We now know the full extent of the rout of the Democratic Party on November 5th.
The GOP took back the White House, regained control of the US Senate and kept a slim majority in the House of Representatives. If you throw in the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, they now control all the branches of government.
Big winners.
But that’s not all we learned on Election Day.
We now know the full extent of the rout of the mainstream media.
Data from Nielsen showed overall viewership on election night was down 25 percent from four years ago.
Although its numbers are down, Fox still had its loyal viewers. The conservative cable news channel doubled the ratings of its nearest rival, the leftist MSNBC. CNN was a complete disaster, topping only CBS in viewership.
In the news world, that’s as bad as it gets. To give you a football analogy, it’s like saying, we suck less because we beat the New York Jets.
Big losers.
But it’s not surprising. We’ve been heading there for a while. Now, we are solidly, irretrievably in the post-broadcast news, post-cable news era. The presidential election of 2024 was a podcast election and it is the death knell for the traditional news media.
This election proved that politicians don’t need the broadcast or cable news networks to reach their core supporters and those who are on the fence.
Remember when Donald Trump blew off the “must do” 60 Minutes interview? It has been a long tradition that all presidential candidates, if they wanted to get their message across, needed to sit down with 60. How could Trump blow us off, they bellowed, we’re 60 Minutes? We’ve been the influencers before there were influencers.
Well, Trump could, he did, and he won.
Instead, Trump sat with podcaster Joe Rogan for three hours, and he got nearly 50 million views on YouTube.
Kamala Harris did sit for an interview with 60 Minutes and they helped her out with some favorable soundbite editing, but she didn’t sit with Joe Rogan. She lost, bigly.
That’s just one example.
In 2024, when a politician wants gobs of time to get her or his point across to a hyper-targeted audience, when they want to shoot the shit and seem more human and less political, they’ll jump on a podcast and shun old media.
Hey Friend, you are (or were, until you started writing this bromidic blog), a big-j journalist yourself. Aren’t you troubled that your highly educated, “professional” colleagues in the legacy news media are obsolete, replaced by guys like Rogan, the former host of Fear Factor?
Nope.
The journalists I grew up with and worked with, strived mightily at being objective. They prided themselves on asking tough, but fair questions. They tried to set aside their personal beliefs as much as they could. They were rewarded with their audience’s trust.
There’s that word, trust. It’s now all but gone for my buddies in the news media and it’s a self-inflicted wound.
Many anchors, hosts and reporters are blatantly biased, and it shows. They are overt partisans for their elitist causes and their woke ideologies. They and their newsrooms are increasingly out of touch with their viewers, even those in distinctly blue states. Trump came within five percentage points of winning New Jersey and eleven percentage points of winning New York. Guys, wake up! You are preaching to a rapidly diminishing audience of elites, and by doing so you are making yourselves irrelevant to your broader audience, and now to the politicians themselves.
Bloomberg News reports the number of people that listen to podcasts has more than doubled since 2016, and research from Deloitte last year found that 75% of the people they surveyed agreed that they trust the podcast hosts they listen to.
The younger news consumers, who’ve grown up in this age of media partisanship, are gobbling up their information from the podcasters. They find them way more interesting and informative. They like the personalities, they like the formats. The broadcast networks, the cable news channels, certainly the newspapers, are nowhere on their radar.
The old media are dead men and women walking, they’re zombies, unresponsive to what’s going on around them.
To be clear, we won’t wake up tomorrow, or in a month, or next year and find they’ve disappeared. No. But the days when they were must see TV, when they reigned supreme over the election process, those days are long gone.
It’s not too crazy to think that sooner rather than later, these newly influential podcasters could form their own networks, either permanent or ad hoc. That could give them even more influence and power.
In the meantime, due to their declining viewership, advertising revenue and the country’s rejection of their coastal elitism, the broadcast and cable networks are facing a bleak present.
Puck News is reporting that CNN is about to undergo another round of layoffs. CBS has basically admitted defeat in the evening news arena by firing Norah O’Donnell and replacing her with the improbable duo of John Dickerson and Maurice Dubois. ABC, digesting the results of the election, is reportedly in a panic to find a true conservative panelist for The View, to make that news division show watchable for anyone who doesn’t live on Manhattan’s upper west side.
The presidential election of 2024 will be remembered for the stunning political comeback of Donald Trump, for a red wave that swept him to the presidency and for the Republican control of the US government. It will be remembered for the forced retirement of a sitting president by his own party and by the first woman of color to be her party’s nominee for president.
It will also be remembered for the end of the era of the traditional news media. For them, the party’s over and it’s time to say goodnight Gracie, I mean Anderson, I mean Rachel.
Bob Dylan didn’t have the media in mind in 1964 when he wrote the iconic lyrics for The Times They Are A-Changin’, but 60 years later they are apropos to the old media’s demise. As Dylan said, You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone…The order is rapidly fadin’…for the times they are a-changin’.