This October, within the closing days of the presidential election, the podcaster Joe Rogan mentioned one thing extraordinary. He had simply hosted Donald Trump for a three-hour dialog in his studio in Austin, Texas, and wished to clarify that he had mentioned an identical association with Kamala Harris’s marketing campaign. “They supplied a date for Tuesday, however I might have needed to journey to her and so they solely wished to do an hour,” he posted on X. “I strongly really feel one of the simplest ways to do it’s within the studio in Austin.” And so Rogan declined to interview the vp.
What a diva, some folks mentioned. For those who’re supplied an interview with a presidential candidate, get off your ass and get on a airplane! However Rogan might dictate his personal phrases. He isn’t competing within the snake pit of D.C. journalism, the place sitting reverse a serious candidate delivers an on the spot standing bump. He’s the most well-liked podcaster alive, with a devoted viewers of right-leaning males who take pleasure in combined martial arts, stand-up comedy, and wild hypothesis about aliens (house, not unlawful); they aren’t political obsessives. Rogan knew that Harris wanted him greater than he wanted her.
Nothing symbolizes the modified media panorama of this previous election greater than Rogan’s informal brush-off. Inside every week, his interview with Trump racked up greater than 40 million views on YouTube alone, and tens of millions extra on different platforms. No single occasion, other than the Harris-Trump debate, had an even bigger viewers this election cycle. By comparability, Harris’s contentious interview with Bret Baier on Fox Information, the most well-liked of the cable networks, drew 8 million viewers to the reside broadcast, and one other 6.5 million on YouTube.
These figures exhibit the absurdity of speaking in regards to the “mainstream media” as many nonetheless do, particularly those that disparage it. In response to a 2021 Pew Analysis Middle survey, People with a variety of political beliefs usually agree about which retailers fall inside this definition: newspapers akin to The New York Occasions and The Wall Road Journal and tv networks akin to CNN. Everybody else who’s disseminating info at scale is handled like a few hipsters operating a craft brewery who’re valiantly competing with Budweiser.
That’s merely not true. Rogan is the “mainstream media” now. Elon Musk, too. Within the 2024 marketing campaign, each presidential candidates largely skipped newspaper and tv sit-downs—the harder, extra centered “accountability” interviews—in favor of speaking immediately with on-line personalities. (J. D. Vance, to his credit score, made a degree of taking reporters’ questions at his occasions and sat down with CNN and the Occasions, amongst others.) The outcome was that each Trump and Harris received away with reciting slogans fairly than outlining insurance policies. Trump has not outlined how his promised mass deportations would possibly work in observe, nor did we ever discover out if Harris nonetheless held agency to her earlier stances, such because the abolition of the dying penalty and the decriminalization of intercourse work. The vacuum was stuffed with vibes.
The idea of the mainstream media arose within the Twentieth century, when reaching a mass viewers required infrastructure—a printing press, or a broadcast frequency, or a bodily cable into folks’s homes—and establishments. That actuality made the media straightforward to vilify. “The press turned ‘the media’ as a result of the phrase had a manipulative, Madison Avenue, all-encompassing connotation, and the press hated it,” Richard Nixon’s speechwriter William Safire wrote in his 1975 memoir.
Someway, the concept the mainstream media is made up of main firms has persevered, despite the fact that the web, smartphones, and social media have made it doable for anybody to achieve an viewers of tens of millions. Two of an important info sources of this election cycle have a job that didn’t exist even a decade in the past: Acyn Torabi and Aaron Rupar, who watch hours of political rallies and TV appearances to be able to clip them for social media. These “clippers” can drive days of dialogue, significantly when the context of a comment is disputed—akin to when Vance’s 2021 remarks characterizing Democrats as “childless cat women” went viral.
Right this moment, the divide between the “mainstream” and the outsiders will not be about attain. Sixty-three p.c of American adults get no less than a few of their information from tv, 42 p.c from radio, and 26 p.c from print publications, in keeping with a 2024 Pew report. However 54 p.c get no less than a few of their information from social media—which means that, alongside established retailers, they’re counting on sources akin to Infowars movies, Fb memes, and posts on X.
The divide will not be about affect, both. Throughout Trump’s victory speech in Florida, he invited the UFC boss Dana White to say a number of phrases. White thanked the streamer Adin Ross, the podcaster Theo Von, the YouTubers referred to as the Nelk Boys, and the previous NFL gamers Will Compton and Taylor Lewan, in addition to Rogan. Throughout the marketing campaign, all of those males had hosted Trump for softball interviews, typically with the encouragement of Trump’s 18-year-old son, Barron; Ross even gave Trump a gold Rolex and a personalized Tesla Cybertruck throughout their livestream. (You don’t get therapy like that from the Wall Road Journal editorial board.)
Trump’s showmanship, aggression, and skill to confabulate go well with this new setting. His inconsistency will not be an issue—these interviews are designed to be entertaining and private, to not nail down his present place on abortion or interrogate his income-tax insurance policies. Trump has been particularly enthusiastic in his embrace of this new media class, however the Democrats additionally perceive its energy: In 2023, Jill Biden addressed a White Home vacation occasion for lots of of influencers. “You’re right here since you all signify the altering method folks obtain information and data,” she reportedly mentioned. On the Democratic Nationwide Conference, greater than 200 “content material creators” have been credentialed together with conventional journalists.
Lastly, the media divide will not be about sources, both. Though a number of the legacy retailers are nonetheless massive, well-funded corporations, so are most of the upstarts. Vance, Peter Thiel, and Vivek Ramaswamy have all invested within the video platform Rumble, which went public in 2022 with a reported valuation of $2.1 billion. When The Every day Wire, a right-wing on-line information group, tried to rent the web character Steven Crowder, he was supplied $50 million over 4 years. He rejected this, calling offers like these “slave contracts.”
As for Rogan, he has apparently chosen to forsake fact-checkers and legal professionals in favor of some man named Jamie who appears up stuff on Google, however he doesn’t have to do this. His final cope with Spotify was reportedly price as a lot as $250 million. He might rent a complete newsroom if he wished to. However Rogan has intuited, appropriately, that many People now not belief establishments. They like to obtain their information from trusted people.
The principle beneficiary of our outdated concepts in regards to the “mainstream media” is the political proper. Not so way back, conservatives resented their exclusion from the MSM, as a result of they thought it painted them as excessive: Sarah Palin complained in regards to the “lamestream media,” whereas the late Rush Limbaugh most well-liked to name it the “state-controlled media” or the “drive-by media.”
However that’s modified. Being outdoors the mainstream is, right this moment, seen as extra genuine, extra in tune with Actual America. Trump’s fixed criticisms of the “fake-news media” have been enthusiastically embraced by his downballot copycats. Complaints about alleged liberal media bias have been amplified by commentators who’re themselves overtly partisan: Tucker Carlson, Russell Model, Dan Bongino, Megyn Kelly, Charlie Kirk, Alex Jones. The underlying premise is that every one media skew towards one facet or one other, however no less than these individuals are sincere about it. That enables them to talk alongside Trump at rallies (Kelly), embrace weird conspiracy theories (Jones), discuss their encounters with demons (Carlson), and proceed to work regardless of a number of allegations of sexual assault (Model, who has denied the claims)—all issues that might be out-of-bounds for precise journalists.
And let’s be clear, some influencers are very cozy certainly with the topics they cowl. It’s possible you’ll not have heard of the Instagrammer and Substacker Jessica Reed Kraus, who was previously a way of life influencer, however she has greater than 400,000 subscribers on Substack, the place she boasts about her entry to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Trump. In January, she joined Kennedy on his catamaran in Hawaii, sipping mimosas and consuming pineapple; she attended Trump’s Tremendous Bowl occasion at Mar-a-Lago. Reed Kraus is open about specializing in personalities, not coverage. “Common People don’t have the time or persistence to sift by way of what separates one candidate’s well being care plan from one other,” she advised Semafor. “However they relate and reply to intimate points that talk to 1’s character.”
Usually, these exact same influencers are the loudest voices complaining in regards to the failures of “the media.” On the eve of the election, Rogan hosted Musk, that different nice titan of the brand new media, to make the case for Trump—whom Rogan then endorsed. “The legacy media, the mainstream media, will not be balanced in any respect,” mentioned Musk, who personally donated greater than $100 million to Trump’s reelection efforts. “They’re only a mouthpiece for the Democratic Celebration.” By no means thoughts that, for instance, CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski broke the only most damaging story to the Harris marketing campaign—that she had certainly, in Trump’s phrase, supported “transgender operations on unlawful aliens which might be in jail.” (This turned a staple of Republican assault adverts.) Nor did it matter to Musk that, amid his complaints in regards to the requirements of the mainstream media, he has repeatedly promoted faux tales: about Nancy Pelosi’s husband, about gangs attacking polling stations throughout the latest Venezuelan election, and even about a useless squirrel whose euthanasia the proper noticed as proof of presidency overreach. When he’s proved to be fallacious—typically by the identical legacy media that he decries—he tends to delete his posts with no correction or an apology.
What occurs subsequent? To me, the image appears bleak: extra conspiracy theories, extra noise, extra loudmouths complaining about different folks’s bias. It’s arduous to see how journalistic establishments get rebuilt when so a lot of their enterprise fashions have collapsed. The migration of advert {dollars} to Google and Meta signifies that—with few exceptions—Twentieth-century newsrooms will not be coming again.
We can not reverse the drift from establishments to people. Nor can the brand new partisan retailers be pressured to undertake Twentieth-century norms. The Equity Doctrine—the coverage, repealed beneath Ronald Reagan, that required broadcasters to mirror contrasting views—is gone for good. We’ve got to let go of the notion that “mainstream media” is a class reserved just for journalists guided by an expert code of ethics, a mission of public service, and an aspiration towards objectivity or no less than equity.
Many impartial reporters do good and vital work—I’m pondering of the YouTuber Coffeezilla’s work on crypto scams, for instance, and Jason Garcia’s investigations into Floridian politics on his Substack, Searching for Rents—however they’re surrounded by a clamorous sea of partisans who function beneath new and completely different guidelines. Flaunt your bias, get cozy together with your topics, and don’t harsh their mellow by asking uncomfortable questions. “You’re the media now,” Musk advised X customers because the election outcomes got here in. It was the truest assertion he had made in months.
To the parents constructing their very own platforms, to the influencers hopping on catamarans with politicians, to the streamers handing out Teslas to their visitors—effectively finished in your triumph. Welcome to the mainstream media. Now maintain yourselves to the identical requirements you demand from others.
This text seems within the January 2025 print version with the headline “Joe Rogan Is the Mainstream Media Now.”
