Reels over reading: How Trump beat bad press

The Z factor

In the recently concluded US presidential elections, the biggest loser was not Vice President Kamala Harris or the Democratic Party. It was the traditional news media. In his first term as president, Donald Trump assailed the US media as “fake news”. This time, he has shown that they don’t really matter.

If you followed any major US newspaper or magazine over the last several months, you would have seen report after report on why Trump would make for a disastrous president. Economists wrote extensively about how Trump’s push for tariffs would cause inflation and widespread economic distress. Publications carried interviews of officials in the former Trump administration who explained why their former boss was unfit to be president. Then came a series of editorial board endorsements for Harris: The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, The Economist, and more. Yet, all of that mattered less in the end than the endorsement of a podcaster.

In any previous era, no presidential candidate could have weathered such bad press. In the 1960s, as President Lyndon Johnson headed for reelection, he was taken to the cleaners by the press. A morbid ground report on the Vietnam War by legendary broadcaster Walter Cronkite proved to be particularly devastating.

For his dispassionate reporting, Cronkite was widely called “the most trusted man in America”. In the aftermath of his and others’ expositions on Johnson’s failings in Vietnam, the president’s popularity plummeted. Johnson, eventually, decided not to run for reelection.

Those days now seem long gone. For years, traditional newspapers and television broadcasts have been battling falling readership and viewership in America. People have often preferred short, snappy and more entertaining tweets and reels to detailed ground reports that run for thousands of words. In result, the bully pulpit has moved from the newspapers to mediums such as podcasts and videos.

That shift tilted the balance in favour of Trump and his meme-worthy style of politics. In the run-up to Election Day, Trump received the prized endorsement of podcaster Joe Rogan. Rogan alone has nearly 15 million subscribers on Spotify and over 18 million on YouTube. By contrast, all of America’s major newspapers have a combined daily circulation of less than 21 million (for context, this figure was over 60 million between the 1960s and the 1990s).

But the reliance on podcasts, YouTube videos and Instagram reels also means that people are more likely to see, hear and consume garbage. For better or worse, traditional media outlets follow more rigorous fact-checking and editorial standards than social media platforms. Newspaper editors require extensive substantiation and citation of sources before they publish opinion columns and ground reports. Social media platforms require none of that. If you don’t believe me, try sending in an article full of lies to this newspaper and see if you get published. Then, try and make an Instagram reel with the same content and see if you can upload that.

To be sure, the decline of the traditional news media is not just an American story; it’s a global phenomenon. Rigorous journalism is hard work, and given the demands of audiences everywhere, traditional media outlets simply can’t compete with the blockbuster bombast of the internet. Everybody says that they want intelligent journalism, but nobody wants to read long-winded and nuanced analyses. The new fad is to explain everything to the masses in a way that doesn’t force them to think. But the problem is that reality is always complex. And complex ideas require complex language – longer and, perhaps, more confusing sentences and words.

Sadly, complexity is out of vogue, and the world is now stuck with the politics of reels and memes.