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.
Yet the business of politics, and discussion thereof, continues to grind on. That activity now takes place in an informational context unrecognizable from even a generation ago, with politicos adapting to new sets of power dynamics and market incentives that are far less anchored in the aspirational pursuit of truth. As the catastrophe of Hurricane Helene amply demonstrated, these contemporary conditions can materially degrade the visibility of facts during life-and-death crises, particularly amid the hatred-organization of a presidential campaign.
Examples: Elon Musk posted on October 4 that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was “seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own.” North Carolina’s lieutenant governor (and now-failed GOP gubernatorial nominee), Mark Robinson, asserted on October 1 that “Joe Biden told the people of North Carolina they had no more supplies for us.” Donald Trump at an October 3 rally charged that “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants, many of whom should not be in our country….They stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.”
None of these claims was true. Begged libertarian Republican Mayor Glenn Jacobs of Helene-ravaged Knox County, Tennessee: “Please quit spreading those rumors as they are counterproductive to response efforts….If everyone could maybe please put aside the hate for a bit and pitch in to help, that would be great.”
But putting aside hatred of the faraway political Other is damnably hard to do when the venues for neighborly engagement have collapsed.
The Death of Local
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.
But the sheer magnitude and long-term relentlessness of the media implosion suggests exogenous factors far more potent, with implications far more interesting, than what theories lie on either side of the partisan divide. Sure, Vice News went bust after transitioning from billion-dollar Bad Boys to identity-politics scolds. But the reaper also came for the proudly Trump-supporting Santa Barbara News-Press. There are plenty of ways to go broke without going woke.
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.
And even that grim ledger undersells the shape of creative news-industry destruction, and what remains in its aftermath. Consumers abandoned their local news/advertising monopolies for more user-friendly digital alternatives as soon as they could—to Craigslist for classifieds, the Drudge Report for breaking news headlines, Usenet and descendants for community, Yahoo! and other search engines for accessing information. Even those few newspapers that responded nimbly to new technologies and changing preferences were never fully able to reassemble their old captive audiences online.
The upshot: When local newsrooms shrank, very little sprung up locally to take their place. The new internet office spaces were national, clustered disproportionately in a handful of big cities.
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] Cl
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