reckoning, at least for the moment, has been limited to crying that “our spells don’t work anymore. The magic’s gone.”
Or, as Elon Musk put it to his followers on X, which he owns: “You are the media now.”