The Suicide of the Mainstream Media
Christine Rosen for Commentary.org December 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 dis-
agreed 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 Timesheadline 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 cog-nitive 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.
Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
It is my personal opinion that nary a single conservative should give a single minute to any of the mainstream media organizations. Frankly, they should be very very selective about who they give time to at Fox News. Basically, starve them of access.