Besides partisan Democrats, among the United States election’s biggest losers is what is commonly called — inaccurately — “mainstream media.” Accustomed to acting as information gatekeepers and setting the “acceptable” range of discussions, journalists woke up on Nov. 6 to discover that years of eroding credibility had culminated in what they feared the most: irrelevance in the eyes of many Americans.
It was a long time coming as name-brand news outlets picked sides in the country’s political disputes, fighting with whole segments of the population. The result is a fractured media landscape in which old titans wither, new outlets rise and nobody fully dominates the space.
A few weeks before the election, Gallup reported of its polling that “Americans continue to register record-low trust in the mass media, with 31 per cent expressing a ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of confidence in the media to report the news ‘fully, accurately and fairly,’ similar to last year’s 32 per cent.”
Anybody who has been paying attention could have guessed that the polling showed rock-bottom (12 per cent) trust in media among Republicans, miserable 27 per cent trust among independents and majority support (54 per cent) expressed only by Democrats. Even with Democrats, trust dropped from a high of 76 per cent in 2018. A big reason is that many media outlets picked sides — mostly Democrats and the political left with a smaller faction favouring the right. That leaves allegedly “national” networks and “newspapers of record” speaking primarily to true believers.
In an October op-ed, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos defended his decision to end presidential endorsements at the newspaper. “Most people believe the media is biased…. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help.”
Bezos was attacked by some of his own employees, not to mention his newspaper’s readers who cancelled subscriptions in droves, for allegedly putting his business interests ahead of the Post’s independence by ending endorsements. But he pointed to a real problem recognized by others. As Nov. 5 approached and President-elect Donald Trump’s eventual victory looked more likely, an anonymous TV executive told New York magazine’s Charlotte Klein, “If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely.”
So, the election’s outcome didn’t come as a complete surprise to media observers, though it was larger and more definitive than anticipated. We can assume that CNN’s chief media analyst Brian Stelter had been mulling his thoughts for a while when he conceded after voting results were clear that Trump’s “defeat of Kamala Harris is raising questions about the media’s credibility, influence and audience.”
It’s worth noting that, since the week before the election, MSNBC and CNN have each lost roughly half their viewership. Their conservative rival, Fox News, grew its audience by 21 per cent in that same period.
Part of the problem is that big-name journalists have become less like the audiences they seek to serve. Big media operations are increasingly concentrated in coastal urban enclaves. Former Politico senior media writer Jack Shafer wrote of the matter in 2017: “Reporters, an admirable lot, can parachute into Appalachia or the rural Midwest on a monthly basis and still not shake their provincial sensibilities: Reporters tote their bubbles with them.”
Dwelling in coastal cities, elite journalists reflect their homes’ prejudices — unless they work for contrarian operations like Fox News. That affects culture, lifestyle preferences and, especially, politics. In the 2022 American Journalist Study, 36 per cent of journalists called themselves Democrats compared to 3.4 per cent saying they’re Republicans. Between 65 per cent and 96 per cent of journalists’ political donations go to Democrats, depending on source and timeframe. Worse, journalists let their biases show in their work, such as covering for President Joe Biden’s obvious mental decline.
Data analyst Nate Silver argued last year that “Partisan, progressive, pro-left wing, pro-Democratic Party media is embedded within the mainstream media.” Silver, a Democrat himself, refers to this phenomenon as “the Indigo Blob” which he defines as “the merger between formerly nonpartisan institutions like the media, academia and public health … and expressly partisan and political instruments of the Democratic Party and progressive advocacy groups.”
Right-wing media, though smaller than “mainstream media,” is as biased in its conservativism as the Indigo Blob is in its progressivism. The result is competing ideological silos, though it’s harder to escape the Indigo Blob’s pervasive message than it is to turn off Fox News or ignore the New York Post. Perhaps that’s why conservative outlets grow as “mainstream” (really progressive) ones lose ground.
Gaining even more ground, though, are podcasters, blogs, influencers and online publications that challenge older media. By the end of October, Trump’s interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast had drawn almost 40 million views. Kamala Harris attempted a similar end-run around the traditional press when she appeared on Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” podcast, though it didn’t gain the same audience. It makes sense to seek exposure on podcasts given that an estimated 135 million Americans tuned at least one in each month in 2024, up from 120 million in 2023.
Other outlets are also expanding their reach. A few years ago, Bari Weiss was a New York Times columnist who resigned over political bullying at the left-of-centre publication. Last week, her online publication, the Free Press, announced it had signed up over 935,000 subscribers. Not incidentally, the Free Press does a lot of reporting on ideological intolerance at Indigo Blob institutions like the media, medicine and academia.
That said, many of the new outlets embrace partisan identities. They cater to progressives, nationalists, libertarians or any other audience you can imagine. But unlike “mainstream” journalists, they pick a silo from the start, knowing their influence will be limited beyond those sympathetic to their ideas.
Now, “mainstream” journalists face a similar fate. Mainstream no more, but just another flavour to choose from, they still have a future of sorts, alongside the upstarts they once ridiculed. But journalists will never again have the same unified influence in a media landscape that looks more fractured, ideologically diverse and unpredictable than what we’ve seen in the recent past.
National Post