The election proved the media is in crisis. Here’s what it needs do to regain its relevance
By Brian Stelter, CNN
New York (CNN) — Donald Trump’s reelection last week emboldened his allies to proclaim that he had vanquished the American news media as well as Vice President Kamala Harris.
“The media is dead,” Fox News comedian Greg Gutfeld declared. “It’s dead,” his primetime colleague Sean Hannity echoed. “You are the media now,” Elon Musk posted over and over again on X.
Dead? No. But some journalists are feeling defeated in the wake of Trump’s victory – not necessarily because they preferred Harris, but because they are acutely aware that many voters tuned out the fact-driven news coverage of Trump and Harris altogether. In the words of one radio journalist, who insisted on anonymity to speak frankly, it is “hard not to see this election as just a national repudiation of what we do.”
As audiences increasingly embrace online platforms, podcasts, YouTube videos and other digital sources of information are ascendant while traditional news outlets struggle to remain relevant. On social media, in-depth investigations are often ignored while misleading memes get shared millions of times.
Some of these trends have been evident for years, but the election results have put an exclamation point on the concerns about distrust and dissatisfaction with the media status quo. Now a reckoning is underway. Media executives and rank-and-file reporters are wondering what needs to change. What can news outlets do to regain trust and appeal to new audiences without alienating existing readers and viewers?
For the past week, CNN’s media team has been receiving feedback from readers of the Reliable Sources newsletter. Here are some of the concrete recommendations and ideas that have emerged.
First, recognize the scope of the problem.
Mainstream media outlets have been losing public trust for decades, particularly among Republicans, but also among Democrats and independents. Alternative sources, often lacking any semblance of journalistic standards, have filled some of the voids. And smart phones, social networks and streaming services have introduced an almost infinite amount of competition for peoples’ attention. Algorithms have replaced human editors and artificial intelligence systems have started to replace search. These are huge changes that warrant equally big adjustments by news outlets.
Pop the bubbles.
Many news consumers, and a good number of journalists, think national news coverage is too Washington-centric. Maybe, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan commented last week, the media collectively spent “too much time obsessing about polling (where did that get us?) and not enough time talking to people!” O’Sullivan and other correspondents interviewed voters all election season long, but those conversations and focus groups should inform editorial decisions and panel discussions.
Geographic diversity would also help. “When we cover MAGA,” a former ABC News executive said, ruefully, “it’s like going to the zoo to report on an exotic animal.” One logical takeaway: Publishers should embrace the Zoom era and have employees spread out across the country to balance out New York and Washington groupthink.
Listen to young people and learn from their media habits.
As a media executive who asked to be anonymous said last week, “We’re programming for the audience we have, not the audience we need.” Americans in their 20s, 30s and 40s are scrollers by default, soaking up news and views through headlines, memes, vertical videos and other bite-size bits of content. This engagement isn’t as easy to measure or monetize as, say, a Nielsen-rated TV newscast, but it’s not the “future,” it’s the present, so news outlets should produce content accordingly. As TheWrap’s Sharon Waxman wrote, “If people have moved away from network news and broadsheet newspapers to opinionated podcasts and TikTok lies, then that’s one signal of how things need to change.”
Note the big differences between talking and reporting, but recognize that both have value.
There are some journalistically rigorous podcasts, including ones produced by CNN, but most podcasters, YouTube streamers and online creators are not journalists per se. They are in a different, news-adjacent business, even when they land interviews with politicians like Donald Trump. They’re not doing the hard work of reporting and vetting information; they’re talking about what others have gathered. But making sense of the news and talking informally and in-depth – three hours at a time, in Joe Rogan’s case – is important work in its own right. Talk show hosts and vloggers have deep connections with media consumers. News producers have a lot to learn from podcast stars.
Make content for casual news consumers and those turned off by politics.
News junkies already have go-to sources of information. But most people are not news junkies. A survey by the 50-state The Civic Health and Institutions Project showed that “friends and family,” not the “news media,” was the top source of election information this fall. So, as one reader put it, news publishers should be creating new streams of programming for “center-right” audiences and people who instinctively distrust politicians. Other streams could provide “civic on-ramps” and relatable stories for young people.
These discussion spaces would have to be authentic – not carbon copies of shows and websites that already exist. Some would need to be explicitly right-coded. “People, glued to their devices, like to consume information when it’s informally presented via parasocial relationships with influencers,” The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote. Can news personalities make the “influencer” leap?
Meet people where they are.
Some news brands have turned inward in recent years, away from the social networks that sometimes devalue their work, but they’ve lost relevance as a result. “Social media can no longer just be thought of as ‘distribution,’” with the intent to get referral traffic or subscriber leads, Link in Bio newsletter author Rachel Karten wrote earlier this week. “The news needs to happen natively on these platforms, where more and more young people are going for their news already.”
Simply put, clipping a cable news segment or summarizing a story on Threads “meets people where they are,” she wrote. “You’re fishing where the fish are.” Publications that aren’t fishing are at risk of losing market share to others.
Start stories at the beginning, not in the middle.
Instead of “Trump vows to impose tariffs,” begin with “what’s a tariff?” When I asked Tim Graham of the conservative Media Research Center for suggestions, he offered this: “If the media think voters are uneducated, teach them. How many members of Congress? How many Supreme Court Justices? When voters can name characters on ‘The Simpsons’ but not Supreme Court Justices, it means the news has more opinions than facts.”
Starting stories at the beginning also means resisting the temptation to stick a label on something and make a moral verdict.
Don’t compromise on facts, but make room for feelings.
The election results showcased big disconnects between how news outlets reported on the economy and how swing voters felt about the economy. The facts were one thing, but the feelings were another. What’s a fact-based outlet supposed to do about that?
The answer: understand the “deep story.” Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of the acclaimed 2016 book “Strangers in Their Own Land,” has posited that voters sometimes act based on their emotional needs – their “deep story” – rather than their economic needs. “We all have a deep story,” she told Vox. “And it’s important to know what these are.” Whether core beliefs are empirically true or false, those beliefs move people, and journalists have to understand them better.
Solicit questions from readers/viewers and follow through with answers.
Digital platforms allow for actual two-way communication instead of traditional media’s typical one-way, top-down approach. So publications should take advantage of the tools. Answering questions puts the audience’s wants and needs first.
“We need to reframe how we discuss why we ask questions,” New York Times interviewer and CNN contributor Lulu Garcia-Navarro, wrote on Threads. “It is actually the public we are asking questions for. Which means we need to think about what the public actually wants to know and not what editors or other specialists are interested in exclusively. News media narratives are developed by journalist herding and it’s often not relevant to what people actually want to understand. Buck the herd.”
Cover the tumultuous information environment as a story in its own right.
“Filter bubbles and conspiracy theories should be an actual beat,” former TIME editor Richard Stengel, the author of “Information Wars,” wrote last week. He said, “publications and news networks should aggregate the content that their own readers and viewers are not seeing. That informs readers about what’s out there, signals trust in their ability to handle it, and may have the added benefit of increasing perception of ‘fairness.’”
Build trust through news coverage outside of politics.
Political news will be polarizing for the foreseeable future. As long as President-elect Donald Trump keeps repeating lies and raising controversies, the press will be seen as a hostile force by many Trump voters. But news consumers who don’t believe – or even bother to read – stories about politics still connect with news outlets through coverage of, say, sports and business. Atlanta Journal- Constitution publisher Andrew Morse, a CNN alum, touched on this in a letter to readers. “Many of you are tired of politics,” he wrote. “Everyone can use a break, and the AJC is as committed as ever to providing multiple touchpoints for you and your family to enrich your lives and enjoy what this great city, state and region have to offer.”
Start small.
Local news has been hollowed out, particularly in rural and small towns across the country that are Trump strongholds. “It’s been estimated that half of U.S. counties have limited access to reliable local news, and hundreds are so-called news deserts with no outlets at all,” Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch wrote. “It’s not sexy for big-time philanthropists, and there’s not a big subscriber pool, but the war to reclaim reality begins there.”
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
