In the aftermath of President-elect Donald Trump’s impressive victory two weeks ago, the legacy media are doing their best half-hearted attempt at introspection and, in doing so, exposing just how much they have made themselves a hostage of the Democratic Party.
Ever since Trump emerged on the scene in 2015, legacy media outlets have made their negative coverage of him a sort of badge of honor. After he won in 2016, the media embraced their role as the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party’s resistance against Trump. The Washington Post adopted the self-important motto “Democracy dies in darkness,” CNN’s Jim Acosta turned the White House briefing room into his personal lecture hall as he railed against the great evils of the Trump administration to the president and his press secretaries, and book publishers fell over themselves to hand out contracts to regime-approved reporters and former Trump administration officials who lambasted the former president and his team.
The alliance between the Democratic resistance to Trump and the legacy media proved lucrative. Ratings at CNN and MSNBC went up, subscriptions to the Washington Post and other newspapers soared, and books flew off the shelves. By abandoning any sense of fairness, these outlets found an energized and engaged readership and viewership that filled their coffers during the Trump years.
But once President Joe Biden took office in 2021, that all started to change. With unified control of Washington, the Democratic base breathed a sigh of relief and stopped fretting over the day-to-day actions of Washington D.C., but still, the specter of Trump’s return loomed large enough that they still engaged with some of the media outlets they had embraced in the Trump years.
But the 2024 election has forced the legacy media to reckon with the fact that they have little credibility. After years of anti-Trump coverage and warnings that his return meant fascism’s resurgence, the legacy media were faced with the reality that the majority of the public was not buying what they were selling.
Perhaps sensing what was coming, the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times blocked their respective newspapers’ editorial boards from issuing endorsements in the presidential race, shocking the elite liberal readership of both publications. The backlash was swift. The Washington Post lost an estimated 250,000 subscribers in the days after the nonendorsement was announced.
On Monday, the outrage mob came for Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, after they informed viewers that they had gone to Mar-A-Lago to meet with Trump and try to restore their old working relationship.
It is too early to see if Morning Joe’s ratings are going to take a hit because of their meeting with Trump, but the odds are more than good. Liberal viewers tuned into the show explicitly because of the anti-Trump hysteria that became its calling card over the past eight years and are not responding well to the hosts’ announcement.
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But this is the bed the legacy media made. The liberal audience of these publications and cable news channels has come to expect a partisan version of the news that confirms their priors. They have convinced themselves that anything else is right-wing propaganda and not honest reporting.
The price of introspection and perhaps a new era of honesty for the legacy media is losing the audience they have so eagerly embraced. Time will tell if the loss of revenue can be weathered long enough for these outlets to build a new audience that isn’t so nakedly partisan.