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Trump's Triumph and the Legacy Media’s Blind Spots | 11.23.24
00:15:18
Gerard Baker dissects the media's disconnect from the American electorate. Get the facts first on Morning WIre. Ad: ZBiotics: The drink before drinking with ZBiotics. Get 15% off your order with promo code WIRE at https://www.ZBiotics.com/Wire
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- [00:03]
Gerard Baker
The postmortems from Donald Trump's landslide presidential win have been painful, not just for Democrats, but also for the legacy media, which has spent much of its cultural and reputational capital on trying to keep him out of office. With trust in the media at an all time low, a growing number of outlets are announcing major shakeups and layoffs.
- [00:22]
John Bickley
In this episode, we sit down with the Wall Street Journal's Gerard Baker to discuss what the legacy media has failed to learn from the Trump phenomenon and where it goes from here. I'm Daily Wire editor in Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's November 23rd and this is a Saturday edition of Morning Wire.
- [00:42]
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- [01:12]
John Bickley
Joining us now is Gerard Baker, editor at large for the Wall Street Journal. Gerard, thank you so much for coming on. A real delight to talk with you.
- [01:19]
Gerard Baker
Pleasure. Thank you for having me.
- [01:21]
John Bickley
So look, you wrote an op ed that really got a lot of attention. It's a response to Trump's landslide win and it really shames the legacy media for how it covered this election. The title is 2024 election shows the media learned nothing from. What lessons did the media fail to learn?
- [01:39]
Gerard Baker
Well, if you recall, after the shock of the 2016 election when Donald Trump won, despite the media telling us that there was virtually no chance of that happening, we had those famous probability indicators saying that Hillary Clinton had a 90% chance of winning. The shock that so many American media companies discovered that there were so many people in this country who wanted to vote for Donald Trump even though they didn't know it, the media companies didn't know it. You recall that after that shock, there was a bit of soul searching, at least a little bit of public soul searching on the part of some of the media companies. And they said, look, we really need to understand the country better. Maybe, you know, there are people out there that we just aren't, whose views we aren't capturing, whose views we don't understand. And you know, we're going to go and Sort of try and do a better job of that. The New York Times, the editor of the New York Times at the time said that was one of his priorities after 2016 to, to know more about the country. Well, you know, they kind of went forth in the manner of sort of 19th century anthropologists Venturing into darkest Africa to discover who these people were who voted for Trump. And they presumably found them. And then we didn't really hear very much more from them, except when we got to the election campaign of 2024, and we sort of were just told by so many of these media organizations that Trump supporters were a lot of fascists. So I think, you know, again, it's one thing to be sort of surprised and shocked the first time, and. But when eight years later, Trump wins this time with more votes, with a higher share of the vote, and undisputed in any sense, undisputed election, you wonder, what have those media organizations been doing for the last eight years? And as I say, we know what they've been doing. They've been carrying on essentially still this extended campaign of vilification of Donald Trump. And look, there are lots and lots and lots of things to criticize about Donald Trump. I'm not here to, you know, say he's the greatest man who ever lived, but the continued willful failure to even try to understand what it is that animates so many Americans to vote for Donald Trump, to vote against the political establishment, that failure by the media is a staggering failure. And it just suggests what we kind of all suspected all along, that they've learned nothing and they frankly know very, very little about a very, very large proportion of the population of this country.
- [03:49]
John Bickley
You know, it strikes me, looking at the electoral map, it is stunning to see the amount of red. And this isn't something that's new, but the degree to which the red predominates is new over the last few decades. It is overwhelming. And you can see the idea of the bubble. Is it that the media is in these traditional bubbles of the east and west coast, little enclaves, and they do not venture into red parts of the country? Is that what's happening here?
- [04:21]
Gerard Baker
So it's partly that, for sure. I mean, you know, again, this has been a long standing phenomenon. And as you know, anybody who's worked in the American media, certainly for as long as I have, the major journalists, the major reporters and editors at the main news organizations, the big newspapers or television networks, or increasingly even the digital operations we have now, they're drawn from a pretty kind of narrow swath of the country, both geographically and, if you like, sort of demographically. They tend to be quite highly educated and essentially from the coasts. And they don't have any experience of the rest of the country. They don't know anybody in the rest of the country. I mean, one of the interesting exercises you can always do with a bunch of journalists is ask them how many of them voted for Donald Trump at this election or at previous elections. And you won't see many hands go up. But then ask them how many people know anyone who voted for Donald Trump and you'll see no hands go up either. They don't move in circles, either socially or indeed even professionally in attempt to understand who these voters are. But I tell you what's really interesting, that that's been a phenomenon for the last, certainly since Trump came onto the scene 10 years ago. But what's even more interesting is what we've seen in this election. You're absolutely right about the redness of the American electoral map. But what that redness disguises is that what we saw in this election was actually really significant gains for Trump and for the Republicans in some of these places where these journalists are concentrated. We have seen this remarkable phenomenon, big gains for Trump compared with 2020 in places like New York City and Chicago and San Francisco and la. So this phenomenon that we've seen of what used to be we think of as the white, if you like working class, want of a better term, who were voting for Republican increasing numbers over the last 10 years, that's spread to ethnic minority members, and particularly again, ethnic minority, if you like working class people living in these big cities who are fed up with the way in which, you know, that these cities are governed, fed up by the way in which the Democratic Party has essentially abandoned them. It's one thing not to go out to darkest Kansas and interview people in, you know, Lawrence or Topeka to find out what they're thinking. It's another thing entirely to be sitting in an office building in Manhattan and not realize that people across the east river in Queens are also turning towards Donald Trump and voting in numbers and not begin to understand, understand why that is.
- [06:35]
John Bickley
You know, I wanted to talk about the fascist label of Trump. This was astonishing to me, the degree of partisanship of the legacy media this go round. It was more extreme than we've ever probably seen. Trump described as an actual fascist, as the next Hitler, despite having four years of him as a successful president, not being an authoritarian, and by extension the description of anybody that supports Trump as a fascist has the media jumped the shark? How much farther could it go in terms of partisanship than what we just witnessed?
- [07:08]
Gerard Baker
Look, they'll say, the media will say in response to that question. And indeed, I've heard them say it's, look, it's, it's not us calling Donald Trump a fascist. It's people who work with him. It's, you know, General John Kelly, who worked as his Chief of Staff and Secretary of Homeland Security, it's Mark Milley, who was the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff when Trump was president. They pick out those two people, I think are only two people who've really, you know, made that accusation and say it's them. But of course, we know that they are using those convenient weapons with which to bash Trump and, yes, to broadly characterize him as a fascist. And as I wrote in my column this week, and as you just said, you know, it's a kind of a weird sort of fascism that gets the support of 45% of Hispanic voters, 21% of black male voters, a significantly higher proportion than last time, when presumably wasn't a fascist of Jewish voters. I mean, I've not heard of many Jewish fascists in this country or anywhere else in the world. And it seems to me, again, that's just a reflection of just how little the media not only really don't understand the Trump phenomenon, but have no interest in trying to understand it. You know, for them, who all come from similar sort of social and demographic and intellectual backgrounds, they all have this, you know, monolithic view of Trump. Some of them will say it's because of the way he behaved after the last election or because he has an authoritarian streak, which is probably true. But a lot of it comes down to the idea that somehow he is racist, that he believes in some sort of white supremacy, that he believes in sort of racial hierarchies. After all, that tends to be typically one of the most important things we think of when we think of fascism. And as I say, the evidence from voting and large numbers of people voting for him is that, you know, voters don't see it that way. Voters don't see him as racially exclusionary. They see him as someone who actually stands up for them, whatever the color of their skin, whatever their background. And I think the media just, again, has just failed to understand that.
- [08:58]
John Bickley
Yeah. Poll after poll shows the trust in media at an all time low. Gallup found it's now the lowest of all the major political and public institutions in terms of trust, lower than Congress. What went wrong? I Mean, we obviously have the Trump phenomenon, but where did this start? I mean, how did things start to unravel so much for the media in terms of its credibility with the public?
- [09:19]
Gerard Baker
Well, I wrote a book about trust last year and the media was a large part of it and the decline in trust. I think there were a couple of main reasons for this. I mean, firstly, we always know, and those of us of a certain generation like mine have always been familiar with media bias. There's always been a kind of an inbuilt left of center bias in the media going right back to the days even, you know, when people think of the glory days of television news like Walter cronkite in the 60s and 70s. Well, you know, Cronkite was a kind of an old fashioned liberal who sometimes, you know, let his slip show, as it were. So there's always been that bias, whether in the New York Times or the main media. But a couple of things I think have really accelerated in the last couple of decades. One I think is the changing nature of the people who go into journalism. Journalism used to be, at least up until the 1960s, 70s, maybe even 80s, it used to be a. Not really not even a profession, but a trade into which people that weren't necessarily expensively educated, many of them didn't have college degrees, they just had a hunger to find out the truth. They wanted to go out and find out what crimes had happened in the, where they lived the night before or what sort of corruption was going on in the local government. That was their background, that's what they were steeped in. They just had an interest in getting just the facts, as it were. And then along came, you know, beginning in the 80s, 90s, and then we're really coming to fruition with this now. We have a class of journalists who have been to many of them to very expensive, very elite colleges, many of them with postgraduate degrees. Journalism again in the last 50 years has become something that many news organizations require, a postgraduate degree. For those people it wasn't enough for them to just go and find out what was going on. They wanted to tell people how to think. And given where they went and what their background were, they tended to have ideas that were to the left of centre. So I think journalism became a business practiced increasingly by ideological activists as much by people who simply wanted to report. The other phenomenon that has really, I think has accelerated this process in the last 10 years is the changes to the news business. The news business, especially the newspapers, used to be dependent almost entirely on advertising. Until the Internet came along, advertising was the basis of their revenue, 80, 90% of their revenue. When the Internet came along, all that advertising went away to digital properties, particularly the big ones like Google and Facebook, but others, smaller ones too. And the business model was essentially destroyed. Newspapers that were going to survive had to find a way of replacing that lost income from advertising and they went for subscriptions. The bulk of their revenues, as you now know, from the New York Times and other papers, is now subscription. And what that means is it makes the papers required to be much more attuned to their readership than they were in the days. Days of advertising. Advertisers didn't really much care, you know, weren't trying to push a particular political line. They would just wanted as many eyeballs as they could get. What you now have are people who have to part with 200, 300, 400, $500 a year maybe to get a news product. And they have strong views about what they want. And that tends to create an incentive for the news organization to go after sections of the audience that have a particular kind of coherent, you know, that cohere around a worldview. And so the New York Times, the Washington Post is a perfect example of this. Look what happened, you know, when the Washington Post's editorial board did not endorse a candidate, as we famously had a furore about a few weeks ago, and supposedly, apparently the reports say, lost 250,000 subscribers in a kind of a protest that shows these newspapers have become incredibly sensitive to the political views of their subscribers, of the people who pay for their journalism. So you've had this tendency towards partisanship, particularly towards the left, in both the supply side and the demand side of the equation, both the supply side of the equation that is, you know, you've created this class of people who are essentially ideologues working for newspapers and the demand side of the equation, which is people who seek out news that comports with their political viewpoint and are willing to pay a subscription in order to get that news.
- [13:00]
John Bickley
Oh, it makes perfect sense. Look, we've seen several outlets in the 11th hour of the election, like you said, choose not to endorse a candidate. Some are now announcing some major shakeups. There's going to be some staff cuts that are going to be pretty deep. Do you believe we're about to see genuine moderation toward the center here from some of these left wing outlets?
- [13:21]
Gerard Baker
No, I don't. Bluntly. Look again, I think they'll go through a little bit of the soul searching. They went through in 2016, but I think the die is cast. Or sorry to sort of, you know, complicate my metaphors, but, you know, that horse has bolted from the stable. I think the staff of these news organizations is just so monolithically left of center, and not just left of center, but committed, as I say, in a kind of an activist way that I. I don't really see that unwinding. It'll be really interesting to see what Jeff Bezos is able to do at the Washington Post. He does seem to be intent on appealing to a wider audience beyond the kind of progressive audience that it seems to be appealing to. Or the same with the LA Times. And look, maybe the market. I'm a great believer in the market here. Please forgive me for sounding like I'm toading to you, but, you know, your own publication is a good example of where you discover there's an opportunity in the market. People are tired of the same monolithically, you know, the same political bias in news, and they look out for other news organizations and they're now, you know, barriers to entry are so low in the digital world to get into that space that you can do things like the Daily Wire or some of these other news platforms that have grown up very, very successfully and very effectively. So I think that the market will actually, A, develop new platforms and new products, and B, in the process might actually force the owners of these media properties that we've seen, again, like the LA Times and the Washington Post, to say, not only do I do, I think it's right that we should be more balanced and that we should appeal to more readers, but actually I think it's in our business interest that we should, too. So I don't think the staff are going to change. I don't think there's going to be any kind of reckoning, internal reckoning in these news organizations to try to make them more objective, but it might just be that market pressure may drive them in that direction.
- [15:04]
John Bickley
Well, we can hope. Gerard, thank you so much for talking with us. It's terrific.
- [15:08]
Gerard Baker
Thank you very much indeed, and keep up the good work.
- [15:10]
John Bickley
That was Gerard Baker, Wall Street Journal editor at large, and this has been a Saturday edition of Morning Wire.