Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.
The 2024 election results certainly came as a surprise to the national media. They spent the last few weeks of the campaign wildly speculating about how Donald Trump wouldn’t accept the results and that it would be complete chaos. Instead, Trump won the popular vote, and they all had to follow their own norms and accept the results in an orderly fashion.
The win wasn’t a landslide, but it felt like one because of the towering tsunami of garbage the media and the Democrats and their prosecutors threw at Trump. They could not believe that all this lawfare and relentlessly negative publicity would create a backlash. They saw this pattern in the Republican primary—and yet they couldn’t accept the pattern would repeat itself in the general.
They knew that the Biden-Harris approval ratings were abysmal, and that the top issues, like inflation and illegal immigration, were dragging them down. But they loathe Trump so much they could not imagine he could win again—and win much more convincingly than in 2016.
So, then the media had to think about the unthinkable: Doesn’t anyone care about our “news” anymore? How could our relentless anti-Trump messaging fail to land? They had to ponder whether podcasters like Joe Rogan were the wave of the future in influencing voters. They had to moan and whine that “misinformation” spread by Elon Musk’s Twitter ruined all their objectives. […]
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