Is It the End of the 'Big Media Era'?

Tim Graham on Nov 22, 2024

The 2024 election results certainly came as a surprise to the national media. They spent the last few weeks of the campaign wildly speculating about how Donald Trump wouldn't accept the results and it would be complete chaos. Instead, Trump won the popular vote, and they all had to follow their own norms and accept the results in an orderly fashion.

The win wasn't a landslide, but it felt like one because of the towering tsunami of garbage the media and the Democrats and their prosecutors threw at Trump. They could not believe that all this lawfare and relentlessly negative publicity would create a backlash. They saw this pattern in the Republican primary -- and yet they couldn't accept the pattern would repeat itself in the general.

They knew that the Biden-Harris approval ratings were abysmal, and that the top issues, like inflation and illegal immigration, were dragging them down. But they loathe Trump so much they could not imagine he could win again -- and win much more convincingly than in 2016.

So then the media had to think about the unthinkable: Doesn't anyone care about our "news" anymore? How could our relentless anti-Trump messaging fail to land? They had to ponder whether podcasters like Joe Rogan were the wave of the future in influencing voters. They had to moan and whine that "misinformation" spread by Elon Musk's Twitter ruined all their objectives.

Axios.com wailed that "the big media era is over." The young people aren't following along. Smart sources said that "reaching people ages 35 and under with any message -- or even major event -- is almost impossible. Or they've seen an eight-second clip with no context, so they have a very different understanding of what happened than someone who saw a mainstream report."

These "cord-cutters" aren't imbibing the conventional wisdom. They're in "fractured communities" on the internet. Point and laugh that these people eternally see themselves as the "mainstream," no matter how the people vote.

We can say with confidence that the big media don't have the same grip on public opinion that they have long imagined. When only 31% of respondents told Gallup they have a "great deal" or a "fair amount" of trust in the press, it became clear most Americans are looking elsewhere for information. No wonder Democrat-enabling journalists worry about "misinformation," which they define as "information that doesn't agree with our hot takes."

But when politicians assemble in public, it's possible they will still feel the pull of the leftist press as the most powerful players, even if the polls don't match it. Old assumptions die hard in national politics. It would be encouraging for Trump and the Republicans to make sure that conservative journalists, radio hosts and podcasters are provided with lots of access and make the liberal journalists have to listen to conservatives. Because they tend to be incurious and intolerant of opposing views.

Finally, conservatives should enjoy how the liberals said this whole election was about "saving democracy," and then a majority voted for Trump and GOP control of Congress. Democracy hasn't died in darkness. The majority of people who cited "democracy" as an issue voted for Trump.

This is because the Left cannot concede that they were the ones trying to suppress the speech of their opponents and they were the ones that were putting their opponents in jail. They were the ones raiding the home of the opposing former president with guns drawn. So, who ended up looking "authoritarian" in the end?

Democracy means the Left gets to be ridiculed and rejected, and it's only just begun.

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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.