Liberals treat Rightwing media as the Fringe. It’s the Mainstream.
A lot of things have been said about the reasons behind Donald Trump’s re-election: inflation, immigration, fascism, rejection of “wokeness, racism, sexism, and more. As reporters and pundits everywhere offer their takeaways on the results and what the implications will be, I think the 2024 elections revealed a clear pattern towards where the media landscape is.
The center of gravity for news media in America has shifted to the right.
It isn’t that liberal institutions are less relevant per se, more so that the information ecosystems of the Left and Right are increasingly siloed. The massive social media platforms most Americans find themselves on have an algorithm infrastructure that incentivizes outrage, extreme views and misinformation because those things get more engagement. Places like Facebook or X are more profitable when users are sorted into their ideological camps and then yell at each other all day. The average American is getting their news from cable news networks that fit their ideological preference, social media platforms that incentivize polarization, and their favorite podcaster or Youtuber; not books, academic journals, or newspapers.
Where these trends are becoming a clear issue for Democrats is the ways the average American receives their news information much more closely resembles that of the Right. To be blunt about its political implications, we live in a media landscape that benefits Republicans, conservatives and reactionaries. As an NBC poll found in April, President Trump does best among voters who don’t follow political news at all. After the election, Politico ran a story compiling studies that showed most Americans are turning to Instagram, TikTok and Facebook for their news. A recent Pew study revealed that news influencers are disproportionately conservative and men.
On top of that, audiences with more conservative social views are generally not getting a good faith representation of liberal views. There’s no comparable desire in the Right’s media ecosystem for parity or range of views for conservatives as there is for liberals. As a simple example: you don’t have a roster of “in-house” liberals working for the Blaze or writing for National Review as you have in-house conservatives writing for NYT or speaking on CNN. When the LA Times gets a fact in a story wrong, they print a retraction. But less people will see the retraction than they will the initial mistake, especially if the mistake was highlighted in conservative media. When a popular rightwing Kick streamer does this, they just move on to the next topic. And rightwing media isn’t going to do a story on how that streamer got their facts wrong.
How this power shift shapes our politics isn’t a fait accompli. But one thing is for certain, the Democratic Party is failing miserably at getting their message out to the people that need to hear it. Some of this failure is due to factors they don’t necessary control, but there are self-inflicted wounds — to name a couple examples: Donald Trump was going on popular podcasts and streams, while Kamala Harris did not go on Joe Rogan and the DNC kicked out the most influential streamer on the Left.
Democratic members of Congress are going to have to adjust to the rightward shift of the media landscape. If invited, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Elizabeth Warren, etc. need to speak with popular Twitch streamers, not just news-reporters. Influential figures in the Democratic Party might serve their interests better if they not only did interviews in traditional mainstream media, but also did YouTube essays explaining their policy proposals. Leftwing public intellectuals will have to debate on the podcasts of men who harangue the Left for making “everything about race,” but seem have a photographic memory of Black crimes statistics.
Wading in rightwing waters will be an adjustment for those used to making their cases in the pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post or on NPR. Viral clips of Pete Buttigieg, often regarded as Democrats’ most effective communicator, going on Fox News gives plenty of examples of how to go about it. But this year’s election should be a clear indicator that no matter how good Democrats feel their policies are, there is a large segment of the country who simply will never hear about them — and when they do, it will be presented through reactionary framing (i.e. why this policy is not only misguided, but it's a deliberate step on the road to communism).
The task for traditional news media is different, but just as daunting. Journalists need to think about how our work can become a part of the media diet of someone who may get most of their news from Facebook memes, Joe Rogan and Tiktok videos. America’s free press must figure out ways to compete in an internet information landscape where the views of so many citizens are being shaped by sources that don’t meet basic fact-checking standards, and, at base, spread rhetoric that doesn’t challenge their worldview.
We live in an era where, whether you are a freelancer, staff writers at the Miami Herald, an investigative reporter at ProPublica, or a producer on 60 Minutes expose, journalists are doing truly fantastic work. The quality of journalism may be the best it has even been, and yet large swathes of the public don’t read it because they don’t trust it. I’m sure this sounds self-aggrandizing for us and critical towards the public, especially to opponents of the mainstream media, but it’s true. We know this, not just because we are the ones writing those stories, but because increasingly, we are disproportionately the only ones reading those stories.
This is why those of us in the so-called liberal media must wrestle with the fact that if our goal is to provide the public with the best information possible to help them stay informed and make informed decisions about their lives, then we are failing.
As challenging as all this sounds, it is our responsibility, nonetheless.
