I will begin by saying straight off – I am not suggesting Tuesday’s election result was the death of the news media. There will remain a need for reporting and coverage, as flawed a delivery vehicle as the press complex has shown itself to be. But what did take place is that now it can no longer be denied that our journalism complex has lost the narrative and no longer has the traction with the American public it once enjoyed. And abused.
The election win for Donald Trump is significant, but the loss of Kamala Harris says just as much in regard to the shambles seen from our national news industry. What we witnessed was a fully coordinated effort to get the Democratic candidate elected by means of both overly touting Harris and doing everything possible to impact the chances of Donald Trump. This is not a deniable concept; the news outlets displayed unbridled support for one side.
Brian Stelter attempts to reconcile what has happened, but he reveals the underlying truth being denied. He writes in his newsletter that Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris is raising questions about the media’s credibility, influence, and audience. Stelter errs here by, of course, framing this only as a conservative complaint and not looking at it in objective fashion. (“Trump loyalists are asserting that his win is a complete repudiation of the news media.”) He does however provide what may be the best piece of sober analysis, sent to him by a longtime contact inside the Trump campaign:
Those are sane and salient words, but doubts exist that they will ever be absorbed by those who need them. Instead they persist in deluded thinking. There are some pundits this morning licking wounds and trying to declare that Harris ran a great campaign amid numerous challenges. This is pure farce. The press ran the Harris campaign. Following her becoming anointed in late July, Kamala Harris was something of a non-entity. She did not do any significant media appearances or interviews for weeks, but that did not matter.
The first two months of her campaign saw the media flooding the zone. They raved about her popularity, they ignored her dismal lower-than-Joe approval numbers, and they rewrote her record. Kamala was NOT the border czar! Harris was all in favor of fracking! She loves guns! And in those times when there was no content from the candidate, the press filled the void with tales of her cooking prowess, her fashions, and how her cackle was made into a dance track. We were told how her husband was a sex symbol as they ignored his history of fertilizing the nanny and slapping around his girlfriend at a film festival.
And all the while Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance were perpetually on defense. The constant quotidian drumbeat of “Fascist/Nazi/Death to democracy” never did more than bolster the resolve of the converted, while refusing to even entertain showing policy issues. Vance adroitly exposed Jake Tapper on this matter in an interview when he tried to steer talk to what Americans wanted to hear. Tapper tried to say that they had to focus on the empty hysteria surrounding Trump because he does not discuss issues, but Vance straightened him out, noting that both Trump and himself discuss issues daily in their rallies and interviews, but the press does not cover those.
In the closing month, the media only got worse. The collective press thought they had the Trump poison pill when a comedian at the Madison Square Garden rally (you know, the one that resembled a Nazi event from the 1930s?) told a joke about the island of Puerto Rico. Pundits harped on it relentlessly and the electorate was told this was racist and natives from the island should despise Trump. Instead Trump saw significant gains with Latino voters over the last two elections, flipping some counties that are Hispanic strongholds won by Joe Biden in 2020. Notably included is Osceola County in central Florida, a huge Puerto Rican stronghold Biden won with 56 percent.
When The Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg came out with an entirely fabricated story of Trump turning racist to refuse to cover the funeral costs of a fallen soldier, that fable was repeated across the news networks without question. This past weekend the media exploded with news of Selzer polling in Iowa, showing that the state had changed by over 20 percent in recent months, now allegedly supporting Harris +3 percent. Instead of treating this as an outlier and looking critically at the flaws in this result, the press pimped this poll in an effort to drag Harris to an upset victory. Instead, Trump won Iowa handily.
These display clear intentions of the press to completely toss away credibility and sell a fraudulent version of events. The importance was defeating Trump, a reality made clear now. For at least three months of Kamala’s electoral tenure the media went out of its way to serve as the Public Relations wing of her campaign. This is not a boastful claim or exaggerated assessment; it is indisputable.
What is clear is that news outlets showed abject disregard for their credibility, as fractured as that had already become. I have long been saying that repairs are needed in journalism, and this was highlighted last week by a New York Magazine report I covered. Speaking to a television executive, they said:
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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. And the question is what does it look like after.
That is a hell of an admission, basically declaring they were campaigning against one candidate. And the public has recognized this effect. The press has made its position clear, and while showing disregard for journalism ethics in the attempt to get Kamala elected, a bulk of the audience has stated they are done with the partisanship and bias.
If the media industry wants to recover and draw back the public, they need to take a series of actions to reconstitute its reputation. The first step: They need to care about journalism.
