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Amid the barely processable torrent of news produced by President Donald Trump, Shadow-President Elon Musk, and their allies in the early days of Trump’s second term, the political press has carved out time for a favored narrative: Democrats in disarray! After Trump won in November, journalists at major outlets mined the reasons for the Democrats’ loss and took stock of their present rudderlessness; in recent days, attention has turned to whether the party might be finding its voice again, with Trump and Musk already testing the limits of their political capital (not to mention the Constitution). Earlier this week, a video of Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, awkwardly chanting “We will win!” at a protest against Musk spread online and on cable news (occasioning some snickering on CNN); yesterday, The Daily, the New York Times’ flagship podcast, asked “Where Are the Democrats?” while New York magazine and The New Yorker ran similar-looking interviews on the same theme with Brian Schatz, the Hawai‘i senator. (“It’s a good day for those of us who want to read an interview with Brian Schatz with a Getty file photo in a magazine with ‘New York’ in the name,” Semafor’s Dave Weigel quipped.) In general, the coverage has lined up on a spectrum from premature horeseracey tittle-tattle to What the hell are you doing? The future of the republic is at stake!!
One subplot to all this has been the recent race for the leadership of the Democratic National Committee, a story that mostly unfolded out of the spotlight of major media coverage but nonetheless got tongues wagging among scoopy political reporters and left-leaning commentators, some of whom convened interviews with the runners and riders; last week, MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, Symone Sanders-Townsend, and Jonathan Capehart chaired a forum that was repeatedly interrupted by climate protesters, to the hosts’ and candidates’ apparent annoyance. On Saturday, we learned that the race had been won by Ken Martin, a “low-profile political insider,” per the New York Times, who previously led Democrats in Minnesota. Those hoping for a sharp change of direction atop the party might have been disappointed. “Anyone saying we need to start over with a new message is wrong,” Martin said at the MSNBC-hosted forum, according to the Times. “We got the right message.”
Indeed, a recurring theme of the DNC race was how to make that message heard in an increasingly noisy, fractured, and lawless media environment. The candidates broadly agreed on the need to fight misinformation and engage with new media venues and new messengers, while regretting that they haven’t done this well enough up to now. In the weeks after Trump won, Faiz Shakir, a former top aide to Bernie Sanders, bemoaned to the Times’ Ezra Klein that there “aren’t that many corollaries on the left” to right-wing media outlets that boast huge reach; Shakir subsequently jumped into the DNC race and proposed engaging influencers on Medicaid who could speak to the harm of Trump’s designs. In December, the New Republic’s Greg Sargent made the case that countering Republicans’ propaganda advantage and reaching politically disengaged voters through new media should be a top priority for the new chair, and asked leading candidates what they proposed to do about it. Martin responded that the party needed to invest “significant resources” in a comprehensive review of how different demographics get information and news, and proposed sending “trusted messengers and validators” into GOP-dominated spaces.
In Sargent’s view, however, the candidate with the “the clearest vision of how to fix the party’s informational/media problems” wasn’t Martin but Ben Wikler, the chair of the Democratic Party in Wisconsin, who scored a number of high-profile endorsements in the race but ultimately finished second. Wikler, Sargent noted, had been alarmed last spring by data showing that while President Joe Biden, then still running for reelection, had a clear lead among consumers of traditional news outlets, Trump led among those who get their news from Google and YouTube or don’t follow it at all. Wikler told Sargent that Democrats need to venture into right-wing media spaces more, by which he meant Fox News but also nonpolitical podcasts and YouTube streams, and pledged to train armies of communicators to take the Democrats’ message into these settings. And he said that the party should invest in building out an “independent, progressive media ecosystem,” then seek to elevate it by breaking news and doing key interviews within it, much as Republicans do on Fox.
A left-leaning media ecosystem separate from the mainstream media already exists, as Maddy Crowell reported for CJR’s Election Issue last summer. Crowell wrote about MeidasTouch—a new media network that “describes itself as doing ‘pro-democracy’ journalism, and provides commentary on national politics seemingly calculated to appeal to those for whom Rachel Maddow is too subtle”—which started producing videos in 2020, in the early days of the pandemic; around the same time, Crowell notes, “they were joined by an orchestra of other new left-leaning digital ventures—different from one another in approach, but all claiming to have arisen out of a shared discontent: with the country facing the prospect of a second Trump presidency, something about the traditional mechanisms for delivering information to the American electorate was broken.” With the exception of MeidasTouch, all these ventures were piloted by Democratic strategists; one of the examples she highlighted—More Perfect Union, a progressive outlet focused on labor—was founded by Shakir. The venture had a modest follower count on Instagram, Crowell noted—but Shakir sent her data suggesting that its posts had “stunningly high rates of engagement,” far outstripping those of outlets like MSNBC, the Times, and Politico.
Biden and his administration did court the attention of new media influencers, often to the evident irritation of the traditional political press, which felt frozen out. As Crowell noted before Biden dropped out of the race, he personally appeared in videos produced by both More Perfect Union and MeidasTouch (and would later grant a rare exit interview to the latter outlet); after Kamala Harris replaced him atop the Democratic ticket, she, too, faced accusations that she was shunning the mainstream media in favor of appearances with new media stars like Alex Cooper, the host of the wildly popular (and traditionally apolitical) podcast Call Her Daddy. And yet a narrative has developed since the election that the Democrats lost the new-media war to Trump—who went on Joe Rogan’s show, and scored his support, amid a blitz of appearances on other so-called “bro podcasts”—and that this was a key reason for her defeat. In the weeks after the election, questions were asked as to how the Democrats could get their own Rogan, and why Harris hadn’t deigned to appear on the original Rogan’s show. (Some progressives noted, archly, that the Democrats’ Rogan was the original Rogan: he supported Sanders for the Democratic nomination in 2020.)
As I see it, the reality is less clean than this narrative would suggest: Harris only narrowly lost an election fought across a whole host of different issues (if she had flipped only a small number of votes in key states it’s unlikely we’d be having this conversation about Democratic media failure) and, as I’ve noted, did go into new media spaces. (She also, according to a new book by the political journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, went to significant lengths to score an interview with Rogan, including scheduling a rally close to his Texas studio, only for Rogan’s team to keep putting up roadblocks; Rogan has denied this.) Generally, though, it’s true that the Republicans have a double-headed media advantage, having invested more heavily in the longer-term project of creating their own network of aligned outlets, and more recently figured out how to convincingly crack apolitical media spaces. Whether the Democrats can catch up strikes me as a complicated proposition. While progressive outlets often engage in rampant spin, they are typically tethered to the realm of basic fact in a way that no longer constrains many right-wing commentators. (“We’re not fighting fire with fire,” one source told Crowell, “we’re fighting fire with water.”) Nor does waging all-out rhetorical war on the traditional press seem remotely consistent with the party’s current brand. A couple of the candidates for DNC chair expressed outright hostility to the mainstream media—Marianne Williamson expressed a desire to sue CNN and MSNBC—but neither got many votes. Democratic senators recently met privately to discuss doing better in digital spaces, but reportedly agreed not to abandon traditional media.
And yet there is space within these constraints for Democrats to pivot away from traditional media venues toward newer ones. (There is certainly room for them to do better than a new-media “bright spot” that the senators highlighted during their meeting, according to CNN: a pandemic-era video of Senator Mark Warner making a tuna melt in his kitchen.) Martin may come across as a conventional choice for DNC chair, but one of the names elected to a vice chair role at the same time presents a different media profile: David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland school shooting who filmed interviews with classmates on his phone even as the attack was unfolding, did remarkably media-savvy hits on cable news in the aftermath, and has since built a sizable following on social media. (CJR’s Alexandria Neason and Meg Dalton wrote about the journalism of Hogg and his classmates at the time of the shooting.) Hogg ran for the vice chair position arguing that the Democrats have a huge problem reaching young voters and need to become better storytellers. (Perhaps tellingly of the party’s current messaging woes, a number of centrist Democrats carped to Politico that Hogg’s penchant for media visibility will now spell trouble for the party given his history of progressive positions; already, he has become a right-wing-media lightning rod.)
And it’s clear that rank-and-file Democrats are increasingly dissatisfied with the coverage that the traditional media is serving them—historically, “while partisan media on the right had little trouble finding consumers who were disaffected with mainstream political coverage, the potential customers for explicitly liberal outlets were happy enough with their mainstream standbys,” Crowell wrote last year, but Brendan Nyhan, a political science professor at Dartmouth, told her that the Democratic Party is “becoming more liberal and more dissatisfied with mainstream media, and more open to partisan content focused on how the other side is bad.” After Crowell wrote, liberal dissatisfaction with mainstream coverage of the election only grew, and that trend has continued now that Trump is back in office: CNN’s Brian Stelter observed earlier this week that “readers who are alarmed by Trump’s actions—and don’t feel like legacy media outlets are equally alarmed”—are turning away from the mainstream press. They aren’t necessarily turning toward explicitly party-political outlets; Stelter noted that the beneficiaries have included “bloggers, Substack writers, YouTubers and other independent media figures.” (We profiled one such figure, Marisa Kabas, on Wednesday.) Either way, it’s clear that the landscape for news is changing, and that opinionated—and sometimes overtly partisan—media is gaining ground all across it, not only on the right. You can read Crowell’s feature from last year here.
Other notable stories:
- For CJR, Robert Corn-Revere, a former chief counsel to the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, urged Brendan Carr—the current occupant of the latter post, who has already initiated an investigation into NPR and PBS, and revived a complaint about CBS’s pre-election editing of an interview with Kamala Harris—to demonstrate “institutional modesty” in the role. Meanwhile, CBS, after controversially agreeing to hand over a full transcript of the Harris interview to the FCC, made the materials public as well. (The FCC also released the records; they show, as CNN’s Stelter notes, that “there is no ‘there’ there.”) And Fox’s Brian Kilmeade challenged Carr on the precedent the CBS probe might set for other outlets; Carr dismissed the notion, and suggested he was restoring balance against the “radical left.”
- Elsewhere, the false claim that the federal government has been propping up Politico continued to reverberate. In fact, a range of federal agencies had merely been paying for subscriptions to a Politico product; the administration now seems poised to end not only those subscriptions, but, according to Axios, “every single media contract” currently expensed by the General Services Administration. (On Truth Social, Trump suggested that the supposedly “STOLLEN” USAID funds for news outlets might be the biggest scandal in history; he was, presumably, not referring to the German Christmas cake.) USAID has helped fund outlets working in restrictive press climates abroad; per the Financial Times, the aid freeze is delighting the world’s strongmen.
- Following Trump’s shocking suggestion earlier this week that the US would take over Gaza and turn it into prime beachfront real estate, a political show on Franceinfo, a French public media station, interviewed a tourism expert on whether it would be feasible to turn the territory into a Middle Eastern Riviera. The segment provoked widespread outrage online, and the channel subsequently removed it from its website, adding in a statement that it was “totally inappropriate and regrettable.” A media union suggested that the segment had resulted from a need to fill airtime with debate due to a lack of journalistic resources; Le Monde has more (in French).
- CJR’s Meghnad Bose spoke with editors at Drop Site News, an “accountability journalism” platform founded last year by exiles from The Intercept, about their approach to covering the new administration and other stories, not least the war in Gaza. “Obviously, we have a different administration with different political ideologies coming in—and yeah, we’ll take that into account,” Sharif Abdel Kouddous, the Middle East and North Africa editor, said. But it will continue to scrutinize Democrats, whose “foreign policy and also domestic policy are not held to account in the same way.”
- And Politico’s Ian Ward tried out ALP, a new line of tobacco-free nicotine pouches that Tucker Carlson launched to take on Zyn, a competitor that he used to promote, before a falling-out. “To the average consumer, Carlson’s foray into the tobacco-less nicotine market merely looks like the latest chapter in a longstanding tradition of conservative media figures promoting an array of odd products,” Ward writes, but it highlights “deeper and more interesting trends,” including a push among right-wing political and media types to build a “parallel economy” for right-leaning consumers.
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