The Media is Letting America Down
Behind the rousing speeches and party atmosphere of the Democratic National Convention was a different kind of story—a story of the jealousy and frustration brewing within legacy media.
Despite over 10,000 print and television journalists getting to be in attendance, they were upset that space was created for 200 content creators. The media's apparent elitism suggested they believed content creators shouldn’t get to be there at all.
Yet, those content creators made around 7,000 posts during the convention that received 400 million impressions online, a massive reach for just a few people. That is precisely why content creators were included and given designated spaces to film videos and perform interviews.
TV news ratings continue to fall. Printed newspapers shut their doors one after another. And despite moving to the internet, prestigious brands have difficulty keeping an audience, particularly concerning politics.
Even as far back as 2015, Pew Research found millennials turned to Facebook more than other news sources. Today, millennials and Gen Z mainly get political news from social media, with TikTok as the leading source.
Legacy media has lost some people's trust. But what hurts them even more is that they fail to deliver what people want.
Legacy media isn’t informing people about the issues they want to know about. Content creators have stepped in to fill that role. An easy first example is the recent interview of the Democratic nominee for President Kamala Harris and her Vice Presidential nominee, Tim Walz, conducted by Dana Bash for CNN. This was Kamala Harris's first interview since she became the Democratic nominee for president.
While the Harris campaign has been full speed ahead and has taken the lead in national polling, many people are still waiting to hear more in-depth discussions about Harris’s policies. This interview was an excellent opportunity to dig into those policies, but that wasn’t the direction Bash decided to go.
Instead, Bash spent most of the interview asking Harris and Walz to respond to Republican attacks, including insults such as Trump saying that Harris “turned black” and did so as a way to court voters. Harris handled this question well by refusing to deal with such a despicable statement and simply saying, “Next question.”
Nobody wants to watch that kind of interview.
America is tired of the lies, hatred, and conspiracies spewed by the far-right for the last eight years. Major TV news networks focus more on drama to drive engagement than on informing the public. People want to be informed. They want to know what is happening in our nation and the candidates’ policy positions.
Another example is the fact-checking performed by outlets such as the New York Times during the DNC. Here are a couple of them:
They claim that Pete Buttigieg's statement that crime was higher when Trump was in office was exaggerated.
It is not exaggerated.
Trump had the largest single-year increase in homicides in US history in 2020. In 2016, the year before Trump took office, gun deaths (excluding suicides) were just over 15,000, and there were 383 mass shootings. In the last year of Trump’s presidency, there were 19,600 gun deaths and 610 mass shootings.
So why did the NYT say the claim was exaggerated? Because crime dropped slightly in the first two years of Trump’s presidency. That has no relevance to the claim.
Just like a person who is leading the pack in the first half of a race only to finish dead last can’t claim it is exaggerated to say they lost the race, a President is judged by how the country changed over the course of their entire time in office, not part of it.
A fact check like this is harmful.
Crime dropped in 2022. It dropped by more in 2023. It is dropping even faster in 2024 and is on track to have the largest decrease in homicides in US history. Violent crime is at a 50-year low. Mass shootings are down 30% this year, and overall gun deaths have fallen year after year.
When Americans are polled by places like Pew Research and Gallup, 70% or more believe crime is on the rise, not at a historic low. The way the news covers (and often does not cover) what is happening in this country is leaving the vast majority of the nation uninformed.
The NYT rated a fact check on Governor and Vice President nominee Tim Walz's claim that a Trump administration would repeal the Affordable Care Act as “needs context.” They quoted Trump’s claim that he isn’t running on repealing the ACA and that his ideas would make health care much better and cheaper.
A proper fact check never includes a statement from a person who lied over 30,000 times as President and lies every day of his life. However, there is an important context to go with Walz’s statement.
Trump tried to repeal the ACA when he was President. A commendable vote by John McCain saved it. Trump has never had a replacement healthcare plan, despite claiming he does. Over five years ago, Trump said he would release his plan in two weeks. We’re still waiting for it.
Multiple fact-checkers attacked Democrats for saying that Project 2025 was Trump’s plan for the nation. Several of them again used Trump’s own statement claiming he knows nothing about it. Others tried to be overly technical by saying Trump didn’t write it.
Of course, Trump didn’t physically write Project 2025. He isn’t capable of doing so. However, it was written by dozens of members of Trump’s previous administration, many of whom would also be a part of a new Trump administration. Trump’s name appears in Project 2025 many times. It was expressly written for Trump, and Trump has cited proposals from Project 2025 multiple times while campaigning.
To suggest it is false that Project 2025 is connected to Trump and intended to be used in his next administration is a travesty of journalism. Provide the context, including Trump’s statement denying it, but inform people of what it is and why it is dangerous. Show how it is connected to the Republican party’s agenda. The American people deserve to know that.
The GOP realized years ago that the Big Lie was more powerful than actual policies or achievements. They understand that if they all spread the same lies and loyal networks such as Fox News, Newsmax, and the New York Post also spread those lies, then people will believe them.
They say crime is high. But it is historically low.
They talk daily about high inflation. Inflation hasn’t been high in 18 months and is at 2.5% today.
They claim unemployment was lower under Trump. It is lower under Biden.
15 million jobs have been created. We have the highest energy production in history. There is booming manufacturing and construction. Unions are at their strongest in decades. More Americans have healthcare than ever before. There is a record-breaking number of new small businesses, record-high stock markets, wages growing fastest among the lowest earners, a debt-to-GDP ratio lower than when Trump left office, and higher average GDP growth.
But despite President Biden's impressive job, especially considering he inherited a pandemic, had to deal with global high inflation, and had multiple world conflicts start while he was in office, most Americans polled think Biden was bad for the economy when he created the best and most resilient economy in the world avoiding the recession predicted by economists and Republicans.
Americans don’t know the real state of our union. To fix this requires journalists ready to take lies head-on, debunk them, and not spend their time trying to twist themselves into a pretzel attempting to be “fair and balanced” between a Democratic party that is much the same as it has been for decades, and a Republican Party taken over by Trump and MAGA extremists spreading QAnon conspiracy theories, Russian propaganda, and whatever lies they create daily to serve their narrative.
Legacy media has shown they aren’t up to properly covering modern politics.
However, there is another reason why so many people in the country have moved to content creators: how the information is presented.
Traditional news wants to rattle off data points and be overly pedantic with terminology while dissecting a given moment. That can work on a simple, straightforward topic or conventional political rhetoric.
We live in a time when lies and rhetoric are crafted to take advantage of traditional media. To explain these moments requires someone who can paint a picture. Someone who can take all aspects of what is happening around a given topic and summarize them in a relatable way that accurately informs the viewer about the subject.
People don’t care that Trump didn’t physically write Project 2025 or sit in boardroom meetings discussing how to craft it. They want to know that those who did write it worked for Trump. Trump has publicly praised those individuals repeatedly. That JD Vance is even more closely connected to Project 2025 than Trump is. And that Trump has repeated policy ideas from Project 2025 on the campaign trail.
I’m not suggesting any special treatment for one side of the aisle over the other. I’m encouraging proper reporting and accountability for all sides. Make all politicians answer for their lies. Break down and challenge policy positions exactly how the media recently did when Kamala Harris said she was interested in taxing unrealized capital gains.
Inform the public about the issues that will impact their lives, and don’t focus on meaningless drama.
My advice for legacy media is this. Instead of writing articles complaining about how content creators had places to sit and work at the DNC, do some introspection on why people prefer getting their information from content creators instead of from you.
