Last month, the entrepreneur Patrick Bet-David had Donald Trump on his podcast, where he congratulated him for “killing the mainstream media.”
“I did. I’m very proud of it too,” Trump responded.
It was classic Trump bombast that carried with it more than a kernel of truth. While the president-elect may not have personally ended the media, defined for the purposes of this story as newspapers, TV, radio and the like—including the outlet you’re reading—the press as a whole comes out of Tuesday’s election a far diminished force.
Elon Musk—the billionaire to whom Trump entrusted digital campaigning, evidently with success—broadened the point on Tuesday night when he also declared the media all but dead. “You are the media now,” he told his 200 million followers on X.
On CNN, political commentator Scott Jennings, a former aide to President George W. Bush, outlined where he said the media had erred in the final weeks of the campaign.
“We have been sitting around for the last couple weeks and the story that was portrayed was not true,” he said. “We were told Puerto Rico was going to change the election. Liz Cheney, Nikki Haley voters, women lying to their husbands. Before that it was Tim Walz and the camo hats. Night after night after night we were told all these things and gimmicks were going to somehow push Harris over the line.”
The path of traditional media’s institutional collapse is really two intertwining stories: a breakdown of its business model exacerbated by a breakdown of influence, the extent of which became clear this campaign cycle. Behind it all lies a growing sense among Americans that the media cannot be trusted to tell them the news they believe is fair.
Joe Biden is likely to leave office as the first president since Franklin Roosevelt to deny The New York Times an on-the-record interview. Kamala Harris is the first presidential candidate in modern history to snub Time magazine, to the chagrin of its billionaire publisher. Donald Trump hasn’t sat down with CNN in 18 months, instead focusing his campaign media strategy on podcasters and social media influencers like Bet-David, though he has written opinion pieces for Newsweek.
It was a bold move that paid off, at least in terms of reach. His three-hour appearance on Joe Rogan’s far-reaching podcast garnered 40 million views on YouTube in a week—more than twice the combined audience of the Big 3 television newscasts.
When Newsweek asked the Trump camp why it agreed to the Rogan interview, campaign adviser Alex Bruesewitz responded that it was a no-brainer.
“Engaging with podcasters like Joe Rogan allows people to see the human side of President Trump that the mainstream media deliberately won’t cover,” he said.
Harris, for her part, also sat with popular podcasters like Alex Cooper of Call Her Daddy and Shannon Sharpe, though she did not go on Rogan’s show in the end.
A Busted Business Model
The mass media’s slow but steady loss of influence predates Trump. It can be traced to economic headwinds brought on by the digital revolution and evolving consumer preferences.
In 2010, about 105 million U.S. households subscribed to a cable television package. This year, that number was down to 68 million, according to Statista, for a 35 percent decrease in 14 years. Just last week it was reported that cable behemoth Comcast was considering spinning out its cable networks, including the likes of MSNBC and Bravo, which were once the most lucrative segment of its TV portfolio.
“Cord cutting is not abating,” Brad Adgate, a veteran media consultant, told Newsweek. “Once you drop cable TV, you’ve done it for a reason. The reach just isn’t there anymore.”
Even the biggest names on cable news are not immune from the changing landscape. Last month, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Wolf Blitzer were both reportedly denied salary increases, while the network is said to have offered Chris Wallace a significant pay cut.
In print, newspaper circulation has been more than cut in half since 2000, according to Pew Research. Hundreds of papers have either shuttered or ceased their print editions, the most recent being New Jersey’s largest daily, the Star-Ledger, which will stop its print run in February.
The number of journalists at U.S. newspapers dropped 39 percent between 1989 and 2012, according to a report from the Brookings Institution. Those who have remained in the decade since are writing for a smaller and smaller audience. A 2018 study by the American Psychological Association found that just 2 percent of U.S. 10th graders were reading a newspaper almost every day, down from a third in the 1990s.
There are exceptions. A small number of national newspapers—literally, two or three—have succeeded in bucking that trend by being early and aggressive to the digital transformation. The New York Times now counts 11 million digital subscribers, having discovered a way to offset its cost-intensive journalism with lighter fare like games, recipes and expanded sports coverage. But that transformation has its own downsides, as editors at the Times must be responsive to its paying audience—who happen to be overwhelmingly coastal and liberal.
“They pivoted from being a newspaper for everyone to being a newspaper for their core reader,” the digital media executive Bryan Goldberg recently told New York magazine. “From a purely business standpoint, that was the right decision, but I also think it made the world a much worse place, and that’s a difficult thing to reconcile.”
Ceding Influence
Year after year, Gallup’s annual survey of public trust in political and civic institutions came to the same conclusion: the legislative branch, that is the two houses of Congress, set the standard for mistrust, bar none. Nobody in America inspired less confidence than a generic Washington lawmaker.
This year, though, Congress was eclipsed. The mainstream media is now the least trusted institution in the country. When asked by the pollster how much trust and confidence they had in the media, nearly 70 percent of respondents said either “not very much” or “none at all.” In the “none at all” category, the press ranked a staggering 17 points lower than Congress.
That collapse in trust was a long time coming. The media has been underwater with the public for two decades, long before Trump started referring to it as the “fake news.”
The last time Gallup’s survey found a majority of Americans had either a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in media was 2003.
Back then, before the Iraq War devolved into a quagmire, the media was still supported by a majority of Americans. President George W. Bush was notching approval ratings in the low 60s as he prepared to kick off his reelection campaign. The postrecession economy was getting stronger, fueled by a housing boom still several years away from sparking a global financial meltdown.
And a Harvard undergrad by the name of Mark Zuckerberg was putting the finishing touches on a project called TheFacebook from his Cambridge dorm room.
The story of how social media fractured the traditional media landscape has been well told. The platforms’ swift rise to attention dominance blew up an old advertising business that reliably printed money, giving media outlets huge new reach but putting them at the whim of an algorithm tweak by an engineer at Google or Facebook.
While detrimental to the business models of the old guard—who needs newspaper classifieds when you’ve got Facebook Marketplace?—the phenomenon allowed a rise in alternative media sources that spoke to fragments of the population, rather than the whole of the country. From The Intercept on the left to the Washington Free Beacon on the right, Americans’ media diets took on a choose-your-own-adventure quality, helped along by personalized algorithms that, as the internet historian Eli Pariser put it, created a “unique universe of information for each of us.”
Back in 2011, Pariser coined a term for this: the filter bubble. But it would be years until most Americans saw firsthand how influential the Big Tech platforms really were when it came to distributing the news.
When asked in a recent interview by—who else?—Joe Rogan why he still insisted the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Trump, his 2024 running mate, Senator JD Vance, cited the media’s handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story that fall.
Weeks before Election Day in 2020, the social media platform then known as Twitter suspended the New York Post for publishing a story—and blocked users from sharing the link to it—alleging that emails found on the laptop’s hard drive suggested that Joe Biden shaped American foreign policy in Ukraine while vice president to benefit his son’s business dealings. The Biden family have denied any wrongdoing in overseas business dealings. Facebook also temporarily suppressed the story, limiting its reach.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
The Hunter Biden laptop saga, perhaps along with the investigation into possible ties between Russia and Trump’s 2020 campaign, is what many Republicans would point to as the moment at which any remaining shred of credibility with the media was lost (forget that the laptop story was broken by the Post, an erstwhile member of the mainstream press).
Hunter’s laptop did end up being real, not a figment of election disinformation, and it did raise questions about the business dealings of the president’s son that, Vance argued, might have swayed enough votes to determine the winner of that election if the story was not censored by the tech platforms.
According to internal texts released as part of a House investigation, one Facebook executive explained why the company wasn’t worried about “demoting” the Post story in users’ feeds. “Golden Rule: The Press is only as good to you as you are bad to Trump.”
For a sense of how far the pendulum has swung since, compare that to what YouTube, a part of Google, said to The New York Times last week for a story about the persistence of conservative influencers peddling what the Times said was election-related disinformation on its platform.
“The ability to openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial, is an important value—especially in the midst of election season,” a YouTube spokeswoman said in a terse statement to the paper.
That reflects a larger shift within the world of Big Tech over the past four years, as it decouples from a media establishment it helped ruin. Billionaire CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are now more willing to push back against the legacy media and be more vocal about endorsing free speech in absolutist terms.
The platform that originally suppressed the laptop story has since been purchased by Musk himself, rebranded as X, and is now a bastion for conservative and right-wing thought (as well as plenty of conspiracy theories).
Getty
But the media’s recent collapse in trust, as illustrated by the Gallup survey, is not being driven by Republicans, who long ago lost faith in the Fourth Estate. The nosedive is more a reflection of a 16-point drop among Democrats just over the past two years.
“We’ve always seen Democrats having more trust in the media than Republicans, and they still do,” said Megan Brenan, a Gallup senior pollster and former Times journalist. “But what’s happening now is an age thing,” with just 31 percent of Democrats aged 18 to 29 saying they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the press.
“It actually transcends party,” Brenan said. “Young people in particular are very distrusting of the media.”
As the former CIA analyst Martin Gurri argued in his prescient 2014 book Revolt of the Public, the media started to lose influence around the same time an explosion of digital information eroded its authority and highlighted its shortcomings to a newly empowered, online town square. The result was a relatively sudden shift in the balance of power from established elites to the general public.
“The authority of institutions that surround and support modern democratic government—journalism, academia, science—has been systematically challenged,” Gurri wrote, before Trump descended his golden escalator into the political arena.
“People are getting their information from a diverse array of sources now,” said John Pitney, a political scientist who teaches at Claremont McKenna College in California, with the “political conversation being driven by social media.”
Still, Pitney believes the traditional press plays an important role in that conversation as “much of what’s trending on social is downstream from the mainstream media,” whether it be criticism of some piece of original journalism or cherry-picking from that reporting to make a broader partisan point.
Pitney pointed to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump this summer in Butler, Pennsylvania. The most iconic photo to come out of that day was an image captured by a credentialed photographer with the Associated Press, working from the media pen and shooting on a professional camera rather than an iPhone.
AP
“The mainstream media still has a role to play in big events,” he said.
Adgate, the media analyst, also said he thought the demise of the mass media has been overstated. He noted the role of paid advertising by the campaigns, which was projected to reach a record-breaking $10.7 billion this cycle, according to the ad-buying analytics firm AdImpact. Broadcast television accounted for more than $5 billion of that sum as the candidates earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars for commercials to run on near-repeat in swing-state markets.
But even then, TV is acting more as a vehicle for influence rather than a driver of it. That cash influx is also only reliable every four years—maybe every two for markets with competitive legislative elections—and is no sure thing. Florida has seen a 99 percent decline in campaign advertising spend between 2020 and 2024, according to AdImpact, as the Sunshine State moved from competitive battleground to reliable GOP stronghold.
Newsroom Bias
There have been several big news events that have done more harm than good to the media’s reputation in the Trump era.
Trump’s first term began under a cloud of suspicion among liberals that his campaign had colluded with Russia to influence the election. In a deeply reported post-hoc analysis of the media’s attention to the Russia story, the Columbia Journalism Review argued that the wall-to-wall coverage contributed directly to a decline in public trust of the press, given that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation did not uncover proof of any collusion. The CJR report emphasized the need for introspection within newsrooms to prevent similar issues in future political reporting.
More recently, the circumstances surrounding President Biden’s age and acuity, and his refusal to give up the nomination until he was all but forced to, are what the veteran political journalist Mark Halperin has referred to as “the worst scandal in American journalism history.”
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images
After the June debate debacle that served as the beginning of the end of Biden’s 50-year political career, “the press turned on him and acted like they had not just propped him up for seven years,” Halperin recently told Tucker Carlson (both Halperin and Carlson are themselves former members of the mass media now producing content on their own platforms).
“They never acknowledged their participation as coconspirators in a seven-year-long cover-up, and then the same people get to cover the new candidate.”
And unlike past media failures, from the Russia story to the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Halperin said with Biden, “there’s been zero soul-searching or acknowledgment” that the media failed to do its job.
Signs of Circumspection
In the closing weeks of the campaign, there have been some signals that the media has recognized that it has lost its way in the eyes of large swathes of the public.
Both the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post stopped their editorial boards from issuing presidential endorsements, with Post owner Jeff Bezos making explicit that the “principled decision” was aimed at rebuilding credibility with readers—though his timing, shortly before Election Day, drew the ire of readers, tens of thousands of whom canceled their subscriptions, according to NPR. What went unmentioned in Bezos’ missive was that the Post lost half its audience between 2020 and 2023, along with $77 million last year alone.
The dawn of another Trump era could give the press a chance to regain the trust of the public that slipped away over the past four years. After all, the last Trump term was good for business. Or it could accelerate a path toward mainstream irrelevance.
