A tale of two jets: The old media grapples with its new limits

Donald Trump’s victory in the face of what would be ruinous news coverage for most candidates (again) speaks to his unique political resilience, a difficult inflation-fueled global environment for incumbents, and various unsuccessful political calculations by the Biden inner circle and the last-minute Harris campaign.

In the wake of Trump’s victory, some media critics have returned to self-flagellation or blaming their competitors for “missing” Trump’s popularity. But unlike 2016, the news media was not caught off-guard. Major outlets took him seriously as a candidate and dedicated time to covering his policy proposals. Polling analysts emphasized how his voters could (once again) be undercounted in their surveys, and those voters (once again) outperformed polling, but the forecast models still showed Trump likely to win the election.

The argument that the media didn’t do enough to communicate about Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric doesn’t hold up, either. Outlets like CNN and The New York Times ran daily coverage about Trump’s strongman impulses — I flipped to CNN earlier this month and happened to catch a segment in which one of the shows pulled up the dictionary definition of “fascism.” (Trump’s ideology qualified.)

Other critics confusingly suggested that the media “missed” other elements of Trump’s support, such as the rise of tech’s right wing — a head-scratching assertion given the volume of coverage given to the politics of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, the “All In” podcasters, and others.

Trump’s victory isn’t a result of a failure by news outlets to sufficiently hold him accountable. The real answer is one that is a lot more uncomfortable to grapple with: The national news media is more limited in its reach and influence than ever in the modern era.

For the third presidential contest in a row, the legacy news media — represented by newspapers, television networks, magazines, and cable news networks — spent months publishing and airing neutral to overwhelmingly negative news coverage of the former president. And for the second of those three instances, a majority of American voters largely ignored the implicit and explicit warnings of that coverage — if they saw it at all — and voted Trump into office.

Critical political media coverage simply did not resonate with a large swath of the electorate. Many voters showing up at the polls either did not agree with much of the legacy media’s suggested or overt assessment of Trump’s conduct or the various norm-shattering elements of his campaign, didn’t see it, or didn’t care. Local newspapers have continued to die off, leaving much of the country without a trusted local news source. Cord-cutting has decimated cable news viewership and taken a bite out of broadcast television viewership. Most of the people still watching are moderately to extremely old. With the exception of the Times, most other major national news organizations have seen shrinking audiences and have fewer resources than ever.

None of this is a surprise to many of the leaders of the country’s most prestigious and rigorous news organizations. In a telephone call with me earlier this week, New Yorker Editor-in-Chief David Remnick said he didn’t think “editors of a whole range of publications had the illusion that they were speaking to a majority of the electorate or the population.”

“As large as The New York Times has become, it’s 11 million subscribers in a nation of 300 million people. Obviously its influence goes beyond its subscriber base, but the idea that even the biggest publications can only speak directly to a limited portion of the populace is just terribly old news,” he said. “It’s become more fractured and more intensified by the way the media landscape has played out in recent years, for all the technological, political and economic reasons you know only too well. And anybody with any sense knows it’s true, right?”

When Semafor asked what new CEO Mark Thompson thought the election’s results said about the reach and impact of legacy news media, a CNN spokesperson pointed Semafor to several memos the network chief sent out over the last year. In them, Thompson said that “to succeed, we must abandon our preconceptions of the limits of what CNN can be and follow the audience to where they are now and where they will be in the years to come. We will still stand for the same things — video-led breaking news, delivered as it happens with honesty and insight — but with greater flexibility about the how and multiple new forms of monetization to complement existing revenues.” The network’s position is that legacy media will die if it doesn’t transform to meet these audiences.

It isn’t just a problem of reach or distribution. To some media executives, it’s a sign that the quality of news offered to Americans is not satisfying them, a view that Axios founder Jim VandeHei described as “gut-check time for traditional media.”

“The verdict is not debatable: Half the country thinks traditional media is biased and often useless,” he said. “They feel reporters treat Republicans like a crime beat and Democrats like friends in need. I don’t think this is usually the case, but it happens enough to give critics pause.”

Jessica Lessin, founder of The Information, similarly urged journalists to remain vigilant about their tone, arguing that while Trump is a unique challenge to cover, it isn’t the media’s job to serve as the political resistance to him.

“Trust in journalism is plummeting; it’s lower than it was even four years ago,” she wrote this week.

“That calls for caution. That’s not weakness or shying away from asking tough questions — but we must remember it’s not our job to tell our readers what to think,” she said. “Our job is to reveal new and important facts — especially facts that powerful people want hidden.”

“What journalists need to realize is we can and must fight for what Trump holds in contempt — tough and accurate reporting — without letting it bias our coverage,” she told Semafor in a follow-up text. (Lessin is an investor in Semafor.)

The coverage itself is also likely to change as legacy news organizations end internal arguments about “normalizing” Trump, and acknowledge that his victories were not a fluke but a sign of a political realignment in America. Already, there are some signs that major news organizations are looking at Trump’s popularity differently than they did in years past.

CNN has in recent years shaved the edges off of its most aggressive Trump criticism since the departure of network chief Jeff Zucker (though its panels are still overwhelmingly critical of Trump).

In an op-ed explaining why the Washington Post did not endorse in the presidential race, the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, acknowledged that Americans were turning out much of what Post and its mainstream media peers were saying, particularly about politics. Interim Post executive editor Matt Murray said in an email after the election that while journalists “don’t need to overthink this,” media organizations need to find a way to reconnect with audiences through the tone and type of content and the means of delivering the news.

“Our job remains landing big stories that cause trouble, without fear or favor, and providing news and insight,” he said. “There has been plenty of good reporting from around the country from The Post and others that doesn’t get the attention it deserves now. We can all do better at promoting and highlighting that, as well as do more to capture the views and experiences of a broader array of Americans and taking them seriously. We need to break through the wall of skepticism and show people that they and their concerns and experiences are reflected in our journalism.”

These journalistic prescriptions — try to find new ways to reach people, try to treat subjects fairly and not alienate potential audiences — may be sensible. But the fundamental problems with the current economic model for many legacy outlets aren’t changing. And few of the executives I spoke with this week had any innovative ideas about how to reach more people in a fragmented attention landscape.

The 2024 race was the first major campaign of the cord-cutting era, and the limited resources of many news organizations showed on the campaign trail. In the final weeks of the campaign, the Harris campaign and White House Correspondents Association attempted to organize a private plane for the press that would trail Harris, who was hopping from state to state on Air Force Two. In past elections, media organizations would jockey for seats on the plane. This time around, many organizations said they could not afford the steep cost for a seat, which started at around $30,000 and began to rise as more news outlets declined, leaving only half the seats on the plane reserved. Journalists were also bewildered by the fact the plane wouldn’t be guaranteed to actually make it to every destination, due to logistical difficulties.

Unlike Fetterman’s Rogan charter, the media’s Harris chase plane never got off the ground.

Nontraditional media has a few advantages over more traditional outlets. Popular podcasts and YouTube shows rely on the news media for information that informs their segments, but they do not employ journalists and are not held to the same standards of accuracy and accountability. News media outlets are often boxed in by rigorous fact-checking; comedy YouTubers can say whatever they want with little consequence.

A willingness to do confrontational journalism has also made the mainstream media the enemy of powerful political and business interests. Part of the distrust in traditional news media stems from those same interests trying to discredit it, Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg noted in an interview. Musk’s stewardship of X and forceful denunciations of the news media is a particularly illustrative example.

They “have a vested interest first in neutralizing and then demonizing the journalists and the journalistic institutions that are investigating their behavior,” he said. “It’s a deliberate campaign to marginalize, and even demonize, because they fear the outcome of our investigations and our scrutiny.”

He added: “Elon Musk’s opposition to accountability journalism isn’t ideological. It’s practical.