In the wake of the red wave that saw Donald Trump win back the White House, Republicans to regain control of the Senate, and Republicans generally outperforming their 2020 returns everywhere, there have naturally been all manner of explanations given for how it could be so. While they range from everything to Fear of a Black Woman to Joe Biden Intentionally Sabotaged the Democrats to Get Revenge, one that I’ve seen most often is The Changed Media Landscape.
Regular commenter Jim Brown 32 raises it in this morning’s Forum:
Democrats have no viable messaging apparatus in this Country that can challenge RW messaging. Period. The messaging they do have is in a completely different language than what most of the country speaks–and is easy to counter-message.
Most of the people in this country are Simpletons (I say this not as as insult) they live their lives at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy. Having more stuff and money available to us does not change ones Psychology. Perceived threats to one’s safety, lifestyle (however shitty) and freedom of movement to access: food /housing /sex are the predominant motivation of most Americans and indeed Earthlings. SYSTEMS–the methods and means by which the aforementioned things are delivered are a level higher–and although systems are the key to modern society– only a minority of people can understand them enough to develop an emotional attachment to them and their proper creation and understanding.
A great irony is that although RW messaging hits exclusively at the bottom of Maslow–they built a SYSTEM to deliver that message at multiple layers of society. Conversely, the LW and centrist speak Latin to Italians in the town square — so that even a villager that happens to be passing by with their mules has no idea what the hell is being blabbed about.
If Democrats want to get the power to execute their agenda–the message cannot only be for the true believers, the inner circle. If fact, MR should hate the message–but like the outcome of more rural Americans voting Blue. Republicans have accepted this. Don’t you think JD Vance would prefer a different message? I’m sure he would — but he knows Italians only understand Italian.
This is not trolling people—it’s meeting them where THEY are. The majority of the Country cannot meet intellectuals on equal ground. You cannot educate psychology. Maslow’s rungs are only climbed by experience–experience that is not possible for the majority of a large population to receive.
The good news is that Democrats can play the same game if they hold leaders accountable to results. Results start with counter-messaging in Churches and local News. Results start with understanding that primary objectives (i.e., DEI) can only occur indirectly. The primary objectives are to force Republicans to defend their Maslow bottom-rung failures on their home turf–with their own constituents.
Why are Rural people afraid of the city but not fired up about their own squalor? Could it be because of Sinclair and the Local Preachers? These places could do better but don’t because they don’t have to as long as there is an unchallenged message of an outside enemy at the gate. If you live on the bottom rungs of Maslow, this is a real and pervasive threat—however imaginary to people at higher rungs.
While I’ve thought and written about the Republican Infotainment Complex a lot over the years, that they’re better than the mainstream press at communicating to blue-collar folks in their own language is a really strong point that I’ve not really considered. Still, the ecosystem hasn’t changed that much since 2020 and Trump lost that one by 8 million votes.
New Republic editor Michael Tomasky (“Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?“) adds his perspective:
Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.
Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.
I’m honestly quite skeptical that the right-wing media is now larger than the mainstream press in terms of audience reach, much less that the set the latter’s agenda. But it’s certainly the case that huge swaths of the country get their news from these sources and are largely oblivious to the framing of the New York Times and Washington Post.
And this point is crucial:
This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.
Once upon a time, I ridiculed John Edwards for his “Two Americas” schtick. But there’s now very little overlap between the folks who think Trump is a fascist set out to destroy American democracy and those who think he’s our one last hope to save it. And the thing is, both groups are equally sincere in that belief. They live in separate realities.
I asked [Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America] what I call my “Ulan Bator question.” If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? “You would know that she is a very stupid person,” Gertz said. “You’d know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she’s a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you.”
Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he’s been “the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years,” that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is “doing it all for you.”
To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side’s view of things. It’s simply “the news.” This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it, too, has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the oped page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.
A related point I’ve seen is the Democrats’ failure to engage with this ecosystem was a huge mistake. Ezra Klein (“Where Does This Leave Democrats?”):
The Democratic Party had spent years kicking people out of its tent. I went and listened to the appearance Elon Musk made on Joe Rogan’s podcast on Monday. It was strikingly right wing and conspiratorial. It wasn’t that many years ago that Rogan had Bernie Sanders on for a friendly interview. And then Rogan kinda sorta endorsed him. Rather than celebrate, online liberals were furious at Sanders for going on “Rogan” in the first place. I was still on Twitter then, and I wrote about how of course Sanders was right to be there and this was one of the best arguments for Sanders’s campaign. If you wanted to beat Trump, you wanted to win over people like Rogan.
Liberals got so angry at me for that, I was briefly a trending topic. Rogan was a transphobe, an Islamophobe, a sexist, a racist, the kind of person you wanted to marginalize, not chat with. But if these last years have proved anything, it’s that liberals don’t get to choose who is marginalized. Democrats should have been going on “Rogan” regularly. They should have been prioritizing it — and other podcasts like it — this year. Yes, Harris should have been there. Same for Tim Walz. On YouTube alone, Rogan’s interview with Trump was viewed some 46 million times. Democrats are just going to abandon that? In an election where they think that if the other side wins, it means fascism?
The iconoclastic, suit-eschewing US Senator from Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, agrees:
I’ve always been a fan of the Rogan podcast, and of him personally. That doesn’t mean that I have to agree with him on everything, but it’s all about having conversations and having an exchange of ideas. I think he really pioneered that whole medium, and I think it’s important for all of us, especially for elected leaders, to challenge your own views and to expose yourself [to others]. He has created an incredibly impressive platform, and it would be pretty dumb to ignore that or to pretend it doesn’t exist.
So, I was happy to show up there. And it also addresses an important kind of an issue, in my opinion, with the Democratic Party. We have a challenge. We have our own kind of “childless cat ladies” situation: “Bros.” People refer to these young guys as bros, and clearly that’s not a positive term. They’re described as dopes, or gullible, or brutes. People were really shocked when the whole childless cat ladies thing dropped, and it is dumb. That violates the basic, basic rule of politics. Don’t subtract, do addition. I think that was part of the new coalition that really delivered a pretty crushing victory for Trump.
Some, like The Nation‘s Elie Mystal, take a different tack:
People saying Harris should have done Joe Rogan are missing the point. That wouldn’t have helped her. Liberals need to BUILD THEIR OWN JOE ROGAN. Somebody who can speak to the people he speaks to, without being a guy who wants to kiss ass to billionaires like Elon Musk.
Former WaPo columnist-turned-Substacker Taylor Lorenz rejoins with “Why Democrats won’t build their own Joe Rogan.”
Without a network of culturally relevant influential content creators boosting and translating their messaging, the Democratic Party is rapidly losing credibility among younger, predominantly male audiences who have become ardent supporters of influencers that promote a distinctly conservative worldview.
This imbalance when it comes to online influence is no accident. It is the result of massive structural disadvantages in funding, promotion, and institutional support. And understanding why Democrats can’t (or really won’t) cultivate an equivalent independent media ecosystem that rivals what the right has built is crucial for anyone who hopes to ever see the Democrats back into power.
The conservative media landscape in the United States is exceptionally well-funded, meticulously constructed, and highly coordinated. Wealthy donors, PACs, and corporations with a vested interest in preserving or expanding conservative policies strategically invest in right-wing media channels and up and coming content creators.
This creates a well oiled pipeline for conservative influencers: young TikTokers, YouTubers, livestreamers, or podcasters are discovered, developed, and pushed to larger platforms, often with the financial backing of conservative billionaires or organizations on the right who have long recognized the content creator industry a valuable means of shaping public opinion and policy.
Organizations like Turning Point USA, PragerU, and The Daily Wire and others receive millions from backers who view them as advertising for a broader conservative agenda. These media entities act as content creator incubators and spend extensively on outreach, production quality, and audience growth. The resources and near unlimited funds they receive allow conservative content creators to grow rapidly and spread their message widely.
For instance, Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire has been heavily funded by wealthy Republican donors, including the Wilks brothers, Texas-based billionaires known for their oil and fracking fortune. Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, receives millions from conservative mega donors including the Koch network. Right wing content creators Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin were recently getting paid $400,00 a month, at least $100,000 per YouTube video, after accepting funding from a right wing Russian influence operation. Johnson even allegedly negotiated a $100,000 signing bonus.
Renee DiResta, a researcher and author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, recently posted that, if you want to amass power online, pouring money into the influencer industry is essentially cheaper than buying bots or banner ads online. “Buying authentic influencers is a far better use of funds than creating fake personas, because they bring their own trusting audiences and are actually, you know, real,” she posted on Threads.
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There is simply zero equivalent to this massive infrastructure on the left.
Leftist channels do not receive widespread financial backing from billionaires or large institutional donors, primarily because leftist content creators support policies that are completely at odds with what billionaires want.
Left leaning influencers argue for things like higher taxes on the rich, regulations on corporations, and policies that curb the power of elites. Wealthy mega donors aren’t going to start pouring money into a media ecosystem that directly contradicts their own financial interests. And so, progressive creators are left to rely on meager crowdfunding efforts to make a living.
While there are plenty of Democratic-leaning billionaires who could fill the gap, the interests of the billionaire class and the Democratic Party don’t exactly align. Dan Drezner, who’s hardly a lefty, made similar argument years back in his bestseller The Ideas Industry: it’s simply a hell of a lot easier to make a living pushing agenda that flatters the wealthy than one that antagonizes them.
Regardless of the solution—or whether one even exists—the fact that half the country inhabits a completely different media ecosystem from the other half is a huge problem.
It is not, of course, a new one. As noted above, Fox News launched in 1996 and Rush Limbaugh was going strong for years before that. The late broadcast journalist Garrick Utley had an essay in Foreign Affairs back in March 1997 that coined a new term: narrowcasting.
While his focus was the decline in investment in coverage of foreign affairs, the essay was exceedingly prescient as to the future of the news industry writ large.
New technologies in cable and satellite TV have turned the stable, predictable, almost automatically profitable television marketplace into a competitive cauldron in which journalism must increasingly compete with entertainment programming. This has prompted a redefining, or at least a questioning, of the traditional news agenda in the post-Cold War world.
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The image of the correspondent reporting from some troubled land has become firmly imprinted in viewers’ imaginations, particularly since 1963. Televised coverage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy bonded viewers to what was beginning to be called a “medium,” which could convey human experience and emotions as they could never rise off the printed page. A Roper poll that year found for the first time that television was the main source of news for more Americans than newspapers. Moreover, in 1963 NBC and CBS expanded their nightly news programs from 15 minutes to 30. Some at the networks wondered whether there was an audience — and, therefore, sponsors — for the longer newscasts.
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With the 1996 merger of Time-Warner and Turner Broadcasting, the parent of CNN, all the major American news divisions are owned by transnational corporations. The financial benefits are clear: Jack Welch, chairman and chief executive officer of NBC’s parent company, General Electric, and Rupert Murdoch, who controls Fox, could provide heavy backing for their start-up news channels. Deep pockets count for a lot in the race to create global television empires. But the drive to penetrate new markets and build media imperia raises serious concerns for international reporting and broadcasting. Authorities in the countries on the receiving end often see the news beamed in as politically or culturally undesirable, even subversive. When interests clash, as they inevitably do, good journalism is likely to be sacrificed. The trend is already established.
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The growing tension between journalistic and commercial priorities may never be fully resolved. But whatever direction events may lead journalists, the role of traditional news organizations is likely to shrink further. The flow of information from fax machines to the Internet and through other technologies already developed or still undreamed of will overwhelm efforts to control it. Today and in the future, anyone sending information from one country to another is a de facto foreign corespondent. The number of correspondents, accredited or not, will rapidly increase. Equipped with camcorders and computers, they will send out and receive more and more foreign dispatches. Even in countries where governments try to control the availability of video on the Internet, ingenuity and ever smaller satellite dishes will enable some, perhaps much, news and information to get through.
I have frequently quoted the late, great Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s admonition, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” It has, alas, been years since that held true.
