Elections increasingly bring reminders of the growing irrelevance of the news media, both mainstream and digital, to both politicians and voters. Like the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, before him, Donald Trump tweeted his way through his first presidency and made fun of the press. (But even then he took press conferences, unlike his ‘good friend’.) He is possibly the first world leader to own a social media platform, Truth Social.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion, it became another significant step towards ensuring Trump’s re-election. Once Trump’s candidacy was announced, Musk tweeted tirelessly in his support and ensured that the platform’s algorithms were used to flood Twitter users’ feeds with pro-Trump posts. He also lavishly funded this presidential election. Social media owners are perceived primarily as businessmen and not held to conflict of interest norms. So no eyebrows were raised when he was named an appointee in the new administration to head a project to whittle down government bureaucracy.
The 2024 presidential election in the United States of America presented an unusual challenge to the press. The quality of reporting was irrelevant to a news audience that had already made up its mind. Reporters going the extra mile to ensure accuracy did not make a difference to what people chose to believe. As The Conversation put it, “millions of well-informed, moral, ethical and law-abiding Americans who know all about Trump’s behaviors, malfeasance and illegalities, and his threat to democracy and constitutionality, voted for him.” And, it asked, what should journalists do when the facts don’t matter?
A disinformation researcher explained to the Financial Times that one should not assume that everyone is going to want true content. The reality is that people like to be entertained. “People like to feel community. People like to have their ideas supported and reinforced. So there’s a bunch of reasons that people are going to intentionally choose or just not kind of question disinformation.” Fake news, then, just got fresh legitimacy.
The liberal press, in the meantime, is now prepping itself to save the nation from a lawbreaker president. Its consternation and angst over the outcome of the polls was in full public display after the result was known. The New York Times wrote a 1,300-word editorial titled “America Makes a Perilous Choice” which said the country’s voters had set the nation on a “precarious course”. After a passing paragraph on why they may have chosen to vote as they did, the paper dwelt at length on what the citizens, the Democratic and the Republican parties, and the Senate and the Congress would need to do to save the country from Trump, as it were. It urged those chosen to serve in a second Trump administration to stand up to him when needed because their first loyalty was to their country. It did not, in the course of its sanctimonious outpouring, wonder whether the country’s liberal press had been, like the Democrats, seriously out of touch with the American working class and other disenfranchised voters.
The British Guardian made itself heard from across the Atlantic. It was reported that the paper’s editor had emailed her staff offering counselling and therapy as the paper vowed to support its workforce after Donald Trump’s “upsetting” US election victory. She said the election had “exposed alarming fault lines on many fronts” and urged journalists based in the United Kingdom to contact colleagues in the US “to offer your support” (The Daily Telegraph). The Guardian then announced that it would not post on Twitter any longer, presumably in protest against Elon Musk putting his platform at Donald Trump’s service and bankrolling his election. But the paper did not delete its accounts either, only archived them.
When Jeff Bezos, the owner of both Amazon and The Washington Post, announced that the Post would not endorse a presidential candidate, something it had been doing for 36 years according to CNN, it was widely seen as anticipatory capitulation. In his last term, Trump has already demonstrated an ability to inflict damage of some scale on Bezos. In 2019, Amazon Web Services filed a lawsuit which claimed that the Pentagon failed to fairly judge its bid for a cloud contract worth up to $10 billion because President Donald Trump viewed the company founder, Jeffrey Bezos, as his “political enemy”. The contract went to Microsoft instead. The lawsuit mentioned the president criticising Bezos for his ownership of The Washington Post.
This time around, the mainstream news media is under no illusion that the new president will not give as good as he gets. He is hostile to much of TV news and given to threatening that the networks should have their licenses revoked. In September, ABC News hosted the only debate between the two presidential contenders. It did not go well for Trump, the channel’s anchors chose to fact-check him on air. Trump told Fox News later that ABC should have its license taken away. While there is currently no licensing process for national broadcast networks, local affiliates are required to prove to the Federal Communications Commission that their programming serves “the public interest, convenience or necessity” to maintain their right to the airwaves. Trump’s likely new appointee to the FCC, Brendan Carr, will have wide discretion to decide what “the public interest” actually entails. When asked whether ABC’s license would be revoked, he chose not to answer.
In the meantime, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is back in business. After being fined over $780 million after the last election when the cable channel was sued for powering Trump’s election fraud claims, and after losing its biggest star, Tucker Carlson, Fox recovered its dominance during the election cycle this year, becoming the most popular US cable channel and the second most watched network on all of US television after NBC. Its parent company’s profits doubled in the most recent quarter. It’s a good time for Republican Party supporters. The Fox News host, Pete Hegseth, has been named secretaryof defence.
But for Trump, the media at large remains an enemy. At one rally, he said he would not mind if an attempted assassin had to shoot through the press pen to reach him. Before a crowd in Texas in 2022, he had suggested that the threat of rape in prison might be enough to compel a journalist to identify an anonymous source.
Journalists in the US are prepared, though. Despite his offensive bluster, they plan to use the First Amendment and take on the new president as much as they need to.
Sevanti Ninan is a media commentator. She also publishes the labour newsletter, Worker Web. https://workerweb.curated.co/issues