The Growing Irrelevance of the Mainstream Media
The 2024 presidential election results speak to the growing irrelevance of the legacy mainstream media that carried on a campaign against Donald Trump, unprecedented in its scope and mendacity. More than half of American voters showed that they do not care what they see and hear on the “news” programs of ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, or PBS. And they don’t believe what they read in (or simply don’t read) the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal (except their editorial page), Time, and other liberal big city newspapers and magazines. Trump’s overwhelming electoral victory should spell the end of this most recent era of “Yellow Journalism,” but it probably won’t.
It is not just the leftist ideological stance of the mainstream or legacy media that has done them in. It is their insufferable arrogance, their demeaning approach to average Americans who didn’t attend the “right” schools or who hold the “wrong” positions on issues, and their obnoxious superiority complex which allows them — indeed, demands of them — to categorize their social inferiors as “dangerous,” “uneducated,” and “fascist.”
Before Trump, Republicans were afraid to tussle with the mainstream media.
Trump called them “fake news” and “enemies of the people,” and in the 2024 election, the people as represented by the voters have spoken. They believe Trump, not his media antagonists.
This same legacy media once had the field of “news” all to themselves. They used it, for example, to help remove President Richard Nixon from office despite his 49-state electoral victory in 1972. The late, great British historian Paul Johnson rightly characterized Watergate as a “media putsch,” which was possible then because alternative news media did not yet exist. Had alternative media existed in 1973-1974, and been able to uncover some of the things that Jim Hougan, Len Colodny, Robert Gettlin, and most especially Geoff Shepard later uncovered, it is doubtful that Nixon would have resigned.
Today, the legacy media have to compete with Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon’s War Room, Charlie Kirk, the Free Press (where some of the legacy media’s former employees fled after exposing legacy media bias), Newsmax, Real America’s Voice, the Washington Times, Breitbart, Substack, Elon Musk’s X, Fox News, The American Spectator, and many other sources of information.
The first hints at the growing irrelevance of the legacy media occurred during the 2004 presidential campaign when CBS’s Dan Rather and 60 Minutes aired a report using fake documents to prove that George W. Bush received preferential treatment to avoid serving in Vietnam. Shortly after the report aired, alternative media sites raised questions about the authenticity of the documents. CBS stood by its story — which obviously helped the campaign of Democratic challenger John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam War veteran. Had there been no alternative media, the story would have been believed and could have turned the election in Kerry’s favor.
But the alternative media sites were right. The documents were fake.
CBS later had to admit their error. Rather and others connected to the program were fired or “resigned.” Bush narrowly defeated Kerry. The legacy media’s credibility took another hit.
Donald Trump’s entry into the political arena in 2015 and his surprising success in the 2016 presidential election shook the legacy media to its core. The media putsch of Watergate was nothing compared to what happened after the 2016 election of Trump. All pretenses of objectivity disappeared at mainstream media companies. With little “fact-checking,” the legacy media ran with the false stories of Trump’s supposed “collusion” with Russia. The mainstream media parroted and egged on congressional and other investigations into alleged wrongdoing by Trump. After all, he had called the legacy media “fake news.” At virtually every campaign event, and later as president, Trump lashed out at media bias against him. He told the American people that they shouldn’t believe what the legacy media told them.
For four years, the mainstream media provided negative portrayals of Trump. And in 2020, it looked as if they had succeeded in removing Trump from electoral success. But Trump refused to go away. He alleged that the 2020 election had been stolen from him by voting rule changes and irregularities in key swing state elections. The legacy media and others branded Trump and his supporters as “election deniers.” The legacy media blamed Trump for the events of Jan. 6 — despite the fact that he had urged House Speaker Pelosi to guard the Capitol with National Guard troops and told his supporters to act peacefully that day. Then the legacy media gleefully reported on the various Trump indictments and legal problems. But still, Trump refused to go away.
The anti-Trump legacy media then acted as a screen and cover for an obviously mentally declining Democratic president during the 2024 campaign until Biden’s debate performance against Trump rendered that impossible. So the mainstream media shifted gears and tried to persuade the American people that Kamala Harris was presidential timber — even though she had not received a single vote for the nomination and had previously been viewed as a political lightweight. But the legacy media’s main contribution to the 2024 political campaign was to portray Trump as “dangerous” to democracy. This became the Democrats’ main campaign issue even after two assassination attempts on Trump, and the legacy media joined in the fun.
When Trump decisively won the 2024 election — winning every swing state and the popular vote — the legacy media’s disappointment could be seen on their anchors’ faces as swing state after swing state was called for Trump. It was like 2016 all over again — MSNBC and CNN’s election coverage was reduced to a funeral-like atmosphere. All of their negative coverage of Trump meant nothing. A majority of American voters confirmed the mainstream media’s irrelevance. It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.
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