November as a referendum on the power of the Media
Six months ago Kamala Harris was the butt of a joke in American politics. Disliked and distrusted by the US electorate, and marginalized by Biden’s inner circle, the Vice President had found herself dogged by a steady rhythm of negative stories and headlines. In 2023, the Telegraph pronounced Harris “the least popular vice president in history.” “A Kamala Harris staff exodus reignites questions about her leadership style — and her future ambitions,” declared a 2021 Washington Post headline. “Kamala Harris one year: Where did it go wrong for her?,” wondered the BBC. Other outlets were barely more charitable: “Exasperation and dysfunction: Inside Kamala Harris’ frustrating start as vice president” (CNN); “Not a healthy environment: Kamala Harris’ office rife with dissent” (Politico); “Kamala Harris’ staff turnover driven by burnout and apprehension of being labeled a ‘Harris person’” (Business Insider). A book on the Biden administration from Atlantic Staff Writer and DNC asset Franklin Foer described, according to New York Magazine, “an administration where Harris is a comparatively minor player and seemingly manages to always put the wrong foot forward despite her best efforts.”
How did Harris go from a beleaguered and unpopular vice president to the inspiring, celebrity-backed, girlboss of the future? The explanation is simple. The press did not need to flatter Harris during her tenure as vice president, but once she became the standard-bearer for their 2024 political ambitions, the calculus changed.
It is a familiar refrain on the Right that the media is a “wing of the Democratic Party,” but the truth is closer to the reverse: The Democratic Party is the handmaiden of the media, academia, major foundations, and activist groups, as well as various other left-wing authorities that exist in the liminal space between the government and civil society.
This has been a feature of developed Western societies for some time. Whereas, as Gramsci put it, in the East “the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.” Hegemony resides in this “system of fortresses and earthworks” — the press, the schools and universities, the intelligentsia, mass media and popular culture and the various other institutions that dictate the normative values, beliefs and attitudes of a society.
In his recent book The Total State Auron MacIntyre recapitulates this same point: “Maintaining power in a democratic system means maintaining control over how the populace perceives and understands the world around them. As each branch of government becomes more vulnerable to the democratic process, control of power hinges increasingly on the ability to manipulate the masses. Instead of different societal forces with different bases of power being forced to the table and checking each other’s interests, power becomes dependent on one source: public opinion. The ability to wield power is reduced to an arms race around perfecting one skill: the manipulation of public opinion.”
With the rise of mass democracy “manipulation of public opinion becomes the key to ruling the entire state.” The US Constitution was conceived to thwart tyranny; but it did so, in part, by limiting mass democracy. Once those limits were removed, power was no longer dispersed across a system of checks and balances, but centralized in the hands of whoever controlled the machinery of opinion formation.
Sovereign is he who shapes the minds of the masses. Insofar as the centralized media is where this power lies in modern American politics, the Right faces considerable structural disadvantages. Right-wing media outlets do not possess the same degree of legitimacy as their liberal counterparts, because the legitimating institutions are controlled by progressives. Conservative media is conservative media — defined by its distance from the neutral mean. Liberal media is simply “the media.” Fox News, the largest and most powerful mainstream conservative outlet, may have more viewers than its commercial competitors, but it lacks the credentialing imprimatur of Harvard and Yale, and therefore will always be viewed as opinionated and biased in a way that the legacy press is not.
Polling routinely shows that Americans overall still trust the legacy media — including outlets that most conservatives view as egregiously politically biased — more than conservative sources. A YouGov poll earlier this year found that adult US citizens are 23 points more likely to trust the New York Times over Fox News. The Washington Post and USA Today had a 22-point advantage over Fox. For NPR, it was 21 points; for the Atlantic, 17 points; for CNN, 12 points.
The result is a generalized version of what some have described as the “New York Times effect,” a reference to the disproportionate power that the Times still wields. For example, conservative have been urging a crackdown on platforms like PornHub for their complicity in sex trafficking and child pornography to no avail for years. But in December 2020, Nicholas Kristof penned a long New York Times exposé advancing almost exactly the same critique. Within days, five US senators had introduced bipartisan legislation to allow rape victims to sue PornHub, major credit card companies (Visa, Mastercard and Discover) had cut ties with the site, and PornHub executives were scrambling to announce sweeping reforms.
Accordingly right-wing politicians and activists tend to find themselves at the mercy of their ideological enemies. The Right is either stuck in a defensive posture, forced to react to the Left, or obliged to appeal to its opponents for help.
When the press turned on Biden following the debacle of his debate with Trump, many right-wingers were initially gleeful that the media was suddenly on their side, and cheered on the attacks, sneering that the Left was “turning on itself” and “eating its own,” because the media had “woken up” and “noticed” that the president was senile. But within weeks the party had closed ranks behind a younger and slightly less clearly incompetent champion, and a bewildered Right found itself on the back foot again.
The genius of Trump’s 2016 campaign lay in his ability to overcome the structural disadvantage of the Right by speaking directly through the media, even as he simultaneously sought to challenge and undermine its legitimacy. This was achieved through his uncanny ability to dominate coverage: Trump received more than $5 billion in free press coverage in the 2016 election cycle — “more than Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio combined,” per The Street — effectively positioning himself as the political center of gravity. But earned media alone does not deliver the White House, especially when that media is almost uniformly hostile. What mattered was Trump’s ability to maintain his narrative frame in face of the negative coverage by bringing every interview, report, or line of journalistic questioning back to his talking points — and on his terms — without compromising or ceding ground to the media’s preferred framing,
Trump’s refusal to capitulate to an unflattering narrative frame sometimes became comical. In his famous exchange with Wolf Blitzer during the 2016 GOP primary debate, Blitzer was pressing Trump on the fact that the Mexican president had rejected his signature promise to make Mexico pay for the border wall. “If you don’t get an actual check from the Mexican government,” the anchor wondered, “how are you going to make them pay for the wall?” Trump’s response was swift: “I will. And the wall just got ten feet taller.”
Trump won the game by refusing to play by the rules. He simply didn’t take the press seriously. He rejected their authority and undermined their credibility. But they couldn’t ignore him; he was the story. And because he was the story, they had no choice but to report on him.
Today’s most successful right-wing activists have learned from his example. Christopher Rufo has won an impressive string of culture war victories by actively crafting news cycles rather than responding to them — often by publicly broadcasting his step-by-step strategy as it unfolds, thus provoking the impotent rage of his enemies. The media finds itself helpless to avoid following Rufo’s script. Some stories are simply too big to ignore. By creating a story, as opposed to reacting to one, Rufo breaks out of the siege mentality of perpetual defense.
The 2024 election will be a test of how much the Right has learned from the past decade, and how much it has successfully institutionalized the tactics of its most skilled operators. It will be a test, as well, of the power of the legacy narrative institutions. Now more than ever, President Trump should be returning to his roots as the radical challenge to the status quo which he was always destined to be.
Nate Hochman is a writer at the American Spectator and a senior adviser at America 2100.
