A Fair and Balanced Look at How Trump’s Victory Destroyed Corporate Media Forever

For once, the Right and the Left agree: It’s time to sign the papers and pull the plug on the mainstream media.

The 2024 election cycle had many remarkable elements. Perhaps none captured the spirit of the age, the utter collapse of the regime narrative, and the thorough ransacking of the legacy media’s control on information quite like this post-Election Day anecdote from the New York Times. The corporate gatekeepers of the Official Regime Narrative™ turned their newsroom into a circus—literally. According to a report by Heather MacDonald at City Journal:

Before the election, the New York Times newsroom had brought in popcorn and cotton candy machines, fake sparklers, and goodie bags in anticipation of the coronation of “Madame President.” On November 6, the popcorn machine stood unceremoniously in a corner behind yellow police tape and an orange rubber traffic cone. Undaunted, executive editor Joseph Kahn and managing editors Marc Lacey and Carolyn Ryan sent a memo to their colleagues on November 6 praising the paper’s election coverage.

This revealing anecdote stands alone as the most potent example of how out of touch the media has gotten with its customer base. And its customer base responded in ways that should, but probably won’t, frighten corporate media bosses into a soul-searching after-action report to determine where they went wrong and how to fix it. MacDonald concluded her article by accurately referring to the legacy media as impotent, blinkered, and unrepentant. And they still don’t know what happened on Nov. 5.

The Media Missed the Greatest Political Comeback in a Century

Donald Trump, in completing possibly America’s greatest political comeback after four years in political purgatory, won the popular vote with more votes than any Republican candidate in history. He won the Electoral College vote—the only tally that matters—by leaving the vaunted Blue Wall in shambles. Trump seized the electoral votes of the normally reliably blue states of Michigan and Wisconsin, while also sweeping the swing states of Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona. Trump won despite a 3–1 spending advantage for Kamala Harris, Big Tech censorship on a scale we’d never before seen, debates openly rigged for his opponent(s), multiple attempts to throw him in jail or have him shot, the entire array of the Deep State institutions aligned against him, non-stop propaganda about his supposed “fascist” plans, and every other gun—both literal and figurative—trained on him in order to stop him.

The institutional left thought they had this in the bag. Their ace in the hole? The corporate media ecosystem, over which they had complete control. They controlled the message. They controlled the narrative, and the narrators. They controlled what was reported—and what was left out.

But a funny thing happened on the way to dragging Trump through the mainstream media mud. The voters saw through their slime. According to Brent Bozell of Media Research Center, only seven percent of Americans trust the news—fully 93 percent hold the media in such low regard they will not listen to its messages.

The leftist media's coverage of Donald Trump was 85% negative, even after someone shot him in the head.

Americans' trust in the media is the lowest in recorded history.

The media's negative coverage of Donald Trump backfired.@BrentBozell @Marklevinshow @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/xcIkoEklwp

— Media Research Center (@theMRC) November 11, 2024

The Left and the Right Unite in Their Distrust of the Media

The Right has railed against the exclusively radical, “progressive” bias in mainstream media for decades, and rightly so. We have more examples than we can count to demonstrate the utter lack of fairness or honesty in coverage. Since the Obama years, however, we’ve seen them take it much further with their campaigns against what they call “misinformation” or “disinformation,” which generally boils down to opinions from the Right they refuse to acknowledge or consider.

Something has shifted since Nov. 5, however, on the Left. They’ve begun to realize the reasons their control over the dominant narrative has disintegrated. In a series of revealing post-mortem accounts of Kamala’s loss, the New Republic does some deep dives into how the Left lost control of the message. Their analysis points to the conservative media ecosystem as having gained superiority for the first time in recent memory:

The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.

If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.

The reader who leans to the right will have to sift through the fear-mongering tone to zero in on the accurate assessment of what happened in 2024. Conservatives have long dominated the talk radio industry, while the “progressive” talk radio that attempted to compete in the arena of ideas fizzled out decades ago. Meanwhile, the Left, through its institutional control of corporate board rooms and schools of journalism, has completely pushed out any right-leaning thought in the broadcast news, or what remains of print media.

The author above, to his credit, recognizes the state of play and where the Left had its advantages. He later goes on to lament how large donors on the Right have recognized where they could make investments and bypass the spheres of leftist media control. This election cycle marks the first time conservatives have broken through the death grip on the message held by the Left on anything resembling a mass scale. As he notes, “This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media.”

Another in the New Republic series of post-mortem articles called the mainstream media one of the biggest losers of this election cycle:

It’s no secret that the right has long harbored disdain for mainstream media, branding it with terms like “fake news” and “enemy of the people.” But what’s new—and frankly alarming—is the mounting frustration from the center and left. These are readers who once defended these institutions, subscribed, donated, and championed the importance of a free press. Now they’re canceling subscriptions and voicing their disillusionment.

This author decided giving conservative viewpoints, or “bothsidesism,” ruined the credibility of the corporate media. “When media outlets insist on presenting both sides as equally valid,” she writes, “they fail in their duty to inform the public. They become complicit in normalizing dangerous behavior.”

Regardless of whether one thinks reporting conservative counterpoints (or even what conservatives might say) ranks as “normalizing dangerous behavior,” her point remains valid. Both the Right and the Left have, for differing reasons, lost all faith in corporate media. They’ve converged on the same reason from opposite directions: the corporate media has gotten completely out of touch with its own mission, and what its consumers actually want from them.

The Radical Left Has Never Bothered to Understand Republican Ideas

Referring to a healthy debate between two opposing viewpoints as “bothsidesism” deliberately undermines the discourse required by the people to run their own society. Of course, propagandists use this design to dehumanize anyone who doesn’t toe the line. What one finds in the corporate media is nothing more than a gross misrepresentation of what one side believes, so that the side they consider righteous and good can tear it down. This is known as the straw man fallacy, one of the basic logical fallacies journalists are supposed to avoid. Instead, this method has become standard operating procedure.

The ideas of the radical Left could not compete on a level playing field, if the media presented them without putting their thumb on the scale. Thus, the entire movement has dedicated itself to institutional capture—media, education, corporate board rooms, government agencies, Big Tech, Big Philanthropy—all cooperating to suppress any disapproved ideas as “dangerous misinformation.”

The Corporate Media Has a Problem Telling the Truth About Republicans and Democrats

Victor Davis Hanson frequently writes about the sad state of affairs in the media, and summed it up nicely after the election:

There were plenty of indications long ago in key states of a Trump thunderstorm: defections of minorities, anger among both the Jewish and Muslim voters, alienated union members, massive increases in Republican registrations and non-Election-Day balloting. And all were deliberately ignored by the corrupt media and pollsters. Democrats know —but will do nothing about the fact—they have become the party of the upscale professionals and rich, and the subsidized poor. They have alienated the entire middle class—white, black, Hispanic—and ceding it to the new Republican populist-nationalist party.

Do we dare dream that the radical Left will see the light? In the days since the election, many have come around to the notion of their incomplete understanding of the things Donald Trump has said and done, based on the gross mischaracterization of him by the mainstream media.

In a remarkable piece for the Free Press, Democratic fundraising consultant Evan Barker admitted she lost faith in the party and switched her vote to Donald Trump this year:

By the time I turned 26, I was a consultant for dozens of U.S. House and Senate campaigns, four George Soros-backed district attorney races, and a wide range of Democratic organizations. I’ve raised at least $50 million for the left. 

And yet, on Tuesday, I voted for Donald Trump. It felt like the biggest middle finger I’ve ever raised to the party I’d supported for most of my adult life. When he won, I was utterly euphoric. 

The entire article is well worth a read. Barker came to realize the radicalized democratic party had completely abandoned anything it promised it stood for, causing her to become completely disillusioned. Her reaction to the shallow and empty DNC convention sums it up:

Donor suites and corporate media suites intermingled in the same area, and extremely rich people mindlessly chanted “joy” and “respect.” Harris had no policies or programs on her website, and yet, an arena of tens of thousands seemed deliriously high, spellbound by her identity as a woman of color running for president. Her political emptiness allowed them to project their own hopes and desires onto her.

The final straw, Barker writes, was Oprah Winfrey’s tone-deaf speech: “She said nothing that spoke to the Americans who had once constituted the Democratic base.”

These reckonings by former progressives resulted from institutional control over approved messages and narratives that they eventually saw through after applying some independent thinking. This independent thinking came about largely because the Trump coalition of anti-elites overwhelmed the keepers at the gates.

Will Corporate Media Editorial Board Do the Necessary Soul Searching?

If the post-election coverage is any indication, the answer is a resounding “NOPE.” They’ve already come out with their unhinged model of coverage of the incoming Trump administration, same as last time:

This won’t end well for those who wish to protect the regime. The incoming Trump administration has vowed to redouble its focus on protecting free speech. That means the memes and the satire of the protectors of the narrative will continue apace. One could make a strong argument that humor and satire, along with an utter disdain for self-appointed elites, won the election for Trump. With the corporate media continuing to beclown itself, look for the anti-elite media to continue doing what it does best, as well.