The election was a referendum on the American media

In the final month of the 2024 election, the national media existed in another solar system from the country for whom is tasked at reporting accurate, unbiased and truthful information. The final month started with Jeffrey Goldberg and the Atlantic attempting to regurgitate their anonymously sourced “suckers and losers” hit against Trump from 2020. With the help of CNN and others, they resurfaced General John Kelly. Then they went and got their full Reich on by comparing Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally to a 1939 Nazi rally there. At said rally a comedian known for celebrity roasts made a crass joke about Puerto Rico, which blanketed the whole of national media outlets for four days. 

When the October jobs report was released on the final Friday of October, showing an anemic growth of only 12,000 jobs, the national media focused all of their attention on comments Trump made about former representative Liz Cheney, who had become a Kamala Harris campaign surrogate, regarding sending her off to fight the wars her family and in particular her father had endorsed. 

The Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and NBC created an echo chamber of thought bubbles that only they were listening to. The country had completely tuned them out. None of these stories actually mattered to voting audiences and the election result, with almost every major voting demographic moving toward Donald Trump in an electoral blowout. 

What happened this election was sort of a Chinese finger trap (are we allowed to say this again?). On one end was the media’s goal of insulating and protecting Kamala Harris. The National Media Research Center estimated that of all the media coverage Harris received, about four-fifths of it was positive or anodyne. But in shielding Harris from questions or scrutiny, the country saw a candidate unable or unwilling to put herself out there and make a case for voting for her beyond the soundbites and video clips of her disastrous 2020 campaign. 

On the other end of the trap was the blanketing of negative stories about Donald Trump, at the expense of reporting on things that actually mattered to the country. The national media all but suffocated the October jobs report. It didn’t work because the media knew if it reported on the topics that actually matter to people, such as inflation, or the economy, or jobs, that it would be detrimental to the Biden White House and his “Bidenomics” policies, which Harris fully endorsed. No media outlet wanted to be responsible for reporting the realities of what was happening across the country that led to the eventual reelection of Trump. In the end they have only themselves to blame. They created a no-win situation for themselves and for Harris. 

This election was a resounding referendum on the American media’s business model. Across the legacy media spectrum, they have frozen out voices that represent about 70 percent of the country on issues important to them. The country is tired of a media who ignores bad news about Joe Biden, or even participated in a conspiracy to hide his clear cognitive decline. The country is tired of the late-night scolds, tired of cable news calling them Nazis. The country is tired of the women of The View, who spew toxic disinformation on a near-daily basis, yet are never held accountable by the fact-checkers and media watchdogs.

This election should be an immediate wake-up call for the national and legacy media to correct course. In the few days since Trump’s win, many of them appear no closer to doing so.