Do Dems Need to Break Up with the Legacy Media?

The media landscape has changed and Democrats need to change our mentality

Even in a media environment where consumers have unlimited choices, a 60 Minutes interview is the coup de grace. A campaign would do almost anything to be featured. The highly-rated program comes on right after NFL football — making it the one thing on broadcast TV that still draws a mass audience. Donald Trump pulled out of the 60 Minutes interview, ceding the entire show to his opponent. In the campaign's final weeks, Trump also reportedly pulled out of interviews with CNBC and NBC News. He turned down an opportunity to participate in a prime-time CNN town hall. In fact, Trump didn’t do a single interview with a traditional news outlet in the campaign's final stretch. No national broadcast interviews, no sit-downs with local TV anchors or newspapers.

The winning candidate ignored the traditional media, focusing instead on partisan media outlets and politics-adjacent podcasts. While this change isn’t new, it seems clear that 2024 was a pivot point for the role of the legacy media in politics.

Democratic communications strategies have evolved over the years — and the Harris campaign did some very innovative things. Nevertheless, our approach to communicating with voters continues to depend heavily on the legacy media. When we have something to say, we look for a cable or broadcast network to say it on. We spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the morning tipsheets and which surrogates are booked on cable news. New York Times headlines can be a party-wide obsession.

Do Democrats need to follow Trump’s lead and break up with the legacy media?

The Right Wing media’s advantage was particularly decisive during this election. This is the first in a series of posts discussing how Trump outmessaged us in the 2024 election and what we can do in the future. If you want to follow along, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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A Changed Dynamic

For a long time, the political press was the most powerful force in politics. So powerful that they were known as the “Fourth Estate” with the capacity to make or break a campaign. The list of failed presidential candidates who were unable to win over the tastemakers in the media is long. One can credibly argue that unfair press coverage from the New York Times and others were a significant factor in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss.

The traditional media has been losing relevance for a while now. The death spiral of the political media is a much longer, more complicated story (I wrote a lot about it in my most recent book), but there have been a few dynamics driving this descent. 

The first is the rapid pace of technological innovation. Newspapers were once the most powerful entities in media. A presidential campaign wanted nothing more than a great picture on the front page of the Des Moines Register, Philadelphia Inquirer, or Detroit Free Press. Most local papers are shells of themselves — simply carrion for private equity to drain the last few cents before closing up shop. While the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are thriving, the Washington Post is bleeding money and full of controversy, and USA Today barely registers (I had to Google if it was still published). Cable and broadcast viewership is down as more consumers cut the cord or turn to social media for news. Legacy media is simply reaching fewer people.

Second, the media reaches people who are less likely to believe what they read/see/hear. According to Gallup, trust in American media is at an all-time low.

Even Democrats — who are the primary consumers of legacy media and prop up much of the industry — have begun to distrust the media. Democratic trust in the media is down 19 points since 2020, and this poll was conducted before the 2024 election when many Democrats felt let down by the coverage on their favored outlets.

The Democratic Media Bubble

Back in the day, someone literally threw the news on your doorstep every morning. If you wanted to know the weather or the score of the ball game, you had to open up the newspaper or turn on the TV. Once the internet took over, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter started putting news into your feed, whether you liked it or not. After the 2020 election, Meta stopped promoting political news on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads; Elon Musk bought Twitter; and TikTok, which includes very little content from traditional journalists and media companies, became a dominant platform. Therefore, it is impossible to passively consume political news or learn about news events osmotically. You have to decide to do it, and the people who do are disproportionately older than the population at large. Check out this chart from Scott Galloway’s No Mercy/No Malice newsletter:

Think about all the time spent discussing the importance of the youth vote in this election. That conversation happened on media entities where the median consumer is eligible for Medicare.

The other problem is that, for all the concern about which surrogates were on MSNBC or the outrage over the latest Pete Baker story in the New York Times, the only people paying attention to any of it were Democrats whose vote for Kamala Harris was never in doubt. The people who consume political news are already in our corner. A Data for Progress poll found that Kamala Harris won voters who consumed “a great deal” and “a lot” of news but lost the voters who consumed no news by a whopping 19 points.

This is hard to admit as a member of the media (kinda), a self-professed news obsessive, and a long-time communications strategist, but 90% of political media — the stories, the spin, the tweets, the narratives — never reached the voters who decided this past election. It was a giant insular conversation for the prurient interest of political junkies.

To reach the younger, less engaged voters who decided this election, Democrats need to fundamentally reshape how we think about political communications.

The New New Media

The biggest media events of the 2024 campaign were not on 60 Minutes or Meet the Press. They didn’t involve the New York Times or any of the major cable channels. They were interviews with podcasters Joe Rogan and Alex Cooper. The media titans are influencers with large followings and parasocial relationships with their audiences. Many voters no longer trust media institutions, but instead trust folks with whom they often spend hours every week. A Pew Knight study found that one-in-five Americans – 37% of adults under 30 – regularly get their news from social media influencers.

Trump and the Republicans have better understood this shift than Democrats. At the end of the campaign, nearly all of Trump’s media interactions were with Right-leaning podcasters commanding massive social media followings. During Trump’s victory speech, UFC boss Dana White came on stage and specifically thanked Adin Ross, the NELK Boys, Theo Von, and the folks from Barstool Sports. The GOP has actively tried to support their influencers with interviews and attention. While Kamala Harris did appear on Cooper’s wildly popular Call Her Daddy podcast, most Democrats kept podcasters and news influencers at arms length.

That approach has hurt Democrats. The Pew Knight study found that Right Wing or pro-Trump influencers outnumber Left-leaning ones.

Chart via Axio.

This media advantage isn’t the reason Trump won, but it is a reason.

What Breaking Up With the Legacy Media Means

Democrats should not start attacking the press like Trump or stop answering their questions like most Republicans. I don’t think we should kick people off the plane or make it harder to do their jobs. Our new media ecosystem is ruinous for democracy. The legacy media played an important role in holding the powerful accountable. Trump’s continued presence is prima facie evidence that they no longer have such power.

Democrats must radically reshape how we think about reaching the public. During the careers of powerful Democratic Party members (especially President Biden and some folks in the Senate), the press was the best way to reach the public. It was how we informed and persuaded. That world is gone, but too many folks in our party still run to CNN or the New York Times when they have news to make. Sometimes, that’s the right decision, but those times are ever more rare these days.

We need to think more expansively about how to communicate. We need to widen the aperture when we think of the media. We must include folks who don’t have a White House press pass. We must learn to reach the voters who don’t pay attention to traditional news. We have to aggressively support the nascent progressive media ecosystem. Most importantly, we have to recognize that politics in 2024 is information warfare, and we are getting our asses kicked.

This is the beginning of a longer conversation about the communications lessons we can learn from this brutal loss. It’s time to get to work because we have more work than we have time.