Kamala Harris did her best
On Tuesday night, Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Republicans also won back a narrow majority in the U.S. Senate. U.S. House results are still coming in, and Republicans hold a small lead over the Democrats. Many people are in shock about the results, and are asking what went wrong for the Democrats, as well as how the party can do better going forward. There are so many possible answers, and it will take some time to sort through them and come up with new ideas. But we want to focus on one area that reflects the mission of Messaging Matters.
That area is communications and media. Specifically, we need to look at what the big corporate “mainstream media” did in this election, and how badly they served us. One obvious place to point to is the number of major newspapers, including ones that traditionally have a Democratic editorial viewpoint, that failed to endorse any candidate this time. Axios has a dramatic chart here, with an accompanying article, demonstrating how the number of such endorsements has plummeted by about 80 percent just since 2004.
The two most egregious cases of non-endorsement in this election are described in the Axios article:
In scrubbing last-minute endorsements for Vice President Harris, billionaire owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times — Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, respectively — have been slammed for putting their potential business interests above their papers’ independence, allegations both owners deny.
In other cases, as noted by Axios, the major newspapers are owned by large financial firms such as Alden Global Capital and Chatham Asset Management. At best, one can surmise that these newspaper owners, anticipating a very close election, hedged their bets and did not want to upset one political party or candidate or the other when the results were tallied. At worst, some of these media outlets arguably were kowtowing to dictatorial Donald Trump, either to curry favor with him or in fear of retribution from him if he won the election after they had endorsed Harris. The New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corp., went the extra mile and endorsed Trump.
If one wants to see really blatant kowtowing to Trump in other media, look no further than Elon Musk and his X (formerly Twitter) platform. Before Musk took over Twitter in 2022, he wrote that:
For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral.
Since then, however, the platform has marched steadily toward right wing, Trump-serving fascism. According to NBC News:
Weeks into Musk’s tenure, the app reportedly restored over 62,000 accounts previously suspended for policy violations in an action that Musk called “general amnesty.” Some of them were white nationalist and neo-Nazi accounts or accounts that repeatedly boost conspiracy theories.
Likewise:
[Musk] hosted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ GOP primary bid announcement and reversed a ban on political advertising, clearing the way for campaign ads, including ads from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent who now supports Trump.
Musk himself posted right wing messages and conspiracy theories frequently on Twitter. He repeatedly referred to liberals as suffering from and spreading a “woke mind virus.”
As if all that weren’t enough, according to AP, Musk “has spent at least $119 million mobilizing Trump’s supporters to back the Republican nominee.”
At minimum, therefore, Democrats need to vote with their feet and wallets, and ditch these right wing media outlets. But obviously, there’s much more to do. As we have been saying for years, Democrats need to build their own large-scale media platforms, especially news media, to rival those of the Republicans. Markos Moulitsas, founder of the popular Democratic website Daily Kos, referred to this need generally in his post-election piece at the site yesterday:
[W]e need to replicate the right’s far-ranging media ecosystem.
If it takes a billionaire to finance such platforms, don’t the Democrats have some on their side? What about Mark Cuban, who vigorously campaigned for Harris this year? How about Taylor Swift, or Beyoncé (who spoke on behalf of Kamala Harris in Houston, and whose song “Freedom” became the theme song of the Harris campaign)? What about George Soros? Or Oprah Winfrey? How about other mere millionaires who support Democratic causes? If the Republicans can play this media game effectively, there is no reason why perfectly smart and capable Democrats cannot do so too.
Photo by Maryland GovPics, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/3mtay0
