OPINION: 2024′s other big loser? The mainstream media. Is there any path forward?

The American mainstream media, and its vital watchdog role that once made it a trusted, major institution in a flawed yet functioning democracy, imploded in 2024, and it happened in two ways — gradually and then suddenly.

The sudden part came in the days immediately after the Oct. 25 revelation that Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos — the third-richest person on Earth — had spiked his editorial board’s long-planned endorsement of Democrat Kamala Harris over the GOP’s Donald Trump. The same story played out at the billionaire-owned Los Angeles Times and USA Today and 200 other newspapers that share its owner, the publicly traded Gannett Corp., also joined them in declining to endorse in an election in which one candidate branded a free press “the enemies of the people.” At least 250,000 people, or 10% of the total, canceled their Post subscriptions, in a business that was already reeling.

But the gradual destruction of public trust in traditional media has been every bit as powerful. You could watch its final days among the last, mostly liberal holdouts who still gathered on the once free-flowing social media site called Twitter that Elon Musk — the richest person on Earth — bought and turned into a disinformation cesspool called X. You saw the steady drips of distrust — over the “sanewashing” of the 78-year-old Trump’s increasing unhinged rants and digressions into Hannibal Lecter, shark attacks, and Arnold Palmer’s private parts — after the headlines proclaiming that record-low unemployment was bad news for President Joe Biden.

For a lot of forward-thinking folks who believed in the power of a free press and have been urging journalists to do better since George W. Bush was allowed to lie America into a senseless war, the non-endorsements were not a shock but the last straw — and now even more folks are checking out in disgust after Trump’s solid, majority win last Tuesday.

They’ve abandoned the elite mainstream media — newsrooms like the Post and New York Times, the traditional TV networks, and the not-conservative cable outlets like MSNBC and CNN — at a moment when pollsters had already found public trust at an all-time record low of 31%. In giving up, liberals and moderates were joining conservatives who’ve loathed the media since Spiro Agnew called them “an effete corps of impudent snobs” in 1969 — not wanting journalists to do a better job, but to go away and stop writing about topics like social injustice or capitalism’s abuses in America.

And while newsroom leaders were getting a lesson (or, in many cases, not getting it) that balanced-but-bloodless journalism that equalized “both sides” would eventually drive both sides away, it’s also fair to ask whether this head-on crash between journalism and increasingly tribal ideologies even mattered that much in the end. The perfect storm fluke of mid-20th-century media monopolies that the late David Halberstam famously described as The Powers That Be have been zapped by the electrons of the internet, creating other ways for folks to speak to each other on social media, or read targeted websites that appealed to their niche interests and ideas or their prejudices.

But especially their prejudices.

The popular business school theory of creative destruction holds that when the traditional way of doing things — like printing yesterday’s news in hot ink and maintaining an expensive fleet of trucks to get that to your doorstep — becomes hopelessly outdated, something better and more efficient arises to replace it. It’s a lot more complicated with journalism, which is very much a business yet also a critical vehicle for democracy ... or dictatorship.

Much of what raced to fill the vacuum of declining mainstream media has been misinformation, and much of that is disinformation — deliberate falsehoods in pursuit of political gain. Unlike the quest for universal truth, disinformation — like Tolstoy’s unhappy families — takes many different insidious forms. It ranges from your uncle’s conspiracy theories on Facebook to the American exile in Russia slandering Tim Walz on behalf of the Kremlin to the growing network of so-called pink slime websites that pretend to be traditional news outlets while peddling slanted news or lies.

The things that pundits have been talking about since Tuesday — an economy that hasn’t worked for the working class since the time of Ronald Reagan, anxieties among white voters about a potential end to white privilege and the patriarchy, and a Democratic Party that’s lost touch with the great American middle — all factored into this election. But nothing mattered more than this: Donald Trump was returned to power by the most badly informed electorate in modern American history.

In October, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found a powerfully strong connection between people who believed provably false information and whether they planned to vote for Trump or Harris. For example, Democrats held a plus-65% advantage among voters who correctly said that big-city violent crime rates are at or near record lows, while Republicans led by 26% with voters insisting this was false. The same was true for 2024′s recent sharp drop in border crossings (true, plus-59% Democrat; false, plus-17% Republican) or the stock market’s current all-time high (true, plus-20% Democrat; false, plus-9% Republican).

This very much jibes with where voters get their news. An NBC News survey back in May — when Biden was still the Democrats’ deeply troubled candidate — found nonetheless that he led by landslide proportions among the shrinking number of Americans who still read a newspaper, with a 70%-21% lead. It provides some context to the never-ending online chatter complaining about tepid “both sides” traditional newsrooms underplaying the threats to democracy posed by Trump. I agree these critiques are important — a bad New York Times headline sets the tone for the entire media ecosystem — but that’s not why Trump won. The now-president-elect, according to that NBC survey, posted his biggest margin of 53%-27% among voters who don’t follow any news. Trump’s win was a triumph of the ill-informed.

I also know this to be true because I ventured out over 2024 to talk with everyday Trump voters at his Pennsylvania rallies in Schnecksville in April and again in Latrobe in October. I met people who lived in an impenetrable bubble of disinformation. They told me that Trump had actually defeated Biden in 2020 in a landslide, or that it was actually Biden who planned to call out the military against civilians. “There’s a lot of information on TikTok,” one Trump partisan told me in Schnecksville, but by the campaign’s waning days in Latrobe last month, every voter now blurted out the same thing: They are getting their information from X, where its pro-Trump owner billionaire Musk made false or misleading claims that received an estimated two billion views.

It’s no wonder, then, that voters seemed to vote against their own self-interest on Tuesday. In a must-read analysis for Salon, the Philadelphia-based journalist Amanda Marcotte broke down the red states that voted heavily for Trump on the same day the public approved ballot measures that enshrined abortion rights or raised the minimum wage or made it easier for unions to organize — the opposite of Trump’s stances or the Project 2025 blueprint he’s expected to mostly follow. That dovetails with the survey in which voters — when blindly given a choice between Trump’s policy agenda and Harris’ proposals — went strongly for the ideas of the Democrat who would lose.

You can make the case that Trump’s so-called charisma (no, I don’t see it, either) or his anti-elite rhetoric overrode policy ideas, but you can’t argue that the American Experiment will be comatose, at best, until we can start debating these issues from a place of reality. That means acknowledging the diminished role of traditional media as we know it — something both candidates themselves did in seeking out podcasts and influencers — and inventing a brand-new world of information. That’s a deep conversation, but let’s start with a few quick points:

1. Self-interested billionaires can’t be trusted to save the news. In sharp contrast to the failings of Bezos, Musk, or LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, newsrooms with different types of ownership and motivations shined in 2024′s lousy environment. I’m not too modest to include my own shop, The Philadelphia Inquirer — a for-profit public-benefit corporation owned by a nonprofit foundation, which both editorialized about the Trump threat and reported extensively on the ground from our key battleground state. But also look at ProPublica, the nonprofit newsroom that exposed the rot of corruption at the U.S. Supreme Court and covered the issues — and not the horse race — in the presidential election.

2. Local news matters — a lot. The great online debate over the media has been nationalized, like everything else, but a lot of public distrust in institutions and the rise of disinformation can be traced to the economic collapse of local news in smaller cities and rural communities across America. It’s been estimated that half of U.S. counties have limited access to reliable local news, and hundreds are so-called news deserts with no outlets at all. It’s not sexy for big-time philanthropists, and there’s not a big subscriber pool, but the war to reclaim reality begins there.

3. Yes, there needs to be a reality-based community of podcasters, influencers, etc. No, I have no idea what that looks like, or how it happens. Last week, a lot of liberals argued about “How do we create our own Joe Rogan?” when history shows that self-conscious left-wing efforts to recreate what’s worked on the right — remember the Air America liberal talk radio network of the 2000s — have a poor track record. That said, the millions in opposition to Trump and his MAGA movement are desperately seeking ways to connect. The current crisis may actually cause this to happen.

The worst part is that this has to happen not in a healthy environment, but when America is led by an authoritarian and his billionaire allies who have an arsenal of tools — lawsuits, licensing fights, public pressure, maybe even arrests — to stop this reinvention from happening. We will have to save a free press in America in the mode of Ginger Rogers — backward, in high heels — but also while getting whacked by a baseball bat. But we have to try because history has shown there is only one place where democracy can survive — in a place called Reality.

Will Bunch is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

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