By Christine Rosen
Wednesday,
November 27, 2024
Failed presidential campaigns often prompt autopsies. In
the case of Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign, however, the candidate’s Oval Office
ambitions were not the only thing that expired on November 5; so, too, did the
longstanding role mainstream news media play in political reporting.
Since Donald Trump first won the presidency in 2016, and
even more insistently since his loss in 2020 and the events of January 6, 2021,
the media have made it their foremost duty to detail every one of Trump’s real
and perceived sins. They view him as a unique threat and see themselves as
democracy’s protectors, even though they began this crusade by compromising
whatever moral standing they had enjoyed—namely with their assertion that Trump
was an agent of Russia. Later, when Trump ran for reelection against Joe Biden,
media outlets and social-media platforms were happy to aid the Democratic
candidate by censoring and suppressing the contents of compromising material on
a laptop owned by Biden’s son, Hunter—claiming, falsely, that the machine
and/or its contents had somehow been manufactured by Russia. Once Trump lost to
Biden, the press eagerly and with partisan zeal cheerleaded for the lawfare
waged by the Biden administration and other Democrats against Trump, which led
to the FBI raid of his home in Florida, years of legal proceedings, and,
eventually, a felony conviction in New York at the hands of a highly partisan
district attorney.
At the same time, this industry, which boasts that it
exists to hold the powerful to account, was either ignoring or putting a
positive spin on the failings of President Biden and his administration. The
disastrous withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan was sent down the
memory hole a mere week after it happened. Persistent inflation and slow job
growth were excused away as transitory or really not that bad, all things
considered. The unsecured southern border received a tiny fraction of the coverage
that was allotted to Trump’s controversies there. Executive orders that
eliminated protections for women and girls in sports by allowing men to compete
on women’s teams were either outright celebrated or dismissed as a matter
affecting a tiny number of people. And most remarkable, the clear physical and
cognitive decline of the commander in chief was a topic seemingly deemed too
unpleasant to cover.
This last failure was perhaps the media’s most glaring
sin of omission, because even the strenuous efforts of the administration to
keep Biden from public view and to control his appearances (which included
giving Biden cue cards with pictures of reporters and scripted answers to their
prescreened questions on the rare occasions he made himself available to a
compliant press), the American people could see that Biden was not up to the
job of running the country. Americans who questioned why Biden spent an unusually
large amount of time relaxing at his beach house in Delaware or who posted
images on social media of the president stumbling or appearing confused were
said to have been gulled into pushing right-wing conspiracy theories or
distributing “cheap fakes” and spreading disinformation.
When Biden announced he would run for reelection in 2024,
media figures fell into line. They parroted White House claims, including many
made by Vice President Kamala Harris, that Biden was hale, hearty, and ready to
take on Trump again. It’s not clear how many were willingly gaslighting
themselves or were deliberately misleading the public about the president’s
condition. But it is fair to say many clearly believed that, with Trump running
again, the stakes were too high and that even an aged and cognitively
diminished Democrat was more appealing than a repeat performance in the Oval
Office by The Donald.
Then in late June, the first presidential debate
occurred, and Biden’s decline could no longer be hidden or explained away. A
genuinely adversarial press would have questioned its own behavior in failing
to report on this fact and would have fully and fairly investigated the murky
process whereby Biden was then forced off the ticket and replaced by Kamala
Harris—who had never received a single vote from a Democratic primary voter.
Instead, the media chose to launch the most
unidirectional effort to destroy a single political candidate the modern era
has ever seen, while propping up the lackluster performance of Harris by
slavishly celebrating her campaign’s messaging of Joy!, Brat summer!,
and the many other slogans that never seemed to land with voters. There was no
campaign by top media figures to demand that Harris engage in tough interviews.
Instead, the press repeated her campaign’s claims uncritically. The
media-enabled “vibes” election quickly devolved into one permeated by smug
assurance, perhaps best captured by the campaign sign seen in the upper-income
blue areas of the country where members of the media elite live and work:
“Harris/Walz—Obviously.” As for voters who might not find Harris’s candidacy
obvious, the media hammered home the message that a vote for Trump was a vote
for fascism, and, by definition, any “low-information voters” (also called
“garbage” by President Biden) who disagreed were complicit in its rise.
It didn’t work. Harris lost, and lost decisively. In
fact, the extreme hyperbole and over-the-top displays of partisan bias by the
media during this election cycle might have helped Trump get elected. This
might be the first national election in which media bias proved fatal not for
its intended target, but rather for the media themselves and their preferred
political party, the Democrats. Unable to identify their own liabilities, they
suffocated inside their own partisan bubble.
In this election, alternative media (both independent and
conservative) and social-media platforms (particularly X) consistently and
effectively surfaced the stories mainstream outlets refused to cover or covered
only with extreme bias. They reminded voters (who get a significant portion of
their news from social media) of the Biden/Harris administration’s dismal
record and candidate Harris’s unwillingness to answer basic questions about
what she planned to do as president. On certain key issues, such as gender
transitions of children, the persistence of these stories eventually required
even the mainstream media to respond with accounts of their own, many of which
ended up confirming the reporting of these smaller outlets.
Republicans proved in 2024 they can win against a media
that was not merely biased but fully weaponized against one candidate and one
party. That in itself was not new; Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were the
subjects of vicious press treatment in their day and won colossal landslides.
But this year did feature something new, thanks to the many people (not all
Republicans) who acted on the insult-masquerading-as-advice often hurled at
critics of mainstream reporting: “If you don’t like our media, go build your
own.” They did.
Substacks like The Free Press, websites like the
Washington Free Beacon, podcasters like Joe Rogan and Theo Von, YouTube stars
like the Nelk Boys, and even entertainment leaders like Dana White of Ultimate
Fighting Championship amplified stories that the mainstream media ignored. They
provided hugely popular platforms where Trump and his running mate, JD Vance,
could engage directly with voters. These stories and appearances were shared
widely on X, whose owner, Elon Musk, a Trump supporter, vowed to make a place
that no longer censors information inconvenient to one political party or the
other. Social-media accounts with large followings repeatedly shared Biden’s
gaffes and Harris’s meandering and nonsensical answers to straightforward
questions. And any video clip of VP nominee Tim Walz cartwheeling around a
stage was itself an antic form of social service, filling the deliberate void
created by mainstream media.
As Musk posted to his followers on X after Trump won, in
a play on the line “I am your captain now” from the Tom Hanks movie Captain
Phillips, “You are the media now.”
In this sense, Republican voters can now largely
circumvent mainstream outlets in seeking out political news. This also means
conservatives will be less persuasive in the future if they attempt to argue
that media bias is largely to blame for their candidates’ failures.
To be sure, a less partisan media environment likely
would have eroded Harris’s support even more by exposing her unpopular views,
and the success of alternative media in this election applies only to political
news. Outside political journalism, the mainstream media’s eagerness and
relentlessness in pursuing misleading narratives in the face of fact—as outlets
such as the New York Times and the Washington Post have done
post–October 7 in their reporting on Israel and its enemies—continue to have a
negative impact on the public’s ability to understand what is going on in the
Middle East.
The broader cultural environment also remains heavily
biased against conservative views and voters. With few exceptions, Hollywood,
academia, and much of Silicon Valley are still overwhelmingly Democratic and
progressive.
Nevertheless, this is a small but significant victory
upon which alternative media should build by cultivating even more tough-minded
reporting like that by the scrappy cadre of journalists at the Washington Free
Beacon, which broke many significant stories this election cycle, and the
reporters at The Free Press, whose coverage of cultural issues has been
stellar.
As well, it’s important for elected officials on the
right to cultivate media skills like those deployed to remarkable effect by JD
Vance in this election cycle. His willingness to explain his views in
thoughtful detail, again and again, in hostile media environments and the
stunned confusion on the face of Kamala Harris the few times a reporter she
assumed was friendly asked her a mildly pointed question were emblematic of the
strengths and weaknesses of both campaigns.
As for the mainstream media, judging by their behavior in
the immediate aftermath of Trump’s victory, they have learned little. One New
York Times headline read, “America Hires a Strongman,” followed by the
subtitle, “This was a conquering of the nation not by force but with a
permission slip. Now, America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style
of governance never before seen in its 248-year history.” That these pieces of
display type could be written after 2020 and 2021, years when state governments
across the country literally locked the doors to churches and schools and
arrested people for going to the beach while the federal government rewrote
eviction law without congressional oversight, is stunning.
The peddling of the analogy to dictatorships past was
everywhere. David Haskell, editor in chief of New York magazine, issued
a letter to subscribers that began, “A frightening world to wake up to, and a
morning swirling with disappointment, fear, anger, alienation,” and he assured
readers, since he is apparently clairvoyant, that when it comes to Trump, “We
will not shy from covering the havoc, damage, and cruelty he will surely
cause.” Cable-news hosts heaped recriminations and blame on Hispanic and black
male voters for their supposed misogyny and racism in voting for Trump. They
refused to acknowledge that Trump’s victory was delivered by a new
working-class, multiethnic coalition of voters, many of whom had defected from
the Democratic Party. Others, like ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger, seemed eager to
once again don the mantle of the would-be journalistic martyr in a new Trump
era, telling his staff, “We may be harassed. We may be sued. We may be
threatened with violence. We may be ignored…. Are we just sunshine journalists,
or are we ready?”
Given their years-long collective compliance in allowing
the Biden White House to prescreen their questions, refuse them entry to
newsworthy events, and “clean up” and doctor even official White House
transcripts to make the president appear cogent, as well as their collective
cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline, the only honest label for them is
“sundown journalists.” The Washington Post, in a post-election
editorial, chided Democrats for the party’s extensive cover-up of Biden’s
health but refused to hold itself accountable for contributing to that same
cover-up.
The few among the mainstream media who have paused to
reflect have had a dawning realization about the public’s lack of trust in
them. As CNN’s Brian Stelter reported in his Reliable Sources newsletter, there
is “an undercurrent of doubt and disillusionment in group texts and private
conversations” among many journalists, and he described a radio journalist who
told him, with some bafflement, that he spent years reporting “aggressively” on
“election denialism and the fallout from the January 6 attack” only to realize
that “many voters evidently didn’t care.”
Or, as an anonymous TV executive told New York magazine,
“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. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current
form.” Alas, this reflection is unlikely to prompt meaningful reform by the
mainstream media itself. But as an epitaph on the political journalism of the
recent past, it is an indisputable truth.
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