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 provided 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 the easiest way to do it’s within the studio in Austin.” And so Rogan declined to interview the vice chairman.
What a diva, some folks mentioned. When you’re provided an interview with a presidential candidate, get off your ass and get on a airplane! However Rogan may dictate his personal phrases. He isn’t competing within the snake pit of D.C. journalism, the place sitting reverse a significant candidate delivers an instantaneous standing bump. He’s the most well-liked podcaster alive, with a devoted viewers of right-leaning males who take pleasure in blended martial arts, stand-up comedy, and wild hypothesis about aliens (area, not unlawful); they don’t seem to be 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 thousands and thousands 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 stay broadcast, and one other 6.5 million on YouTube.
These figures display the absurdity of speaking concerning the “mainstream media” as many nonetheless do, particularly those that disparage it. In keeping with a 2021 Pew Analysis Heart survey, People with a variety of political beliefs typically agree about which shops fall inside this definition: newspapers akin to The New York Instances 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 working 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 more durable, extra targeted “accountability” interviews—in favor of speaking instantly 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 Instances, amongst others.) The consequence was that each Trump and Harris acquired away with reciting slogans slightly 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 full of 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 simple 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.
In some way, the concept the mainstream media is made up of main companies has continued, despite the fact that the web, smartphones, and social media have made it doable for anybody to succeed in an viewers of thousands and thousands. Two of crucial 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 as a way 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.
At present, the divide between the “mainstream” and the outsiders just isn’t about attain. Sixty-three % of American adults get at the very least a few of their information from tv, 42 % from radio, and 26 % from print publications, in line with a 2024 Pew report. However 54 % get at the very least a few of their information from social media—which means that, alongside established shops, they’re counting on sources akin to Infowars movies, Fb memes, and posts on X.
The divide just isn’t about affect, both. Throughout Trump’s victory speech in Florida, he invited the UFC boss Dana White to say a couple of phrases. White thanked the streamer Adin Ross, the podcaster Theo Von, the YouTubers generally known as the Nelk Boys, and the previous NFL gamers Will Compton and Taylor Lewan, in addition to Rogan. In the course of 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 talent to confabulate swimsuit this new surroundings. His inconsistency just isn’t 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 celebration for a whole bunch of influencers. “You’re right here since you all symbolize the altering means folks obtain information and knowledge,” 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 just isn’t about assets, both. Though a number of the legacy shops are nonetheless giant, 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 provided $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 to be like up stuff on Google, however he doesn’t have to do this. His final take care of Spotify was reportedly price as a lot as $250 million. He may rent a complete newsroom if he wished to. However Rogan has intuited, appropriately, that many People not belief establishments. They like to obtain their information from trusted people.
The principle beneficiary of our outdated concepts concerning 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 concerning 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 exterior the mainstream is, as we speak, 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 each one media skew towards one aspect or one other, however at the very least these persons are sincere about it. That permits them to talk alongside Trump at rallies (Kelly), embrace weird conspiracy theories (Jones), speak about 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 will be out-of-bounds for precise journalists.
And let’s be clear, some influencers are very cozy certainly with the themes they cowl. Chances are you’ll not have heard of the Instagrammer and Substacker Jessica Reed Kraus, who was previously a life-style 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 celebration 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 means of what separates one candidate’s well being care plan from one other,” she instructed Semafor. “However they relate and reply to intimate facets that talk to 1’s character.”
Typically, these exact same influencers are the loudest voices complaining concerning 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, just isn’t 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 Get together.” By no means thoughts that, for instance, CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski broke the one most damaging story to the Harris marketing campaign—that she had certainly, in Trump’s phrase, supported “transgender operations on unlawful aliens which are in jail.” (This turned a staple of Republican assault adverts.) Nor did it matter to Musk that, amid his complaints concerning the requirements of the mainstream media, he has repeatedly promoted pretend tales: about Nancy Pelosi’s husband, about gangs attacking polling stations in the course of the current Venezuelan election, and even about a useless squirrel whose euthanasia the appropriate noticed as proof of presidency overreach. When he’s proved to be flawed—typically by the identical legacy media that he decries—he tends to delete his posts with out a correction or an apology.
What occurs subsequent? To me, the image appears to be like bleak: extra conspiracy theories, extra noise, extra loudmouths complaining about different folks’s bias. It’s onerous 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 implies that—with few exceptions—Twentieth-century newsrooms are usually not coming again.
We can not reverse the drift from establishments to people. Nor can the brand new partisan shops be pressured to undertake Twentieth-century norms. The Equity Doctrine—the coverage, repealed underneath Ronald Reagan, that required broadcasters to replicate contrasting views—is gone for good. We’ve to let go of the notion that “mainstream media” is a class reserved just for journalists guided by knowledgeable code of ethics, a mission of public service, and an aspiration towards objectivity or at the very least equity.
Many impartial reporters do good and necessary work—I’m considering 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 underneath 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 instructed X customers because the election outcomes got here in. It was the truest assertion he had made in months.
To the oldsters constructing their very own platforms, to the influencers hopping on catamarans with politicians, to the streamers handing out Teslas to their friends—nicely 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.”