The Year Had Begun With Optimism, Transitioned To Pessimism And Ended With A Level Of Acceptance

The 2024 Campaign Was an Embarrassment for Elite Media

On September 25, more than two months after entering the presidential race, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris finally sat down for her first one-on-one interview with a national television reporter.

It wasn’t just any reporter. Stephanie Ruhle, host of a nightly show on the Democrat-cheerleading cable network MSNBC, had, just five days prior, ridiculed the very notion that journalists, let alone voters, needed to hear anything more from the vice president before Election Day. “Let’s say you don’t like her answer. Are you going to vote for Donald Trump?” an exasperated Ruhle demanded to know from co-panelist Bret Stephens on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher, after the New York Times columnist suggested undecided voters—presciently, it would turn out after Trump’s victory—could use more information from Harris. “We have two choices….There are some things you might not know her answer to, [but] in 2024, unlike 2016, for a lot of the American people, we know exactly what Trump will do, who he is, and the kind of threat he is to democracy.”

When Stephens protested that “I don’t think it’s too much to ask for her to sit down for a real interview,” Ruhle shot back: “I would just say to that, when you move to nirvana, give me your real estate broker’s number, and I’ll be your next-door neighbor. We don’t live there.”

Ruhle, a former managing director at Deutsche Bank, will not likely be moving any time soon from her town house on Manhattan’s Upper West Side or summer cottage on Long Beach Island. But the anchor’s zinger, praised by the likes of The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols and The Nation’s Joan Walsh, did signal another kind of shift. Thirty-six years after CNN’s Bernard Shaw gutted Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis with a single debate question (“Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”), journalists increasingly view their vocation’s role in the political arena as instrumental rather than adversarial: How does their work affect the electoral bottom line?

Ruhle’s eventual sit-down with Harris illustrated the artistic limits of this functionalist approach. “To call the interview with MSNBC softball,” snarked The New York Sun’s Dean Karayanis afterward, “would be an injustice to the game.” The 25-minute exchange better resembled T-ball, with such participation trophy set-ups as “Can we trust you?” and “[Trump] said he will be the protector of women if elected. Can you respond to that?” Left unmentioned was a question that, remarkably, did not get asked of Harris until Fox News anchor Bret Baier brought it up on the 87th day of her candidacy: When, exactly, did she notice her boss was experiencing age-related decline, and what did she do about it?

“As reporters,” Bernard Shaw once reminisced, “we were not doing our jobs if we don’t ask the toughest question possible.” Well, that was then. But what is now?

A surface analysis of the modern media ecosystem might conclude the industry has transitioned into a more conscious partisanship, embracing rather than downplaying a political bias that has metastasized from majoritarian to dominant. Defenders of this mission creep call it “moral clarity”; detractors deride it as orthodoxical and “woke.”

But that reductionist picture zooms in on the tusks while missing the rest of the elephant. The basic condition of the industrialized journalistic project is massive and long-term institutional decline—of audience, of reach, of employment, of influence. In a way that mainstream reporters and their antagonists struggle to accept, the media, comparatively, don’t really matter anymore. There’s not enough there there to sustain the role of either hero or villain. No one cares about editorial endorsements; candidates prefer talking to comedians and podcasters; October-surprise investigative heaves rarely move the needle.

While the center-right tends to blame the deterioration of media on the elites who run them, the center-left has an accusatory explanation of its own: that social media, with its algorithmic preference for consequence-free fearmongering enabled by Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, has incentivized bad actors, including populist conservatives and foreign ne’er-do-wells, to pollute the discourse commons, thereby eroding social trust.

“If we trust little or nothing because we can’t tell the snake oil from the facts,” warned Steven Brill in his 2024 book The Death of Truth, “everything breaks down. We cannot have a democracy. Ultimately, we cannot expect a civil society.” Similar theses, presented with similar pessimism, were advanced this year in Renée DiResta’s Invisible Rulers and Barbara McQuade’s Attack From Within.

For most of our lives, the basic industrial unit of journalism has been the newspaper, with more editorial content, larger newsrooms, and fatter profits than the rest of the verification business (magazines, books, broadcasts, newsletters, websites) combined. In 1990, at the apex of the form, American newspapers employed nearly a half-million people, had a combined circulation north of 60 million, and enjoyed profit margins consistently above 20 percent. Even as those numbers began their initial descent after the end of the Cold War, newspaper advertising revenue continued its half-century climb until the dawn of the millennium to just under $50 billion per year.

All of that has since collapsed by around 75 percent. Combined newspaper circulation is down to 20 million, ad revenue is just over $10 billion, and employment is now well south of 100,000. Weekly newspapers are going extinct by a rate of two per week—and certain subspecies, like the alternative weekly, have all but disappeared. Dailies have declined from 1,600 to 1,200 since 1990, and those that remain are often emaciated facsimiles of their former selves.

The Los Angeles Times in 1990 was as thick as a phone book, with the largest print circulation in the country (1.2 million), an editorial staff of around 1,300, and bigger profits than any other daily in the world. By 2024 the paper was down to a few dozen frequently ad-free pages, with a print circulation of 118,000, a newsroom of 385, and a balance sheet bleeding $30 million to $40 million a year. An institution that once played kingmaker in the West—transplanting rivers, erecting downtowns, making the political careers of such figures as (believe it or not) Richard Nixon—is largely an afterthought in its own city.

In 2017, right around the time when digital began eclipsing print across all measures, in trendlines that resembled the letter “X,” Politico Magazine ran a fascinating study of the journalism work force. Comparing the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ media employment numbers with Census data and voting patterns, authors Jack Shafer and Tucker Doherty unearthed results that to them “read like a revelation.” Namely: “The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-[Hillary] Clinton county—odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties.”

This reorientation has accelerated the industry’s preexisting political trajectory. The American Journalist survey, conducted decennially, has tracked, among other things, the partisan self-identification of reporters since 1971. In 2002, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among those surveyed was 2:1 (36 percent to 18 percent, with the rest being independent or “other”); in 2013 it was 4:1 (28 percent to 7 percent), then by 2022 a whopping 11:1 (36.4 percent to 3.4 percent). Media are hurtling toward where academia has long been—a knowledge-creating sector of purportedly nonpartisan civil society where conservatives are nonetheless an endangered species.

The new generation of journalists entering the work force during the age of Trump has been at the vanguard of some of the profession’s most head-snapping changes: an increase in unionization after decades of decline; the creation of departments dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion; out-loud opposition both to “platforming” people with unacceptable views and to “bothsidesism,” which can mean the consideration of multiple perspectives on a contested issue that journalists consider settled or just critical coverage of a given Democrat when everyone knows the applicable Republican is worse. Most ominously of all, we now see unabashed journalistic support for the government to do something about alleged purveyors of “misinformation,” First Amendment be damned.

As in so many other things, Trump changed all that. Biden’s fabulisms, which never did go away (during the 2020 campaign he repeatedly lied about being arrested while trying to see Nelson Mandela, to cite one of many examples), were largely treated by a weakened if increasingly side-taking press as insignificant at best compared to the daily onslaughts from the incumbent. There is more than enough myth making, academic exaggeration, and outright fabrication in Trump’s co-written business book smash The Art of the Deal to give Biden and Harris a run for their money, yet whatever dishonesty is associated with that project ranks roughly 3,000th on any list of Trump transgressions, from “grab ’em by the pussy” to “stop the steal” to his 34-count felony conviction for fraud (regardless of that case’s dubious propriety). The whole value proposition of Trump is to outrage the sensibilities of the Acela corridor elite; weaponizing one of their parochial professional obsessions against his chief 2024 opponent over a 14-year-old book no one’s heard of was just never going to go very far.

As independent journalist Matt Taibbi acidly observed, the news for the news industry was even worse. At 68 percent, the media’s combined distrust number is one point higher than even Congress; and in the trust level of “none at all”, it’s a rout—39 percent for the reporters, 24 percent for the pols. “It’s impossible to overstate this embarrassment,” Taibbi wrote. “Asked about trust in a politician, ‘None at all’ is what people say when they expect nothing to get done. With media, it’s what you say if you don’t even trust a reporter to tell the time. It’s an extraordinary indictment.”

The White House, largely cheered on by the new breed of anti-“platforming” journalist, went on a censorial bender in 2021, with Biden accusing Facebook of “killing people,” Surgeon General Vivek Murthy announcing a “whole-of-society” effort to combat the “urgent threat to public health” posed by “health misinformation,” and then–press secretary Jen Psaki singling out a “disinformation dozen” ripe to be booted off platforms. As late as 2022, Psaki was urging Spotify to do “more” and “be vigilant” about removing the COVID-related content of the world’s most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-2024-campaign-was-an-embarrassment-for-elite-media/ar-AA1wHzSB

‘We just simply can’t afford to pay that additional $1,400 a month on an already tight budget and tight economy’

So just like that, yer giving it away owner?

‘Those [sellers] that went to the market in February, March, looked like heroes, and those that went to the market late in the year have got doughnuts,’ he said. ‘It’s not to do with interest rates at the top end – there’s global uncertainty, general instability. I’ve never seen the gap so wide between what a vendor will accept and what a buyer will pay, and I think that gap is getting wider’

It’s still a seller market Dave.