Media morphed along with politics this presidential election

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Political scientists aren’t like the ones in a lab, separating compounds over a Bunsen burner. Elections aren’t like that anyway; instead, they’re often an overheated mixture of media, cultural, sociological, economic and of course political elements combining to determine a democratic (and at times dramatic) outcome.

While this compound’s elements exist in relation to each other, some seemed particularly powerful in the presidential election, according to three political scientists who are directors of their respective centers and proverbial deans of interpreting political trends and traditions: Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a Minnesota native who is the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania; Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota; and Natalie Jomini Stroud, director of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas.

While ballots presented presidential running mates Donald Trump and JD Vance vs. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, there was another unwritten name on the Democratic ticket: President Joe Biden. And Harris was “cemented” to him, Jacobs said, adding: “The expectation when she stepped in was ‘Oh, this is a fresh start.’ And it wasn’t. She was really seen as the extension of Joe Biden and that administration.”

And while that administration may be admired by historians who take the long view of a president nursing the country and economy out of COVID critical care to become “The Envy of the World,” as a recent Economist magazine cover claimed, it is not popular with everyday Americans. For several reasons, but polls mostly point to rising prices confronting consumers daily, with $6 boxes of cereal a serial reminder of the worst inflation since higher prices lowered approval ratings and political prospects for Jimmy Carter and before him Jerry Ford, whose WIN (“Whip Inflation Now”) buttons didn’t prevent a loss in the 1976 election.

“Inflation is the development that makes everyone poorer,” said Jacobs. It “feels like you’re being suffocated in terms of your family budget and no amount of deft rhetoric can overcome that.”

Biden indeed tried talking about the broader economic context. So did Harris. And after that, Jacobs said, “Democrats tried the most radical response we’ve seen in our history, which is get rid of Joe Biden, bring in a new candidate, and none of that worked — not the speech, not the new candidate.” The Democrats were the “in-party,” Jacobs said, and with the economy in general and inflation in particular voters’ top issue, voters made them the out-party.

In part because Harris had few opportunities to oppose Biden’s policies. And when she got them, she flinched. Her “answer to the question of what she’d do differently from Biden on ‘The View’ was an important moment,” said Stroud. “It was an opportunity for Harris to differentiate herself and demonstrate that she would bring a fresh new perspective, and she did not seize it.”

“The View” isn’t exactly the “PBS NewsHour,” but it did reflect a refraction of media to ever-newer, less newsy venues. Long gone are the days when Lyndon Johnson, reeling from a searing CBS analysis on Vietnam, reportedly said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” In fact, LBJ isn’t the only one who lost Middle America: Some of the mainstream media has, too.

“We used to have media that was like going around a campfire; Walter Cronkite was giving the news,” said Jacobs. While not completely extinguished, the campfire has been replaced by bonfires from billionaires whose influence “in our media system seems durable at least in the short term,” said Stroud, pointing to Elon Musk’s pro-Trump posts that were “algorithmically prioritized” on X (Twitter) as well as the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times spiking a pro-Harris endorsement editorial. Other media bonfires, if not of the vanities, were at least from vain podcasters who were particularly influential.

Especially Joe Rogan, who hosted Trump for three hours (not a sound bite, but a feast) in the waning days of the campaign. The interview with the 45th and soon 47th president delivered over 46 million YouTube views, more than tenfold the average audience for the “CBS Evening News,” Cronkite’s old program.

“The shift away from traditional forms of communication to more intimate conversational forms — podcasts that are able to reach niche audiences of lower-involvement voters — is a really important change,” said Jamieson. Scholars, she said, “talk about a parasocial relationship” created by podcasters that “is different from the relationship that you have through the televised candidate, with a candidate who sends things in mailers, with a candidate that advertises to you, because now you have a more personal association and you have a kind of endorsement” (or an actual one from Rogan after his Trump interview).

The cost to Trump was time, and it proved an invaluable investment. Harris, conversely, couldn’t make time in her schedule to go to Rogan’s Texas studio, even though she was invited. While both candidates, of course, raised and spent extraordinary sums for campaign advertising, the near billion dollars donated to Harris was far more than Trump’s take, but the results reflect that, while money in politics is important, it isn’t always determinative.

The effects of the ever-evolving political-media industrial complex are complicated — and profound. And they matter not just with elections but with governing.

“You have a fragmentation of the media environment, so the mainstream legacy media don’t have the kind of reach they once had,” said Jamieson, adding that “they also don’t have the kind of influence they once had with those they reach” because of exposure to all the other channels of communication.

Coupled with what Jamieson identifies as conservatives’ efforts to “discredit mainstream media and to discredit fact-checking,” the core function of the Fourth Estate is changing and challenged.

“It minimizes the capacity of the press to perform its accountability function,” said Jamieson. “It’s not simply that mainstream media has some difficulty performing its accountability function, it’s that you have alternative media channels that are carrying the alternative case for their construction of reality.”

The laboratory that is America’s democracy requires that the press hold any administration — particularly one set to have a compliant Congress and courts — to account with actual, not “alternative” facts that were presented in the president-elect’s first term. Social media networks and “parasocial” podcasters may have many followers but few, if any, journalists, who are the essential element for a watchdog press to have its necessary bite. So despite the difficulties present during the presidential election and soon beyond, the news media needs to press on.