A Seismic Shift in Media

Author

Bubba
12 Nov

In a surprising reversal, Republicans are starting to be seen as the savvier party when it comes to media. (Axios)

Axios founders Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen on how Elon Musk’s Twitter gamble paid off bigtime:

Let's start with power. It's unmatched. As this election showed, politics and influence flow downstream from information control.

Musk, once seen by many as a fool for buying Twitter, now controls the most powerful information platform for America's ruling party. X makes Fox News seem like a quaint little pamphlet in size, scope and right-wing tilt.

The information divide: This week, Politico resurfaced an NBC News poll from April which showed Donald Trump supporters are more likely to get their news from alternative sources, like YouTube and social media.

Zoom in: Polling shows the information divide extends to young people and Latino voters, who are more likely to get their news from social media compared to other groups.

  • The Trump campaign’s alternative media strategy may partially explain why the president-elect gained ground with both of those demographics.

New York Times columnist Ezra Klein:

Democrats don’t need to build a new informational ecosystem. Dems need to show up in the informational ecosystems that already exist. They need to be natural and enthusiastic participants in these cultures. [Kamala Harris] should’ve gone on [“The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast], but the damage here was done over years and wouldn’t have been reversed in one October appearance.

Building a media ecosystem isn’t something you do through nonprofit grants or rich donors (remember Air America?). Joe Rogan and Theo Von aren’t a Koch-funded psy-op. What makes these spaces matter is that they aren’t built on politics.

Bubba’s Two Cents

What is it about the Mainstream Media™ that causes only about a third of people to trust them? I think it gets back the classic conventions of ‘show’ vs. ‘tell,’ and they tell too much. For example, they told us that Biden wasn’t too old, and before that that the COVID lab leak story didn’t hold up. It feels like the media ends up chasing narratives and reacting to them. It’s arrogance and elitism versus viewing themselves as a service to deliver information. I’ve always believed that when you show people information, they can decide how they can feel about it, and it empowers them. But when you tell people something, especially in something as heated as American politics, you’re likely to get a lot of pushback.