The election and the decline of Mainstream Media
Picture the Grim Reaper standing beside a grave, shovel at the ready, waiting for the prayers to finish so he can settle the corpse of Mainstream Media/Cable News into its final resting place and become a sentimental but distant dream.
Count me standing beside him with a handful of dirt.
Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
No more Alerts! … pundits … analysts … roundtable discussions … “guardrails” … or anchors with perfect hair and smug expressions. Enough of the “threats to democracy” and “leaning in.” I am done with “The Five,” “The Situation Room,” and “Reid Out.”
The election has settled. Mainstream Media is on its last gasp.
The Collapse of Old Media
The recently concluded presidential campaign saw Mainstream Media and Cable News take a giant leap toward irrelevance and perhaps into extinction. From Washington Post to CBS News, the moldy brands of the industry gambled what shreds of trust remained in them—the number dipped below 20 percent—to exert influence on behalf of Democratic candidates and progressive positions.
They lost—big time. Democracy died in broad daylight.
The fallout has already begun. MSNBC is up for sale, for what it’s worth, and the buzzards are circling. Post-election ratings are down 54 percent. Anchors and pundits at CNN are dead men walking. The Washington Post lost a quarter of a million readers when owner Jeff Bezos became squeamish about picking which candidate to endorse, so he chose nobody. Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong went full beast mode and fired his entire editorial staff.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump will place his hand on the Bible on Jan. 20. A reckoning is coming.
Why is this happening?
Legacy news survives by commodifying polarization. It thrives on divisiveness, contrived conflict and indignation. Most of the dissent from the party line is labeled “misinformation.” All news is propaganda, but this brand of news is particularly odious. It is a witch’s brew of ad hominems, performance outrage, snap judgments, half-truths, “loaded” language (i.e., introducing someone as “far right” or “radical left”), and the comical hocus pocus of “deep fakes.”
Nowhere was this better illustrated than the mental decline of President Joe Biden.
Biden received extravagant praise as a wise, experienced leader until he became a political liability. The media pack tore him apart for being too old and infirm, almost overnight memory-holing that they had spent the past three years assailing anyone who questioned that he was “sharp as a tack.”
It was a lie, a colossal lie, obvious to all sentient mortals who watched a fossilized Biden blurt out in the cataclysmic debate: “We defeated Medicare!”
Meanwhile, attacks on Trump were so bizarrely strident and, at the same time, so ritualized that they attained the aspect of parody. Anne Applebaum, an otherwise serious and thoughtful Liberal writer, penned an election story in The Atlantic with the astonishing headline “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.” Not one, not two, but three psychopathic killers. Not long after its publication, the three-headed super-totalitarian dictator took a turn as an assistant fry cook at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s.
The Washington Post became the campaign’s sacrificial animal, on whose entrails the future of the business could be divined. The Post has been hemorrhaging readers and money—it lost $100 million in 2023 alone. The owner, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, absorbed the hit, but deficits on that scale are almost certainly not sustainable.
Yet the overriding scandal this election season at the Post was Bezos’s refusal to endorse Harris. Bezos claimed he wanted to make the Post more “independent.” The paper’s columnists exploded in protest. Several indignant staffers mutinied. Its readership, aghast that Bezos’ effort at self-preservation, also rebelled — an estimated 250,000 readers canceled their subscriptions. The demonic image of Trump loomed over the controversy. “It is 1933,” tweeted Jennifer Rubin, the most hysterical of the Post writers. “Hitler is in power.”
The Barbarians at the Gates
The Republicans’ advantage in digital media, much commented on since Election Day, was not apparent beforehand. Except for Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), all the big platforms were owned by Harris supporters, who were deeply involved in
promoting the progressive agenda. The institutional “resistance,” eventually absorbed into the Biden administration, had erected a censorship structure that aimed to protect the public from online “disinformation”—and the platforms seemed in lockstep with the censors.
But Musk’s purchase of Twitter (re-branded X) in 2022 and his campaign to become the guardian of Free Speech changed everything. Three developments in New Media allowed Republicans to bypass the semi-monopolistic platforms and connect directly with the public.
1. Musk purchases Twitter (“X”)
First was the flexing power of social media, especially on X, which draws a disproportionate amount of the political commentariat. Writes Martin Gurri:
“First and foremost, (Elon) Musk's purchase of Twitter opened up a freewheeling space populated by political and media celebrities as well as ordinary users, where orthodox and dissident reports and opinions met on an equal footing. Before the sale, conservatives and libertarians had been penned in an information ghetto. They were free to speak but were audible only to each other. Most conservatives with intellectual pretensions read The New York Times; approximately zero liberals or progressives watch Fox News. This imbalance meant that information could be smothered—think Hunter Biden’s laptop—while disfavored individuals, Trump above all, could be vilified without fear of refutation.”
The new model X breached the wall of silence around anti-establishment voices, letting loose a tremendous volume of uncontrolled content.
2. The Rogan Factor
Second, podcaster Joe Rogan emerged during the campaign as a sort of emissary from a forgotten demographic: restless men who found the culture’s obsession with identity politics incomprehensible. Rogan is nothing like a preacher. He’s just a dude with a microphone interested in talking to anyone and everyone. Normality is his superpower. His method relies on duration: The podcasts go on for hours, much too long for scripted answers.
The podcast presented this humanized version of the usually blustering former president before an audience of tens of millions. The Trump podcast had 51 million views on YouTube. Both Musk and Rogan re-posted on X to 15 million views. Combined with those who streamed on Spotify, it totaled over a hundred million views. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris, reportedly following the directives of her normie-averse staffers, refused to appear on the show.
The Trump podcast had 51 million views on YouTube. Both Musk and Rogan re-posted on X to 15 million views. Combined with those who streamed on Spotify, it totaled over a hundred million views. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris, reportedly following the directives of her normie-averse staffers, refused to appear on the show.
Contemporary culture is at war with these disaffected men, who would prefer to be left alone rather than fight back. Trump represented the temptation to revolt. The bond between Trump and Rogan gave millions of normies, including those who considered themselves Democrats or apolitical, permission to join the MAGA movement.
3. Rank and file
Finally, the last and least noticeable of the Republicans’ digital back-alleys was the rise of newsletter platforms, including Substack and the online platform Rumble. Substack's readership is small in comparison with Rogan’s audience. However, the creators who have gone independent are extraordinarily knowledgeable and articulate and embody a unique sliver of the population that they could not find in a four-minute segment on CNN or a columnist from the New York Times.
People like Dave Smith, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, and Michael Shellenberger all began public life on the left. And all repudiated the inquisitorial nature of progressivism and abandoned the Democrats long before aligning with Trump to any degree. Ex-Wall Street Journal and New York Times editor Bari Weiss, who started a new media company called The Free Press, has quickly grown into an alternative with its mix of news, commentary, and “normie” cultural takes into a $100 million enterprise in three years. Weiss described herself as “politically homeless,” giving a label to the “folks” who felt repelled by the excesses of the Biden administration and their cultural enablers yet had no idea what to do about it.
They may have influenced just a fraction of the electorate. However, in the slicing and dicing a closely contested election in which “low propensity” voters moved away from Mainstream Media, it may have been enough.
Musk, Gabbard and RFK, Jr.
In many ways, their background mirrored a cluster of ex-Democrats prominent on the public stage: Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and a few others who had broken with the progressive establishment and were excommunicated. They, too, wandered homeless for a time. None of them had supported Trump in 2016. Yet, they all swayed by a mysterious pressure and gravitated into Trump’s orbit in 2024.
What changed?
In short, the politically homeless ran out of neutral space. As our dominant institutions—especially Mainstream Media and Cable News—demanded ever more ideological adherence and political control, the middle ground simply vanished. The Left moved further Left, leaving the dissidents with only one place to go.
What’s Around the Bend
The motive for this isn’t hard to work out. Popular culture is the vortex of the nation’s attention, and attention is the fuel that powers Trump’s existence.
This is where Mainstream Media has dropped the ball. Since 2016, they tried everything to wish him out of existence. Even with all the chaos he brings with him, they couldn’t. Instead, they created an anti-hero.
Trump’s entry into politics introduced the circus atmosphere of popular culture and the electorate. He has been the peacock strutting into a city of crows. His contempt for the establishment probably had more to do with its dullness and lack of entertainment value than with the cult of progressivism. In the process, he broke the Mainstream Media’s brain. The immediate question was whether such a volatile personality, assisted by a gang of eccentrics, could succeed enough to satisfy the public’s hunger for change.
The answer will not be long in coming.
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Jim Geschke was inducted into the Marquis Who’s Who Registry in 2021.
Great analysis, Jim. As usual, your writing is superb.
Nailed it and well done 👍