As Donald Trump stood before the American people campaigning for a return to the White House, the twice impeached, convicted felon and coup-plotting insurrectionist found liable for sexual assault, blatantly used racist, misogynist and xenophobic rhetoric to incite hatred and division among the electorate.
Media coverage of Trump’s incendiary rallies too often soft-pedaled and sanitized his toxic words, while declining to aggressively examine the aging candidate’s bizarre behavior that clearly betrayed his cognitive decline. While post-election analysis indicates large numbers of voters chose to support Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris primarily due to their faith that Trump would do a better job improving the economy and battling inflation, the media overall dedicated little attention to a serious examination of Trump’s sketchy economic policies or his record on economic performance while he was in office.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Victor Pickard, C. Edwin Baker professor of media policy and political economy and co-director at the Media, Inequality & Change Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. Here, he assesses corporate media’s coverage of the 2024 campaign, with a focus on the decline of legacy media, the rise of disinformation, and the growing reach and influence of right-wing “Bro” social media, streaming and podcast sphere, with few resources available to develop a progressive counterpart and alternative.
VICTOR PICKARD: They really not only “sanewashed” his behavior-they really normalized it in various ways—but they also did the things that we knew they were going to do and asked them not to do that. The inveterate media critic Jay Rosen was long pleading with media organizations to emphasize not the odds, but the stakes. In other words, “Don’t treat this as another horse race as you always do.”
And of course, all too predictably, they did revert back to this kind of horse race approach to our politics. They didn’t really look at the policies. It’s interesting now you’re actually seeing more of an emphasis on the stakes, because now we’re hearing about what would mass deportations actually look like? Who is going to get kicked off their health care plans?
You know, so now we’re starting to see some of the implications of Trump’s policy positions and policy plans. But unfortunately, during the campaign leading up to the election, we didn’t see enough of that. And we saw the standard you know, “he said, she said both sides-ing” of these debates and not enough actual policy analysis.
SCOTT HARRIS: Professor Pickard, I wanted you to comment on the diminishing influence and reach of legacy media, which has quite obviously been replaced now by social media TikTok, podcasts, YouTube streaming filled with disinformation and misinformation. And it’s quite provable that many voters are now uninformed about major issues. In fact, after Election Day, there was an explosion of Google searches on the issue of tariffs, inflation, mass deportation and fascism, things that these social media outlets did not provide and certainly didn’t fact check a lot of the nonsense that was out there from Trump-paid influencers.
VICTOR PICKARD: Yes, it’s deeply, deeply troubling. Will Bunch had a fantastic column a couple of days ago where he really emphasized this troubling fact that it was these so-called low information voters that really led to Trump’s ascendance. And that people who weren’t getting factual information were much more likely to vote for Trump. And what’s correlation and what’s causation is a legitimate question, but certainly they seem to go at least hand in hand.
And this is symptomatic of these deeper structural pathologies. You already touched on a couple of them, but it is this degradation of our traditional news media. And there’s a couple stark examples, data points on this. One is that we’ve seen the collapse of local journalism over the last two decades, since the early 2000. We’ve lost two-thirds of our newspaper journalists and a third of our newspapers.
And the reason why this is especially devastating is that newspapers are still the primary source for original newsgathering, original reporting that actually introduces new facts into our discourse. So that is one structural pathology.
The other one is that increasingly people are turning to social media to get their news and information, and that’s where they’re often finding various forms of mis- and disinformation.
And of course, one thing we didn’t touch on yet is the role of Elon Musk, who is another kind of media oligarch who weaponized Twitter, now called X, to basically push these far-right politics. So all these things combined—a growing right-wing media sector, various kinds of right-wing influencers and podcasts—all combine to create a very dangerous media landscape, a landscape within which fascism is allowed to thrive.
For more information, visit Victor Pickard’s website at victorpickard.com.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Victor Pickard (18:49) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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