Former President Donald Trump’s continued popularity and high chance of reelection indicates that about half of Americans dismiss the establishment media’s coverage of him, an anonymous television executive admitted Wednesday to the New York Magazine.
The statement suggests that Trump has an extradentary power to expose media elites as out of touch with middle America.
WATCH — Maher: Half of Harris’s Media Tour Was Places Where “the Ass Is Pre-Kissed”:
A recent Gallup poll that found Americans’ trust in the media to report current events “fully, accurately and fairly” has plummeted to a record low. Only 31 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media to tell the truth, one point below its low watermark of 32 percent in 2016 and 2023.
“If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form. And the question is what does it look like after,” the television executive said.
New York Magazine columnist Charlotte Klein, apparently confused about why most Americans don’t trust the media, suggested the media’s distaste for Trump appears to help the former president:
But this is part of a larger problem. Everybody did great work last time around. But to what end? Efforts to limit Trump’s reach in the past have, one TV executive argues, blown up in the mainstream media’s face. “The left-wing attempt to deplatform Trump after the 2020 election was the single biggest mistake because it forced him to create his own alternative-reality ecosystem,” they said, “and it only accelerated our own irrelevance.”
This was part of Bezos’s point, of course, however clumsily and belatedly made. The Post’s decision came in the wake of the Los Angeles Times, also owned by a billionaire, Patrick Soon-Shiong, announcing that it too would demur on endorsing a presidential candidate this time. Soon-Shiong’s reasoning was not unlike Bezos’s: an attempt to reclaim some mantle of evenhandedness for the paper. Many found it difficult to not read something into that timing as well. Soon-Shiong too has business interests dependent on the government’s good will. Still, it could be something more particular to that owner’s family dynamic. Soon-Shiong’s daughter, Nika, said that the decision not to endorse stemmed from Harris’s stance on the Gaza war, a statement her father then contradicted. “If you’re an L.A. Times reader and consumer, you’re left uncertain what to believe,” said one former editor. As a result, the L.A. Times, too, has seen resignations, including that of editorials editor Mariel Garza, and fleeing subscribers — more than 18,000 in the week following the decision, according to Semafor.
Endorsements are among a series of concerns gripping newsrooms as they brace for the potential reelection of a president who declared the press the “enemy of the people” and has vowed retribution against the media in a second term — threatening, on the campaign trail and in interviews, to throw reporters in jail and revoke television networks’ broadcast licenses. While some executives feel it’s too early to work through questions about how to approach a second Trump term, it is top of mind for reporters with experience covering him.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.