It's the Media, Stupid

2024 Election Analysis - Hypothesis #3: The Media is Responsible

As we discuss various theories as to why Harris lost, one consistent issue crops up. Media. In Hypothesis #1, I wrote about how it was the economy and broader political fundamentals that sank Harris. But how did that happen? Proponents of Harris will say she ran ads featuring economic programs specifically addressing the cost of living and growing the middle class. As I have repeated many times here and on my tikok, Democrats invested multiple trillions of dollars into various climate projects and infrastructure programs to little fanfare from the media. They loaded those programs up with inefficient, costly Buy American provisions and what did that do for the union vote? The economy itself has been growing, recovered well from the COVID shock re: jobs, and wages grew faster than inflation for the past 2 years. Harris’s full throated endorsement of the bipartisan border bill, the much meme’d on “do not come” line, and an endless variety of executive orders from the Biden administration did nothing. Swing seat Senators who lost in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Montana all flooded the airwaves with commercials depicting themselves as Biden critics who want to secure the border. In one specific case, Sherrod Brown, who had always been a lifelong opponent of free trade, 100% pro-labor guy who had sponsored a wide variety of anti-China, tough on the border, and/or populist economic bills. Didn’t matter. Vote record didn’t matter, either.

This extends past election results but to the broader issue of (mis)identification of issues with certain candidates. It extends to questions about how well informed people were about what a “tariff” was or what “mass deportation of 20 million people” would actually look like. It goes to the endless accounts of people not taking Trump seriously, all the way up to and including Republican Congressman Gonzalez claiming that Trump will run into trouble if he tries and deports their “abuelitas”.

And of course, the “vibecession”, the wall to wall dissatisfaction with the economy despite consistently positive economic indicators you found online. Endless pictures of growing receipts, crime, and border crossings filled out collective social media. So we ask, was it the media’s fault that Kamala Harris lost?

The Argument Reconstructed

The broad strokes are this. First proponents make the case that the information environment is stacked for Trump and the GOP. The most watched news channel in the US is Fox, while none of the remaining contenders outside MSNBC have an explicit slant. In addition to this advantage in partisan national news output, the GOP benefits from domination of local news networks. Sinclair broadcasting owns the lionshare of America’s local news sources. Coupled with the death of local papers, getting anti-conservative viewpoints across is even more difficult outside paid advertisement. It extends past this, so much of social media is dominated by right wing influencers. Twitter, now X, has been turned into a right wing mega phone. The most engaged with facebook pages are from right wing talking heads. The most popular Spotify podcasts are from the likes of Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro. All of this represents an avalanche of negative coverage and “vibes” online. It also allows the GOP to shape narratives consistently over the course of the election.

Others argue that the “soft” media was also stacked against Harris. Partisanly unaffiliated social media was blanketed in negative accounts of the economy, anti-Democratic messaging from both left and right leaning social media spaces, and blatant lies about what the administration was doing. Trump also spent much of the last few weeks of the campaign barnstorming many of these unaffiliated podcasts, directly communicating to their audience of young men. Should it be a surprise he surged with that demographic?

So, without a media organ that can penetrate and shape TV, newspapers, radio, and social media, Democrats couldn’t sell themselves or argue against Republican talking points. Because this professional media was so negative, organically produced “word of mouth” for the lack of a better term also turned against Democrats. Depressing their turnout while Trump held strong.

Other proponents add another critical element. That the media failed to take Trump’s threats seriously. I already showed above a GOP congressman who apparently didn’t take “Mass Deportation Now” but this extends down the ranks. Countless interviews have emerged of latino men; citizens, legal immigrants, and illegal alike share the view that Trump won’t target hard working people, regardless of their status. How could you possibly arrive to such a conclusion without a media that fundamentally doesn’t take Trump seriously? That doesn’t educate people on the policies that he is running on?

Critical Evaluation

In a certain respect I think its impossible to say that the media didn’t fail everyone. I point to polling showing that many right leaning voters believed many ridiculous things about Democrats, much of which are the consistent topics of discussion on right wing media, which dominates all platforms and mediums! There is no other possible explanation for a supermajority of the Trump voters believing, say that Democrats were campaigning on making electric vehicles mandatory, other than the media is broken to the benefit of the GOP. There is no other way to explain how many illegal immigrants personally supported Trump other than the fact the media they were receiving was telling them “don’t worry, Trump’s just for the good stuff”.

Democrats are in desperate need for the equivalent organs that the GOP has. Media and social organizations that exist to promote and create right wing believers. What the Democrats instead have is a disorganized grabbag of wonks, pundits, and the smallest news network by viewership (MSNBC). I want to emphasize this shouldn’t just be limited to some partisan news outlet or placing cadres of talking heads on payroll. There also needs to exist social organizations that create Democrats. Jamelle Bouie mentioned this in a podcast in the immediate aftermath of the election. He noted the lack of a comparable institution like the evangelical church, which naturally produces republicans. What would that look like? Colleges today produce a Democratic leaning split but as electoral margins go, that doesn’t hold a candle compared to evangelical churches.

The first rebuttal comes from whether or not this result was inevitable and all the media in the world didn’t matter. Like lipstick on a pig. Was it simply a case of a metastasizing border crisis and the occurrence of inflation pissed off the electorate? Or is the Democratic brand the only thing that really matters in this polarized, nationalized electorate? This would make the individual candidate more or less meaningless and the messaging they do marginal at best. For a guy like Sherrod Brown, unfortunately a lot of those old swing voters in Ohio are either dead or mainlining pure right wing facebook slop.

Another point of disagreement is that fundamental to this analysis is the implicit dismissal of any and all right wing concerns. This is where I return to my previous article and the idea that “Democrats are the party of brow beating elite consensus” comes to fruition. Take RKF Jr. A total maniac, a walking, talking embodiment of every single crazy online conspiracist you’ve ever had the misfortune of coming across. A man responsible for a measles outbreak that killed 83 people in American Samoa. But the concern about what is in your food, is it safe to eat, are we constantly being exposed to poisons, carcinogens, and worse? That is valid. Democrats love to repeat the thought terminating cliche “kitchen table issues” but don’t seem to think the same person is concerned about what they are putting on the table. The automatic dismissal is somewhat valid. He is a conman. But the conman is playing on the valid concerns of worried people. It’s also a sign that what Democrats think of as politics isn’t valid anymore. Job creation and government investment programs aren’t what captures attention so much anymore. People have new interests that aren’t within the traditional molds from 20 years ago. Food integrity being the most visible example of this phenomenon.

This isn’t to excuse people. There are many “sergeants and lieutenants” to these movements. Low and mid level people who are politically conscious enough to engage, shape, and harness political rhetoric and are the lifeblood of any political movement. There is a whole ecosystem of paid liars that now exists among the right. Who dutifully take orders, are paid by foreign entities, and take 0 accountability when wrong. Among the strongly conservative, it is undeniable that conspiracy and flat out false information runs rampant and the breadth to which every single issue is laden with these falsehoods and conspiracies is staggering. This is the product of a right wing media ecosystem that does nothing but churn out lies and moral panics 24/7.

Conclusion

The media wrote all the time about what Democrats did in Congress. No one read it or watched it. And what did they do in Congress? These long term investment programs did nothing to improve the job market, housing market, or address the cost of living: the actual economic issues people were concerned with. And what did they actually do? Some grant scheme, a tax credit program for specific kinds of construction? Kludge? It’s not like he came out with the WPA or Medicare. Early in 2021, people speculated about a potential dynamic reform trifecta. Or at least getting something like we saw from Obama out: a big healthcare bill, banking reform, a minimum wage hike, and stimulus package. I think a lot of that was flawed too but you could reasonably campaign on “Osama Bin Laden is Dead, General Motors is Alive”. Biden/Harris could campaign on “the domestic chip industry is growing rapidly. We have put cost controls on drugs for enrollees of certain government programs. We spent a lot on infrastructure but not on the kind you, a Democrat, would like”.

And the media spent a lot of time talking about Biden, just speculating about whether he was fit for office. And as his June Debate performance showed, he was in fact not fit to continue to lead the country! It wasn’t a failure of the media to focus on all signs of mental deterioration! And the people who want to cast all the blame on the media were also the first to demand 100% loyalty to the flagging campaign of Biden in July and the first to demand 100% support behind Harris once the decision was made. I think those people ought to be held accountable.

I’ll see you in the next one.