A Liberal’s Guide to the Collapse of Neutral Media
America’s legacy media giants were powerless to stymie the fire hose of right-wing conspiracy theories, disinformation, and bullshit that just propelled Donald Trump to an unthinkable second term in the White House. And they often seemed disinterested in even trying.
We’ve entered a new era of our media. The “neutral” information environment those gatekeepers have tended for so long is no longer just losing a little ground to social media here and there. It’s reached a tipping point in its influence and is now propelling the demise of its own relevance to things like deciding presidential elections.
That’s bad for liberals’ ability to get our messages into voters’ brains. While paid ads are helpful, we all just saw their limits when the news environment is not functional. And it’s only going to get worse as legacy media continue to shy away from the truth.
Fortunately, I finally see more and more of us saying that liberals must step in with our own solutions to fill the media vacuum.
But why should that type of investment work now, when it hasn’t worked before? Because — rather than producing more Air Americas, Current TVs, Crookeds, Intercepts, and others — this time we must target non-news consumers.
The Self-Propelling Demise of “Neutral” News
The decline of legacy media’s influence has been in motion for at least 20-some years, but the signs this cycle were especially stark.
Disinformation about Hurricane Helene ran rampant. Kamala Harris showed there was no need to fear legacy journalists’ squawking about her limited slate of interviews. Decades of tilting coverage rightward in a fruitless attempt to placate conservative critics and lure back conservative readers started to catch up to outlets like the New York Times, who faced more criticism than ever over their bothsidesing and sanewashing.
Moving forward, we will see more “obeying in advance” like we saw from the LA Times and Washington Post in their billionaire owners’ refusals to endorse a presidential candidate rather than risk Trump’s ire by endorsing Harris. And while knuckling under without a fight might have been smart business for the Post’s owner Jeff Bezos, it reportedly cost him the loyalty of hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
We already see this type of obeisance from established press continuing, e.g in stories describing Elon Musk’s relationship with Trump as “close” rather than “wildly corrupt,” as we might otherwise call someone dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into super PACs to support a candidate and then getting literally brought into his administration to pursue his own agenda.
These weaknesses are more than just annoying to would-be consumers of neutral news. They actively undermine relevance and credibility, which will only further alienate audiences and accelerate the decline of traditional news media.
In the first Trump administration, liberals flocked to support traditional media as a bulwark for democracy, most famously exemplified by the Post’s own “democracy dies in darkness” slogan. Media fortunes sagged again during the comparatively boring Biden era when the threat to democracy seemed to pass for the moment and the daily outrages waned.
But don’t expect readership and viewership to pick back up again now that Trump is back. As big media players pull their punches with respect to the president, liberal readers and viewers will have all the less reason to stand with them. And their inability to cover the inevitable Trump scandals with the salacious gravity they deserve will cost them opportunities to entice audiences.
Oh, and on top of all that, the right is planning further escalate spending to swamp what’s left of traditional media and already has a huge head start in share of social media creators. Some media executives are even admitting that “mainstream media is dead in its current form” already.
Ads Won’t Save Us
Take it from me as someone who literally co-founded and successfully ran a Democratic advertising agency for eight years: we can’t just advertise our way out of the collapsing neutral media environment.
The Harris campaign outspent the Trump campaign by almost 3-to-1, per Open Secrets. In swing states — or even just states like Montana with a competitive Senate race — the volume of ads becomes so overwhelming, they’re nothing more than an unbearable nuisance for most voters. In a budget environment like 2024’s, much of Democrats’ spending essentially gets wasted on ads aired well past any reasonable point of diminishing returns.
If outspending our opponents were the answer, we would win by doing it. But we don’t. There is a history here — Hillary Clinton out-raised Trump 2-to-1 herself, after all.
Now, don’t get me wrong: we can’t just stop running ads either. Unilateral disarmament won’t get us anywhere, and there are plenty of instances where a reasonable ad budget is helpful and effective. But if you took a small fraction of those wasted ad budgets and put it into building up a modern liberal media ecosystem, the scale of progress would be massive.
But Donald Trump’s single most important constituency in this election wasn’t the white working class or the male voters of color who swung toward him or any other traditional demographic — it was people who are wrong.
For virtually my whole life, the Democratic Party and those aligned with it have been obsessed with making just the right messaging tweaks to build a winning coalition. By and large, they’re good at it.
But all this messaging effort is wasted when it doesn’t even get to the people who need to hear it. And advertising alone isn’t enough.
Pumping Liberal Info into the News Environment the Right Way
The main problem with previous efforts to bulk up liberal news offerings is that they focused too much on news. Consumers of traditional news, for the most part, are already with us. And while traditional news may collapse in relevance to deciding presidential elections, it’s not going to disappear outright.
So it’s the people getting their information in 21st century environments — and especially those who are not interested in news at all — that we need to reach.
So how do you build something that will reach these people? You build a liberal media presence that’s focused on culture, not news, and you sneak the politics in the side door.
The ethos the right used in building up the power of its media ecosystem is exactly what the left needs to embrace: politics is downstream of culture.
What is culture? It’s all the most popular things people are consuming these days: sports, personal finance, housewives, cooking, home renovations, comedy, and all the rest.
It doesn’t seem political, and certainly not partisan. But where you can slip something political in, it has a better chance of reaching someone who’s not watching MSNBC or reading the New York Times, let alone one of the thousands of local newspapers that’s closed up shop in recent years.
But would that really work?? Yes, dammit! It already does. Just not for us.
Joe Rogan has a large conservative political footprint, but not because he’s imitating Rush Limbaugh. He mostly talks about random stuff like MMA, rock climbing, space exploration, and what have you. Only occasionally does he slip politics in.
If you want more formal evidence, lots of academic study supports the effectiveness of “social soaps,” i.e. story-based programs that succeed at public education goals like reducing racism or improving hygiene where more direct efforts fail.
And in pretesting for one of my own projects, I saw moderate male voters move 26 points (!) toward Kamala Harris from reading a college football blog post that mentioned her as a mere aside . Unfortunately our full field test didn’t show the same results, but that pretest result is so gonzo that it’s just begging for a follow-up.
The right knows politics is downstream of culture, and they’ve just scammed their way into power again on the basis of that insight. So let’s stop being the victims of that approach and start being the agents of it.
Let’s:
- Save the money it would take to stand up a cable network to compete with Fox News and spend it instead on efficient modern approaches, like sponsoring and/or buying non-political podcasts and blogs and YouTube shows.
- Or put as many left-leaning social media creators on year-round retainer as we can find, even if (especially if!) they don’t normally talk about politics.
- Position this effort outside the official party, like the right has done. This is crucial for building the trust and credibility of the effort, which must register to people as non-political/non-partisan.
- Do pieces of this first even if we can’t do it all at once.
- Maintain the fortitude to see this through over multiple years, even if the impact isn’t immediately obvious. Fox News spent its first several years losing money, after all.
The longer we wait to start this, the smaller the traditional neutral news ecosystem will get and the harder it will be to catch up. There’s no time to waste. Let’s act.
