Here Lies The Mainstream Media...

The mainstream media is dead. You watched it die Tuesday night.

For years, legacy media outfits have shaped the political narrative, gatekept the flow of information, silenced and discredited dissenters, and kept a brutal chokehold on public discourse. Even before Tuesday night, the mainstream media could be heard gasping for life. Newspaper after newspaper -- from titans like The Washington Post to city papers with a largely-local readership -- broke a years-long habit and refused to endorse the Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris. 

Some papers explained that they wanted to shift their focus to more local issues, while others were a little more honest and admitted that they didn't want to be seen as biased. Regardless, they all knew: their time was up. On Tuesday night, roughly 72 million Americans buried the reeking carcass once called "legacy media."

When business magnate and real estate tycoon Donald J. Trump was first elected to the White House in 2016, it was not on the back of the mainstream media. He was not treated to friendly interviews or softball questions, he was not praised or lauded by so-called reporters. He was instead smeared as a racist, as the leader of the fringe "alt-right." His historic electoral victory was not commended, it was treated as a fluke.

When, according to author and investigative reporter Lee Smith, then-President Barack Obama and his former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, needed some "evidence" to obtain Foreign Intelligence Security Act (FISA) warrants to spy on the Trump campaign and, later, the Trump transition team, they relied on one of the chief mainstream media outlets, The New York Times, to help them weaponize U.S. courts and federal intelligence agencies against the president-elect. When the Times was given a copy of the infamously vulgar Steele dossier, they published it as news, even after FISA courts had rejected the dossier as legitimate evidence.

In the years since, the mainstream media has only become more and more partisan, and more and more openly partisan. According to the Media Research Center (MRC), mainstream media coverage of Trump actually worsened following his 2016 victory. When he ran against Clinton in 2016, mainstream media (namely ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News) gave Trump 91% negative coverage, while Clinton was given 79% negative coverage, yielding a 12-point difference. 

When he ran against now-incumbent President Joe Biden in 2020, Trump was given 92% negative coverage and Biden was given 66% positive coverage, yielding a 48-point difference. But this time around, Trump was given 85% negative coverage, while Harris was given 78% positive coverage, yielding a staggering 66-point difference.

However, the mainstream media hasn't simply treated Trump to more and more negative coverage and his Democratic opponents to less and less -- the severity and intensity of their negative treatment of the 45th (and soon-to-be 47th) president has also increased, voraciously. 

In a year which has already seen two gunmen take aim at Trump -- and one actually shoot him in the side of the head -- the mainstream media has incessantly demonized Trump, calling him a fascist and a dictator and comparing him to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Magazines have written of Trump's similarities to Hitler and painted him with a Hitler mustache on their covers, while television news outlets have invited commentators, pundits, and even anchors to malign him live on air as a "threat to democracy."

If the mainstream media has been telling the truth about Trump and his allies and his policies for the past eight years, then that means that roughly 72 million Americans are racist, misogynistic Nazis. But, to employ a rhetorical device popularized by Trump himself, you know that's not true, I know that's not true, everybody knows that's not true. A recent Gallup poll, published shortly before Tuesday night's election, found that Americans simply do not trust mainstream media. Trust in the news outlets that were, many ages ago, the hallmark of integrity and investigation has plummeted -- steeply.

Why? Because we found out that the mainstream media has been lying. When it became blatantly obvious to much of the nation that Biden may, in fact, be suffering from cognitive decline, memory lapses, and possibly even dementia or Parkinson's, mainstream media covered it up, as they had covered it up for years. ABC News even offered the sitting president an opportunity to persuade voters on air that he was fit as a fiddle.

When Harris took Biden's place as the Democratic presidential candidate, mainstream media rushed to downplay her extreme, left-wing record. When the vice president sat down for an interview on CBS News's famous "60 Minutes" program, the news team apparently doctored the recorded interview, cutting and pasting Harris's incoherent answers to match questions that might make more sense to viewers. 

When Biden called Trump's faithful supporters "garbage," newspapers stressed that a previously unidentified apostrophe actually made all the difference and meant that the sitting president wasn't calling more than half the country trash but was just commenting on one comedian's waste management problem.

When Trump was shot at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, mainstream media outlets like The Washington Post, USA Today, and MSNBC reported that the former president was taken offstage after "popping noises" were heard. But we all watched the video, many of us on the social media platform X. 

We all saw Trump wince and flinch as a bullet ripped through his ear, less than an inch from his skull. We all heard security detail snipers return fire. We all saw the former president, with blood smeared on the side of his face, defiantly push his security detail aside to face the threat and thrust his fist in the air. We all know that a panicked Trump wasn't bundled away by overprotective Secret Service agents because of "popping noises."

When Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Trump's vice presidential pick, sat down for a two-hour interview with comedian and podcaster Theo Von, hundreds of viewers on YouTube commented variations of, "This guy is supposed to be weird? He's like the most normal down to earth guy," after Harris and her team had essentially been running their campaign on the allegations that Vance is "weird." One user observed, "Is it me or [do] these podcasters do a 10 times better job bringing out the real interviewee than a 'journalist' ever could?"

On Tuesday night, tech billionaire Elon Musk told millions of X users, "You are the media now." Thanks to X, and the freedom the platform upholds under Musk's ownership, Americans were able to connect and share stories and video evidence in the aftermath of the disastrous Hurricane Helene, exposing the federal government's inaction and lethargy. 

Musk and his America PAC started an "election integrity community" on X, allowing users to document instances of election fraud that they witnessed Tuesday night and report them. Citizen journalists have been able to use platforms like X to share real stories as they happen, not narratives crafted hours or even days later in an urban office building by someone sipping an obscenely expensive coffee and ice cream concoction.

The mainstream media is dead, and the flowers that dot its grave will be alternative and independent media outlets, investigators and reporters who are less concerned about resources and ad revenue than they are about telling the truth, and citizen journalists who happen to see something and have the guts to say something.

Originally published at The Washington Stand