Prof. Matt Carlson
Professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota.
Email: carlson1@umn.edu
Prof. Sue Robinson
Helen Firstbrook Franklin Professor of Journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication.
Email: robinson4@wisc.edu
Prof. Seth Lewis
Shirley Papé Chair in Emerging Media in the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication
Email: sclewis@uoregon.edu
U.S. Election 2024
51. The powers that aren’t: News organizations and the 2024 election (Dr Nik Usher)
52. Newspaper presidential endorsements: Silence during consequential moment in history (Dr Kenneth Campbell)
53. Trump after news: a moral voice in an empty room? (Prof Matt Carlson, Prof Sue Robinson, Prof Seth C. Lewis)
54. Under media oligarchy: profit and power trumped democracy once again (Prof Victor Pickard)
55. The challenge of pro-democracy journalism (Prof Stephen D. Reese)
56. Grievance and animosity: Fracturing the digital news ecosystem (Dr Scott A. Eldridge II)
57. Considering the risk of attacks on journalists during the U.S. election (Dr Valerie Belair-Gagnon)
58. What can sentiment in cable news coverage tell us about the 2024 campaign? (Dr Gavin Ploger, Dr Stuart Soroka)
59. The case for happy election news: Why it matters and what stands in the way (Dr Ruth Palmer, Prof Stephanie Edgerly, Prof Emily K. Vraga)
60. Broadcast television use and the 2024 U.S. presidential election (Jessica Maki, Prof Michael W. Wagner)
61. Kamala Harris' representation in mainstream and Black media (Dr Miya Williams Fayne, Prof Danielle K. Brown)
62. Team Trump and the altercation at the Arlington military cemetery (Dr Natalie Jester)
63. Pulling their punches: On the limits of sports metaphor in political media (Prof Michael L. Butterworth)
On January 6, 2021, as we were finishing the final draft of our book News After Trump, we watched in horror as Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building with the purpose of disrupting the certification of a free and fair election. It was an upsetting moment as well as a warning that all our concerns about Donald Trump and his relationship with journalism were not idle speculation, but in fact tapped into broader concerns about whether the U.S. could remain a functioning republic.
We argued in our book that journalists need to feel empowered to adopt what we call a “moral voice,” one that allows them to break from stifling journalistic norms and openly stand up for democracy when it is under threat. This is a moral imperative. Even with a lack of universal agreement about what is or is not moral, such quibbling should not get in the way of journalists’ duty to democracy.
Moving ahead to the 2024 election, journalists, in our observations, were more aggressive in defending democracy. In the final weeks of the campaign, we saw clearly Trump’s calls for revenge (even violence) against his political opponents and those insufficiently loyal to him, all conveyed through daily news reporting across every medium. Certainly plenty of news coverage normalized Trump as a conventional candidate. But, even if paying minimal attention to news, it would have been hard to miss Trump’s authoritarian threats.
In our book, we speak of a “media culture” rather than a system or environment or ecology because we want to capture the range of attributes that a culture possesses: habits, actions, beliefs, community norms, enemies. We have seen in the past few elections a fracturing of this media culture into smaller subcultures, making it difficult to corral attention and bring awareness to what the candidates are doing or saying. In 2024, what was most startling was the deep chasm between the information environments of right-leaning and left-leaning people. We now nurture two mainstream public discourses, and they do not overlap. And further, people who voted for Trump do not believe all of the negative news, from the inappropriateness of his lewd comments and gestures to the legitimacy of his conviction as a felon. It all becomes unproven rumors. When the liberal media is out to get their Trump, voting is a way to right that injustice.
We need to recognize that serious news produced by established journalists is only a small component of the much larger media culture, and a preponderance of competing options, coupled with growing levels of news fatigue and avoidance, makes it difficult for news to break through and actually reach people, let alone influence them. In this election, there were far fewer moments of “Trump versus journalists”—a major topic of News After Trump and the landscape that existed in 2015-2020— because Trump had little need to engage with journalists at all, ignoring interview opportunities and bypassing the press to go direct to his supporters via rallies, podcasts, and Truth Social posts.
So, what do we take away from the 2024 election?
We see two major shifts. First, there has been a decentering of journalism as either a news source or an agenda-setter. In its place is a “sprawling network of online content creators that the Trump campaign centered in its media strategy, ultimately granting him unprecedented reach to win over voters and delivering him the election,” as Taylor Lorenz wrote for The Hollywood Reporter, summing up the impact of influencers such as Joe Rogan, Adin Ross, and Theo Von. Meanwhile, Harris sought to reach young people via influential podcasts like Call Her Daddy and a Saturday Night Live appearance.
Second, media cultures are even more fractured. A Pew Research Center survey on where people were getting their 2024 election news turned up hundreds of different news sources—a far cry from the more concentrated media environment of the past.
These shifts have implications for how well we understand media cultures, how we study them as researchers, and whether our object of study (journalism) retains its currency. It is to our detriment that we marginalize the study of popular communicators like entertainers, comedians, and influencers; these need to be central to understandings of how media and politics work. As a thought experiment, what if we started over and mapped the media culture as it exists now, rather than based on normative assumptions or past visions? If we did this, where would mainstream journalism go?
We are far from the first to make this observation. We have seen decades of such claims as we have watched the transition from mass communication dominance to platform proliferation. But it is precisely because this trend has become so enduring that we need to pause and look around and realize that this election reflects the consequences of a fractured media culture. This is not a call to move backwards, as impossible as that would be, but to recognize in all its fullness the challenges that lie ahead.