How?

This election turned on new media

Half of Americans are elated that their champion vanquished his Democratic foes; half are frightened and depressed by the broad election of an unfit, grifting felon.

This was a transformational election not just for the country, but for media too. Between YouTube and Spotify, 70 million saw or heard Donald Trump on Joe Rogan’s podcast. That’s a number traditional media used to see regularly, but now sees only on Super Bowl Sunday.

John McEntee, a once-and-future Trump White House staffer:

“Whoever dominates the latest communication tool usually wins: Look at Trump with Twitter in 2016, Obama with Facebook, JFK with television, FDR with radio.” Team Trump’s early strategy of web- and podcast-based campaigning, where they mostly eschewed traditional ground-game and mass-media exposure, paid off.

Donald Trump reflects at some level who at least half of us are. But do half of us really share his dark, vengeful views? I doubt it. Many simply voted on the price of eggs. Sure, there are haters, but I also think we are distracted by our entertainment devices, and don’t bother to pay close attention, preferring instead to believe what we hear online. We are, in the words of Neil Postman, amusing ourselves to death.

I stand vanquished with the rest of the left. We are apparently the last to realize that the liberal world order established after World War II is over. We will proceed now as a minority. We will not acquiesce to authoritarianism or government by-the-few, for-the-few. The pendulum swings, and it will swing back, but that change will not be measured in days or weeks. We will just have to do our best to forward our values and hope to win hearts and minds where we can.

Change happens whether you like it or not. I am of course, like many others, unhappy with this change, but it is the new reality and we will deal with it. What makes me apoplectic however is that the agent of change is actually an agent of chaos. We have selected the arsonist to be our fire chief. That we have rewarded criminal behavior, lying, and cheating, does not sit well with me.

Former Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO): "It’s official. He knew America better than we did. We thought we were better than fear and anger driven by lies. We weren't." This brings into focus a necessary discussion regarding the legacy media and its total loss of power. Now that it is not so fearsome, I expect the new administration will try to subvert what’s left of the mainstream media, using Hungarian Strongman, Viktor Orban, as a guide. (Like Vladimir Putin, he bought, shuttered, or jailed media platforms and journalists, until opposition withered.)

And as is now clear, social media will not save us. They’ve already cut their budgets for content moderation. Here’s A.G. Sulzberger, the NY Times publisher in a guest Washington Post editorial explaining how Strongmen bend the media to their will. Spoiler Alert: if you guessed money and threats, you win!

The Young Turks’ Cenk Uyger had this to say: "Politicians who went on mainstream media used to have a huge advantage. But this time Trump's appearances on online shows overpowered Harris's MSM advantage. Her not doing online media proved to be an enormous mistake."

Elon Musk, got it and retargeted X to young men while overwhelming them with lies and conspiracy theories. Using that playbook, the Trump campaign focused on men 18-34. From the Washington Post: “Trump’s staggering showing among this demographic was the culmination of a years-long effort to reach young men devoted to the beacons of American machismo: pranks, combat sports, stand-up comedy and the often-misogynistic online fringe known as the ‘manosphere.’”

Angelo Carusone, the boss at progressive media watchdog, Media Matters: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”

The “Sunday Shows” have been a vacuous joke for years, although for some time it was not apparent what would replace them. This cycle it was podcasts. People listen to Call Her Daddy and Joe Rogan, not Meet the Press or This Week. CBS still airs Face The Nation, but like its brethren, it’s an exercise in unanswered questions, where pols simply pivot to their talking points. The hosts don’t press because their corporate/conglomerate ownerships have multiple interests and don’t want to get crosswise with the administration or the big defense contractors, who would, they fear, pull their Sunday sponsorship money.

David Resnick, editor, The New Yorker: “Liberal democracy is a rare, precious, and vulnerable inheritance, and one we have yet to fulfill. Journalism has a role to play, a very serious and meaningful one.”

It’s fair to say democracy is on the ropes worldwide. One reason is the passage of time: Memory of 1930’s Europe are no longer firsthand. Another is evolving media.

©2024 Jon Sinton